Masturbation is a great teacher.
Alas, it’s one I did not have growing up. No one I knew admitted to masturbation or discussed it. Confused and often incorrect as our ideas on sex with boys were, the language and vocabulary of sex all by ourselves didn’t exist. Nor do I remember any punishment or words spoken against masturbation. Giving up the right to touch myself was a sacrifice I made as unquestioningly as I’m sure my mother had made it with her mother. Like many well-educated young women today, I didn’t use any contraception when I first had sex. I haven’t a doubt in the world that the two are related.
As leader of my group, the intrepid one who would take any dare, I climbed the highest walls, rode on the back of Charleston’s horse-drawn ice wagons, explored the abandoned, shuttered house across the street, even stole from Belk’s department store.
Since I broke all these other rules in what I now understand was my youthful determination to learn bravery, to never be anxious and frightened as I perceived my mother to be, why didn’t I explore and master my own body?
Certainly a map would have helped, given that Houdini himself designed women’s genitals. Here is a mental picture, my earliest unconsummated masturbatory memory: I am lying on my bed and it is summer. My mind is on baseball, my hand aimlessly lying, moving between my legs. I am maybe ten or eleven, no more, because I remember the house we were living in, the wisteria outside the window. Where was it, the source of this tingling pleasure I was feeling, and why did I not continue until I found my clitoris, hidden yes, but not that hidden?
My answer would be that I had already made a bargain with my mother. Made it so long ago and at a time when I was most vulnerable – probably the first year of life – that it had been carved into my very soul, much as a deep cut in a young tree is incised forever. The bargain was never verbalized, never even made conscious to me until I became a writer and began to look for answers to the riddles in my life.
At some point very early in my life I had unconsciously promised my mother never to masturbate if she would love me in the way I had always wanted her to love me. How did I grasp the seriousness of what it meant to her, this business of touching myself? Was it the pained look on her face, the grimace, the turning away, the sharp intake of breath that I would come to associate with her anxiety? I easily gave it up. After all, I was dependent on her for everything, for life itself.
The fact that she never held to her side of the bargain, never loved me in the way I wanted her to, didn’t mean I broke my end of the deal; children have a self-protective way of blaming themselves for mother’s failures and inadequacies. Clearly the fault lay in me, and if I’d been a better child, she would have loved me more.
I buried my anger at her. And I didn’t masturbate – even though I could have done it in the privacy of my own room, even though she wouldn’t have to know. But you see, in the mind of the symbiotic child, still meshed with mother out of anger and love, she would have known. There is a fuzziness where we leave off and she begins, and in that gray area, she lives on in our mind, knowing what we think, what we do, judging us, threatening us with abandonment.
Some children, grown and with children of their own, still hold out for the acceptance and love they wanted when they were little because the unresolved issues with mother remain just that: untested beneath protective layers of buried anger. It doesn’t matter that we wouldn’t die if she abandoned us today; to the still unseparated person the taboo against masturbation remains loaded with dire consequences.
Let me add that on her side, mother experiences this same oneness with her daughter. The biological definition of symbiosis is of two organisms living profitably off each other. They would never think of separating.
When I was writing My Mother/My Self, I referred to the look-alike clothes in which mothers used to dress themselves and their little girls as a small but significant example of how symbiosis blurs the line between mother and daughter. You didn’t see much of those clothes in the late 1970s and the 1980s. They are back. Does that mean mothers are also reading their daughters’ diaries, listening in on their phone calls, and in other ways violating the laws of privacy because there is no privacy, no life separate from mother?
When we grow up and fall in love, we make bargains with men based on the one we made with mother. Our adult expectations of the loved one grow out of and are in reaction to that first, most important love experience. We don’t like to think our mature, sexual lives have anything to do with the nursery, but there is no other way to explain or understand the deals men and women make.
Lovers’ contracts, like the one with her, are too crucial to the love ex-perience to speak out loud. The terms in the small print below the beautifully spoken vows of love aren’t even conscious: “Promise that you will take care of me, love me unconditionally, and never arouse in me any fear of abandonment, jealousy, loss of face, or suspicion that any of the many sacrifices I’ve made for you have been in vain. In return, I am giving myself to you. We will be as one. If you break this deal, I’ll die (or I will kill you).”
How can you say something like that? The meanness of the spoken bargain would break the romantic bubble. Besides, the words show our dependency, infantile omnipotence, lack of trust, the hint of reprisals we would extract if our beloved broke the deal. Better never to say the terms, never even make them conscious to ourselves.
Until he looks at another woman in that special way reserved for us alone. Then our reaction is out of all proportion, our anger has a suici-dal/killing edge, not just because of the other woman – indeed she is inconsequential – but because of what has been re-aroused, a tidal wave of old anger and disappointment that began in that first deal with mother, which he has inherited.
Men don’t command women to fall in love in that peculiarly female I’lldie-if-you-leave-me way which is antithetical to sex, being how a baby experiences neediness and not how a grown person experiences love. No, we give up sex and lose ourselves in dependency because that is the love experience we know best, what we were raised on and for. The kind of love we had with mother abhors sex. But we could never be angry at her, in fact don’t even know the real source of our rage. We can however be angry at men. Oh my, do they ever get the rage we dare never express at mother/women.
Men make their deals too, which are also rooted in childhood, but they don’t hand over their independence, their identity as part of the adult love exchange. They don’t abandon their sexuality in an effort to recapture the asexual deal they once had with mommy. They may lose sexual interest in us, seeing us now as mother/wife, but they still retain their sexual core to either invest in themselves – masturbation – or spend on another woman.
Let me tell you a grown-up story about masturbation, love, and rage, how the unresolved sexual issues between mother and daughter get played out between woman and man. It is my own story.
Did I mention that I didn’t masturbate until I was twenty-two? It was also the time of my first conscious sexual fantasy. At that age I was in-volved with an extraordinary man, whom I’ve come to appreciate as my sexual emancipator. It was because of him that I threw away my circle pin, my little white gloves, and my bra. You see, he had the comfort level of a great teacher, a sureness of himself and a wisdom that resonated back to the earliest stages of my life: he spoke with the tongue of angels and emanated a quality of sexual leadership that said, “Trust me.” I did. Willingly, eagerly, I followed him on the sexual adventure in which he was immersed when we met.
One night early in the relationship we were at his beach house (which he had built himself) and I awoke to find he had left the bed. I walked into the living room and saw him in the early dawn light lying on the sofa masturbating. I was furious. I cried. I said it was because I saw his masturbating, while I was present and available, as rejection. I would say today, however, that my rage had far more to do with my abrupt realization, on seeing him about to bring himself to orgasm, that he had a life separate from me, was not tied to me in that inextricable way that I was enmeshed with him. I was jealous of his hand.
It was the only way I knew to fall in love, symbiotically, the giving over of the self to the beloved. (Let me add that this was not how I presented myself, how the world saw me. I made a flashy external show of sexual assertiveness and economic independence. Even I believed in it – until I fell in love.) Ah, love, the oneness of it all! The bliss of feeling taken care of, weightless, dependent as only a child can and should be dependent on a mother. How dare he break our union, reminding me that I would die or so I felt – if he should leave me, if only in the throes of his own orgasm!
Don’t assume that he masturbated without guilt, or to state it more clearly, that masturbating ever lost its exciting edge of defiance. The lover of my twenty-second summer, like other men, began life with a mother who took his hand away from his penis. What he was up to in the mid-sixties when we met was an all-out determination to separate himself forever from women’s sexual rules.
He had assumed, poor soul, that he had a partner on his sexual adven-ture, when in truth he had a responsibility: me. Nothing said it more clearly – that we were not alike in how we experienced love and sex – than the difference in our attitudes about masturbation.