It’s taken me half a lifetime and the writing of five books, all of which deal at least in part with sexuality, to appreciate the role masturbation plays in our lives, or might play if we weren’t so troubled about this simple, private act.
Here is the most natural thing in the world – our own hand on our own genitals, doing something that gives us pleasure and harms no one, practicing the safest sex in the world – yet we feel guilty as thieves, our sense of self lessened when it should be heightened by mastery and self-love.
Masturbation is not, after all, a difficult skill, like learning to play the violin. The hand automatically moves between our legs in the first year of life. Something, someone gets between it and our genitals so early that most of us cannot remember. A message is imprinted on the brain, a warning so fraught with fear that long after we are grown, even after we have allowed a man to put his penis inside us, to touch our genitals, we are ambivalent about touching ourselves. We may do it, but it is a physical act against a mental pressure – this delicate movement of our fingers that is only effective when the mind releases us. Sweet as orgasm feels, we are not left with an enhanced sense of womanliness; we have won the battle but lost our status as Nice Girls.
Masturbation used to be called the great taboo for women because it was sexual satisfaction outside of a relationship. Masturbation meant a measure of autonomy, and nobody wanted women to have that much control over themselves.
Most of the women in this book say they don’t feel these negative emotions. They have an ease with the subject of masturbation that is a pleasure to hear, a vocabulary so rich in description of when and how they masturbate that I am dazzled; their sexual fantasies soar into a realm of adventure that makes most of the reveries in My Secret Garden read like tentative stuff.
And they were, those early expressions of women’s inner erotic world. How can women today know how hard it was for those first women to speak, having no familiar words, no ease with masturbation or in expressing something no other women had yet given them permission to say?
Had I understood then the close kinship between masturbation and fantasy, I might have more easily uncovered the suppressed world of women’s erotic reveries while researching that first book. I would have begun my interviews with what was at least known – over half of Kinsey’s women surveyed admitted to having masturbated – and then asked my interviewees what was on their minds while they touched themselves. But I hadn’t yet learned that for women masturbation without fantasy is rare. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that women could be more guilty about what they were thinking than what they were doing.
The hand on the genitals isn’t the culprit. The hand may be doing something forbidden, but the hand is obvious, external. It is the mind that carries the genesis of sexual life, inhibits us from orgasm or releases us. Masturbation gets its fire, its life from what is sparked in the mind. The fingers might move across the clitoris indefinitely without orgasm; only when the mind structures the correct image, a scenario meaningful and powerful to us alone because it carries us up and past all fears of reprisals and into that forbidden, interior world that is our own sexual psyche – only then do we come.
After My Secret Garden was published, there was one response I would hear from women that become a chorus: “Thank God you wrote the book, I thought I was the only one… a freak of nature… a pervert…” to have erotic dreams, to imagine sex in forbidden places with forbidden people. How dirty, vile I must be, not like Nice Girls who never touch themselves. Towards the end of the 1970s this guilty sigh of relief lessened as more and more women began to take in the sexual freedoms being offered. Certainly the rape/force fantasy didn’t go away, nor will it ever, given the various convoluted sources of pleasure it provides.
But by the early 1980s there was a new breed of woman who didn’t identify with the guilty women in My Secret Garden. “Where did those women come from?” these new women would exclaim, “I don’t feel guilty. I love my body. I masturbate when I feel like it. I lie in the tub under a running faucet, or use my wonderful vibrator or my hand, and this is what I imagine as I get closer and closer to orgasm.” Even men’s voices pale in comparison to the bravado of some of these women.
Most of the women are in their mid-twenties. They grew up in a climate in which women were talking and writing with exuberance and excitement about sexuality. Whether mother punished them verbally for touching themselves, held their hand over an open flame, or said nothing – often the most damaging – these women continued to act on the premise that their sexuality belonged to them alone. They may have taken in some of mother’s guilt, but the voices they listened to most keenly were the voices of their time, and the voices said that mother was old-fashioned, outdated.
This sense of rightness is their legacy from the 1970s, when masturba-tion came out of the closet. In 1972 the American Medical Association declared masturbation to be “normal.” Masters and Johnson extolled it as a treatment for sexual dysfunction. For the first time, popular books were being published telling women it was good to masturbate and how to do it. New studies claimed that women who masturbated at an early age not only had an easier time reaching orgasm in later sexual intercourse, they also had stronger orgasms.
I remember a woman who painted huge canvases of vaginas and con-ducted classes in masturbation. While women sitting in a group discovering their clitorises may sound as far out and remote as naked hippies dancing in the rain at Woodstock, from this extremism came the small piece of ground that supports the women in this book. It was a different time – a lifetime ago, it feels sitting here today.
What a cramped, guilt-ridden world we once lived in. And it wasn’t all that long ago, not so distant that we can’t return, indeed haven’t already started slipping back. There is a longing in human nature to go back to what was most known and familiar, even if what was known was cruel and hard. Just as battered children, offered loving new parents, choose to return to their abusive parents, so will adult partners in a devastating marriage often remain with one another because anger and resentment are what is comfortable, familiar.
It is an open question how many of their sexual freedoms the young women in this book will retain, how deeply they have incorporated them. I would like to think we can no more return to that stunted, antisexual world in which women once lived than we can order women out of the workplace and back into the home. But the latter is an economic issue, a necessity for most women, and so it will hold.
The rules against women’s sexual freedom have roots that go back to the most primitive society, when men feared the mysteries of female sexuality and reproductive power. To ensure sexual supremacy in the Middle Ages, man invented the chastity belt. In order to control women’s prodigious sexual appetite – feared to be insatiable – it became custom in some cultures to remove a woman’s clitoris, thus killing the source of sexual pleasure and making her man’s property. The operation was called clitoridectomy. When it was deemed necessary to further limit women (reassure men), the labia were also removed. The operation continues to this day in some parts of Africa and the Middle East, where many women do not consider themselves marriageable until they have been mutilated though it is called cir-cumcision – in this fashion.
To the contemporary Western mind it sounds mad, a sadistic piece of science fiction. But clitoridectomies were performed in this country in the early part of the century. That was your grandmother’s or great-grandmother’s time, when some of the most eminent, celebrated surgeons in the land routinely took knife in hand and skillfully removed various parts of a woman’s genitalia for reasons of insanity, hysteria, and oh yes, hygiene.
Masturbation was considered to be at the core of these female disorders; the removal of the clitoris got to heart of the problem. Records show that clitoridectomies were still being performed in certain mental hospitals as late as the 1930s.
In time, clitoridectomies were no longer necessary in this country. Men found they didn’t have to do anything. Women had so totally taken in men’s attitudes towards female sexuality that we had come to judge ourselves by their needs. No Nice Woman would think of touching herself, exploring her sexuality. The less sexual the woman, the nicer. Mothers raised their daughters dutifully in the art of sexual avoidance. Women learned to loathe their genitals. Sex was not a pleasure but a duty. That was in your mother’s or grandmother’s time. Not long ago. Not long ago at all.
It would seem impossible to unlearn, to forget something as absolutely as the young women in this book know that their bodies belong to them. The litmus test will be when they marry and have to make up rules for their own children. Marriage has a way of regressing us, confronting us with images of how our parents were as husband and wife. Consciously we enjoy imitating those characteristics of theirs we loved most; unconsciously we often become what we liked least in our parents, rigid, obsessed with what the neighbors think, asexual. When we have children of our own, all of this escalates.
When this new generation becomes mothers, will they remember the exhilaration of controlling their own sexual destiny? Will they teach their daughters to love their bodies, allow them to masturbate, to discover their own unique sexuality? Or will they regress, telling themselves what generations of well-intentioned mothers have believed, that in limiting their little girls’ sexuality they are protecting them for their own good?
When we lose interest in sex and will not tolerate in others what we once enjoyed ourselves, we are reacting to more than the cautionary voices of our parents; there is a cultural voice, our heritage that has never been comfortable with sex and has abhorred masturbation in particular. Whatever popular support for sexual freedom the women in this book knew growing up, the very real, deep-down “feel” of this country, the fiber and character of the people, is modeled on a Calvinist work ethic and an inherent puritanical attitude toward sex. It would be foolish to think that a few decades of sexual celebration and tolerance could significantly alter our antisexual nature.
It’s important to know this, to remind ourselves of it constantly if there is to be any hope that these young women will bring their daughters into a more enlightened age. Knowledge is power. Therefore, we might ask, why has this simple act of masturbation been so singled out for fear and punishment?
Could the answer be that it is not a simple act at all? An ancient Egyp-tian god, so the myth goes, masturbates into his hand, puts his semen in his mouth, and spews it forth, creating a new race of people. An ordinary human brings him – or herself to orgasm and in a solitary act experiences a resurgence of self, the exhilaration of power. Masturbation, mythic or real, is sexual freedom.
It seems we can live with the knowledge that others are economically better off more easily than we can tolerate the idea that they are freer sexually. Money is power and engenders envy; but sexual freedom must be even greater power, since the envious person cannot rest until he or she had pried into the most private areas of the envied one’s life, stripping away everything that causes the intolerable resentment until finally the enviable one is as depleted and asexual as the envious person.
It is understandable that masturbation and sexual fantasy were accred-ited as “normal” at almost the same moment in history. They go hand in hand, these two good friends, which is why I have chosen to write about masturbation at length. The one reveals the other. Masturbation without fantasy would simply be too lonely.

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