I’ve been feeling a little risqué lately, so instead of putting on some daring red lipstick ( ‘cause lord knows I don’t own any) or trying a new dare devil-once-in-a-lifetime- extreme bucket list activity, let’s flesh it out here. Let’s talk about the unspoken pleasure, an event I’m sure we’ve all taken part in, but are waaaay to “lady-like” to admit it…a lovely term we all know as masturbation. I know, I know it’s gross to even read it on the page, but why is that? A deed that is as natural to us as breathing? Why do we soo quickly negatively judge the safest sexual activity (speaking in likeliness if STI’s) there is?
Throughout the course of history, women have been lead into developing certain kinds of relationships, very distant relationships, with themselves and with their bodies, uncomfortable ones at best unsatisfying ones at worst. For as long as there has been an America there has been a strict and rigid format women had always been expected to follow. In America’s early years, recreational sex was never an accepted “code of conduct” for women. Those who deviated from it were women who were no longer “ladies”; women who were open about sex and pleasure techniques even till this day are criticized and condemned to an extent.
The only time I’ve ever seen female masturbation being glorified is when it is done for the sake of a partner watching. This reinforces the ostracizing of women from their own beings because the only time it is deemed ok to make YOU feel good, is for SOMEONE ELSE. If doing this is supposed to be for your own pleasure why does someone else have an agency over your body that really is only entitled to you?? Now, I am a feminist at heart and of course a lot of my sentiment and drive lies within the unjust effects our society has on the mind of us as women,but I do think it is also important to look at the stigmatization of masturbation for men as well. They have it rough. This may be one of the ONLY categories that men may be more distressed and misunderstood in than us ladies. You want to know why? It’s gross. Plain and simply put, it is nasty. Or at least that’s how mainstream media portrays it. The man who does that is usually a perv who is incapable of getting laid. At least for us, it has an appeal of being sexy to an audience. There are not many cases that I’ve witnessed or heard of where it’s attractive to see a man “taking care of himself”.
It’s immediately associated with derogatory images and events. First ones that come to mind for me are cheating, getting caught watching porn, and Pee Wee Herman, you remember him. The guy publicly jacked off inside a movie theatre? It all barrels down to very embarrassing conclusions: he’s desperate, he’s a sex addict, he has no “game”…. It’s looked at as an insult in a lot of situations. Why the hell is that? Funny how the male sexual desires are acknowledged but yet in the physicality of it, masturbation is every bit as shunned for men as it for women.
A proposal for it? Hmm, I really wish I had one. Why is America, a place where sex and masturbation in all its kinky forms raids and lives within its media and the minds of its public audiences so offended and disgusted by something so seemingly minute as this?
By the always clever and entertaining Sam Hogan.
Love, Loss and Other Shit 