betty dodson

As an add-on to my post Masturbation as Meditation, I would like to share with you guys another excerpt from Betty’s Dodson’s  Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving that I really like.

While I continue to believe that my spirituality and sexuality are closely connected, if not one in the same, I don’t want to go overboard and turn sex into a religion. And I don’t want all my orgasms to be sacred, ecstatic, ritualized communions with some divine purpose. There are times I just want a “maintenance orgasm” with a scuzzy, low-down fantasy. For me, being in the limelight on a full-time basis becomes unreal and I’m dehumanized. I don’t want to deny or ignore my dark side; that mean little person who’s envious and angry and who flirts with evil thoughts and plays with fantasy violence. When we ignore the dark side, the light of our spirituality becomes dim and we’re in danger of turning into mindless automatons willing to follow a false leader.

Aren’t books great? I could sit here all day and share with you all some of my favorite excerpts.

When I was 18 or 19, at a time in my life when I had a lot of free time on my hands (not unlike now), I had the freedom to take really long showers. The shower in the apartment I lived in at the time had really good water pressure, if you know what I mean. I realized that after getting into the habit of masturbating every morning, I found myself feeling pretty relaxed everyday. I came to the conclusion that masturbation could count as a form of self-help, stress relief, therapy, which led me to believe that everyone should masturbate at least once a day and that if everyone did we’d live in a much better world.

Betty Dodson in her book Sex for One writes about Masturbation as Meditation. As she tells it, she had started practicing transcendental meditation everyday in two twenty minute sessions. At one point, when pressed for time, she decided to incorporate her meditation mantra into her masturbation session. Instead of two twenty minute sessions a day, she would masturbate for forty minutes every night while repeating her mantra. Time saving and delightfully orgasmic. What a discovery she had made, “Now everyone will want to meditate”.

I recently read in Sex for One that Betty Dodson was convinced that she had abnormal labia since one of them was longer than the other. As she tells it, when she was a kid she thought that she had deformed them by masturbating too much. She even made a deal with God that she would immediately stop masturbating if the situation was rectified, only to eventually make a compromise with herself, which consisted of only masturbating on the shorter side in an attempt to even them out.

It wasn’t only Betty was in her thirties that she came to realize that her labia were perfectly normal and in fact desirable. Her lover at the time asked if he could look at her cunt and ashamed she told him what was “wrong” with her lips. Fortunately he assured her that they were perfectly normal and in fact beautiful. In an attempt to reassure her and show her that labia came in all shapes and sizes, he took out some porno magazines and showed her photographic evidence.

This was the first time that Betty was exposed to that kind of material and the experience blew her mind. She came to accept her own body by simply seeing that other women had similarly shaped labia and that our bodies didn’t all fit into one image of how things ought to look.