Dodson - Sex for one: the joy of selfloving

Copyright 1996, 1987, 1983, 1974, by Betty Dodson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Three Rivers Press, New York,
New York.
Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

This book was previously published in different form under the titles Selflove and Orgasm and Liberating Masturbation.

Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland

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THREE RIVERS PRESS is a registered trademark and the Three Rivers Press colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sex for one.

1. Masturbation. I. Title

HQ447.D59 1987 306.772 87-12039

eISBN: 978-0-307-95364-3

v3.1

This book is dedicated to me.
Without my selflove it could never have been written.

M y gratitude goes to Grant Taylor for the indispensable part he has played in the creation of this book. Since 1965, Grant and I have had an ongoing passionate dialogue about the politics of masturbation. In 1970, I let him convince me that I could write. Since then, hes been a demanding teacher, a patient assistant, a testy devils advocate, an expert editor, a first-rate word processor, and, always, my best erotic friend.

Also I want to gratefully acknowledge all the women and men who have shared their orgasms with me in my Bodysex Workshops. They have been my inspiration and my teachers. And to all the wonderful people who took the time to write, I say a thousand thank yous for all your love and support.

My appreciation goes to my many enthusiastic editors at Harmony and Crown, especially Heather Julius, for encouraging me to do this revision. And finally, I thank my lucky stars to have been raised by an orgasmic mother who believed masturbation was a natural activity for children.

A s an apolitical artist who never paid any attention to the workings of government, I naively declared myself a radical feminist in the early seventies and began writing this book. It first appeared as a monograph, then as an article in Ms. magazine, next as a self-published book titled Liberating Masturbation, which became a feminist classic, and finally, in its present form, Sex for One, now going into its tenth year to become a trade paperback classic with this revision.

Looking back, I marvel at how brazen it was of me to think I could liberate a sexual activity that had been closeted for ages, but the spirit of the times had convinced a lot of us that women were going to change the world. Leaving a fine-arts career behind, I packed a bag of sextoys along with a carousel of one hundred color slides of female genitals and took off across the country to teach sex to feminists. At the time it seemed very simple. Id show them the wide variety of womens sex organs so wed stop thinking our own were ugly or deformed, and then Id teach them how to have orgasms by masturbating, using both manual techniques and an electric massager.

In 1973, at the NOW Sexuality Conference in New York City, I introduced my slide show, titled Creating an Aesthetic for the Female Genitals, to more than a thousand women. Back then, most women didnt know what their own genitals looked like, much less have an awareness of their beauty. Today many women trim and shape their pubic hair on a regular basis, and some are even wearing jeweled labia rings. That same weekend, I also introduced electric massagers during my conference workshop on masturbation and became the first public spokesperson for the sexual benefits of an electric vibrator, especially for women who were struggling to have a first orgasm. Now electric orgasms are commonplace and the sales of these pleasure appliances grow steadily.

I now proclaim that masturbation has come of age! The word appears more and more in print. Most college sex books include a chapter on masturbation. Many more magazine articles have been written about it. Madonna did it onstage. Dr. Ruth consistently advocates it. When Pee Wee Herman got caught wanking in a porn theater, most folks just wanted to know what the cops were doing there. Seinfeld developed an entire show about who could abstain the longest, without ever using the M word, and Roseanne did a show about childhood masturbation. HBO did a segment on my masturbation workshop, ran Annie Sprinkles performance where she actually used a vibrator onstage, and also ran a piece on peep show masturbation with Carol Queen. Even Hollywoods gotten into the act with a great masturbation scene from Shirley MacLain in the movie Being There. And stand-up comics like Rosie ODonnell are doing very funny bits about masturbation; she jokes, What do you say when you meet someone like Madonna? Hi! I have a vibrator.

Finally, the controversial firing of Dr. Jocelyn Elders in 1995 got the word masturbation on every TV network and in every newspaper. When our former surgeon general responded to a question about masturbation with intelligence and compassion, saying, I believe masturbation is a natural part of human sexuality, something that might even be taught, our frightened legislators fell apart. They also knew she thought drugs could only be controlled by making them legal, and condoms needed to be passed out in our high schools to prevent teen pregnancy and AIDS. After the story broke, I watched a conservative politician on television say, I dont want my five-year-old walking around with a condom in his pocket. The old political ploy of bait and switch.