masturbation

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”.

Olga Wolstenholme is looking for writers to join her over at her site.  She sent me a note asking for me to post the details here.     - - arvan

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about masturbation and sex education and I would like to hear your stories about it. Now, what I propose is that those of you who are so inclined send me an email at olgawolstenholme@gmail.com and share your stories with me so that I can repost them here on Cuntlove.  At present, the topics I would like to cover are: 

1. How did you first learn about sex?  Did you have “the talk” with your parents?  Were your friends your main source of information?  What did you learn from movies, tv, books?  What was sex ed like at your school?  Did you ever walk in on your parents? 
2. What are your personal experiences with masturbation? Have you ever masturbated?  How old where you when you first masturbated?  How did you feel about it?  Did you ever get caught?  Did you ever masturbate with your friends? How do you masturbate?  How would you explain it to someone who has never masturbated before?

As you can see there are two distinct themes: masturbation and sex education.  There is no need to talk about both subject nor is there a need to answer every question.  Simply share with me a personal story that comes to mind when you think about these questions.  Try to keep it between 200 to 500 words for each story, but feel free to send in more than one. What I’ll do is collect them and share them here with the other readers.  Stay on topic, but feel free to give as many details as you like. Make sure to tell me in your email whether you want to remain anonymous. (Who Wants to Tell a Story?)

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. 

Last night during a quiet evening in, my husband and I re-discovered what I find to be one of the more amusing things on late-night basic cable: the "

Shop Erotic!" infomercial

.  If you haven't seen it, "Shop Erotic!" features two natural-looking, casually-dressed attractive women selling sex toys to their viewers at home.  Their sales-pitch includes many paraphrases of, "A lot of people find this embarrassing or intimidating, but it's really not.  Exploring new kinds of sex is fun both alone and with a partner."  And I love the lack of sensationalism of these girl-next-door-types spreading the joy of exploratory sex on TV.  Unfortunately for such an otherwise appreciated public service, they're selling sex toys that are ridiculously overpriced and impossible to clean.  Which makes me assume that the business executives are counting on their audience's ignorance.

I used to sit in class (especially in high school), close my eyes and imagine extensive sexual scenarios. I was bored a lot. Once or twice I got myself so hot and bothered that I’d excuse myself to the bathroom and go rub one out in the tiny little bathroom stalls. They were quick, satisfying orgasms that keep me going for the rest of the day. Of course, at one point I just started smoking a lot of pot to stave off the crushing boredom. And besides, you can only masturbate in the bathroom so many times a day before people start wondering what’s wrong with your bladder.

I’m making it sound like it was much more of a habit than it actually was, when in reality it happened maybe a handful of times. The pot habit proved to be much more chronic. My grade eleven French teacher posited to my father during a parent teacher meeting that I might have digestive problems, since I was always falling asleep in class after lunch. You’d think it would have been a much simpler leap of imagination to realize that I was just stoned out of my mind, which is why I would eventually fall asleep on top of my French dictionary, mouth open, drooling on my copy of Le Petit Larousse.

Back to the topic at hand, which was masturbating at work, but I somehow got sidetracked with masturbating at school and then smoking weed for some reason. Regardless, I’m not changing the tittle of the post. Masturbating at work, it’s something I haven’t done in a number of years actually, maybe because my latest jobs haven’t lent themselves to such an endeavor or maybe since I no longer live with anyone, I can enjoy masturbating in the comfort of my own home without any inhibitions or interruptions. Whether the reason I no longer indulge in masturbating at work, I can tell you that I have and that it was rather a huge turn on.

Have you ever been afraid of becoming addicted to your vibrator? I have, well I wasn't so much afraid as it has been a thought that has passed through my brain a few times over the years. Especially, when I was younger and much more impressionable. There's a myth out there that states that if a woman becomes accustomed to achieving orgasms with a vibrator, she will no longer be able to orgasm with other kinds of stimulation.

I thought that might have been true, because it was (it is) so much easier for me to come with a little vibration, but I've come to realize that it's just not true. Not in the sense that our sexual organs will become desensitized with use and eventually require more and more intensity. Ok, maybe within the same session, but that's true of any kind of stimulation.

For those of you that have watched Sex and the City, you'll be familiar with the episode in which Charlotte buys The Rabbit (check out the Sex Toys at Babeland) and after using it for the first time and finding battery operated bliss, she pretty much ceases to leave her house. The girls eventually have to stage an intervention to convince Charlotte to let go of her new pet. It was a funny episode and it definitely got the point across: pleasure can be addictive and The Rabbit is one hell of a vibrator, but it's not exactly reality, now is it?

This is the third part in a series, inspired by life inside the 2009 Burning Man Poly Paradise.  The first part can be viewed here and the second part is here.

The Lovers

The Lovers. Photo by Eric Francis.

Only once did I speak to her during the session, which was to ask if it was okay if I could photograph her hands and her vulva.  I was soaked in curiosity what she looked like.  She looked at me languidly and nodded yes.  I shifted positions and was treated to the most extraordinary perspective.  And to her scent, which was lush and inviting, mingled with the ubiquitous background of playa dust.