One afternoon in 2002, two of my friends sat on my trampoline and explained the bases to me, painting graphic images that titillated my 11-year-old mind. I was particularly fascinated by their description of fingering. “Couldn’t you do that yourself?” I thought privately. I decided to find out.
I snuck into my bathroom that night, spread my legs, put a hand mirror between them, and discovered that you can, indeed, do that to yourself. Needless to say, I was on that bathroom floor nearly every day for the next few years (until I discovered shower heads).
I stayed quiet about my solo sex exploits, certain none of my friends were doing it. I occasionally heard them joke about boys masturbating, but the jokes always seemed to contain the assumption that this was one reason boys were such aliens. At sleep-away camp, a cabin mate teased an outcast by joking that she masturbated. I hoped they never discovered what I was doing in my bunk bed after the lights went out.
By the time I was in my early teens, every orgasm I had was followed by a rush of shame. I kept pledging to stop and then breaking this promise. Then, during a truth or dare game at age 15, a friend asked me what my biggest secret was, and I admitted it was that I masturbated. As it turned out, she did it, too. Another truth or dare game later, I learned another friend did as well. How had we felt like such freaks when we were all doing it?
“Both women and men, depending how they were raised, have shame and guilt around masturbation,” says Laurie Mintz, Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida and author of Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters and How to Get It. “But female masturbation is still more taboo than male masturbation. There are fewer images of women masturbating than men, and it is less joked about and less talked about.”
There’s a double-standard, for example, in how female and male masturbation are treated on screen. The film But I’m a Cheerleader got an NC-17 rating for a fairly non-explicit female masturbation scene, while American Pie, a movie centered on male masturbation, got an R rating.
In addition, material promoting female masturbation is often censored. New York’s Grand Central subway station ran ads for erectile dysfunction meds without controversy, yet the MTA rejected ads for the sex toy company Unbound until people protested online.
The stigma around female masturbation has a long history, says Hallie Lieberman, author of Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy. As far back as the 18th century, Swiss doctor Samuel-Auguste Tissot wrote that it could cause nymphomania. In the 19th-century U.S., girls who masturbated even faced circumcision in order to limit their sexual expression to penetrative intercourse within marriage. The legacy of these theories continued long after they were explicitly believed: A 1974 survey found that a quarter of women felt guilty, perverted, or scared of going crazy through masturbation.
Even though people have become more open minded about masturbation over recent years, thanks to feminist sex shops, sex educators like Betty Dodson, and books like Our Bodies, Ourselves, Good Vibrations staff sexologist Carol Queen, PhD believes that recent government attacks on reproductive rights, LGBT rights, and sexual assault survivors have caused views on masturbation, particularly female masturbation, to regress.
Part of this comes down to a more general taboo around female sexuality. “Men are expected to express themselves sexually at a young age,” says Carlin Ross, who runs sexuality workshops for women alongside Dodson. “Men are entitled to pleasure and porn and strippers and escorts and Vegas weekends. That just doesn't exist for women yet.”
The masturbation taboo is “part of a larger stigma around sex,” agrees Queen. “It implies that there's one acceptable way to have sex, which is heterosexual, potentially procreative, with gender roles intact.”
The notion of sex that defies gender roles and doesn’t serve procreative purposes is especially threatening when it’s women who are engaging in it. Women’s role, after all, is often reduced to their ability to have children and care for their families. When they are allowed to be sexual, it’s typically in response to a man’s sexual desires, rather than their own. This societal prescription is evident in American purity culture, with women pledging to stay virgins until marriage.
“The stigma around female masturbation is particularly strong due to the idea that a woman’s sexuality exists for her partner rather than herself,” says Queen. “Nobody questions whether men should be motivated by sexual pleasure, and that could include jacking off. It’s all part of the ‘boys will be boys’ narrative.”
Compounding this taboo is a cultural fear that by masturbating, women will get in touch with their desires and stop being subservient to their partners. “When women get a chance to explore pleasure, it’s possible they’ll also explore fantasy, and it’s possible they’ll want something other than they are ‘supposed’ to want,” Queen explains. “They may decide that they primarily want to masturbate and not have partner sex. They may ask male partners to do different things to please them than the male partners have learned or want to do. They may decide they want a female partner or many partners.”
The fear that women will no longer be satisfied with male partners if they masturbate stems from anxieties around women’s preference for clitoral stimulation over penetration. A study by sex researcher Shere Hite, published in 1976’s The Hite Report, found that only 1.5 percent of women masturbated solely through penetration.
This challenged the Freudian idea that the mature way for women to be sexual was to have penetrative intercourse with a male partner, explains Thomas Laqueur, Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley and author of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. Freud called clitoral masturbation a “masculine activity.” Even birth control advocate Margaret Sanger was against masturbation because she believed regular masturbators would be unable to “perform the sexual act naturally,” Lieberman points out.
While the days where Freud’s and Sanger’s ideas enjoyed mainstream acceptance are behind us, fear that masturbation will diminish women’s partnered sex lives now comes out in warnings about vibrators decreasing sensitivity or replacing real human beings. In one Sex and the City episode, for example, Charlotte decides she’d “rather stay home with a Rabbit than deal with men.”
There’s also a lot of body shame deterring women from masturbating. “I've worked with women in their 50's, 60's, and 70's who have never touched their genitals,” says Vanessa Marin, sex therapist and creator of Finishing School, an online orgasm course for women. “Women are socialized to believe that our genitals are ‘icky’ or ‘gross.’ That masturbation is ‘sinful’ or not something that ‘good girls’ do. That our partners will think it's gross or be offended if they find out that we masturbate.”
These myths can lead women to miss out on sexual pleasure, and they may even cause women to settle in their sex lives because they don’t know anything better. “Many women don’t have orgasms during intercourse, but most women do have orgasms when they masturbate,” says Lieberman. “If a woman is too ashamed to masturbate, she may spend decades not having orgasms and even thinking she’s defective or inadequate because she’s not having orgasms during sex. And this can lead to lower self-esteem, of course.”
This lack of sexual independence can even contribute to unhealthy relationships. Women “struggle in codependent relationships, marrying one of their first sex partners, start families, and before they know it, a decade or two have gone by and they don't know who they are anymore,” says Ross.
Unfortunately, the female masturbation taboo has a way of perpetuating itself. When the only references to female masturbation we hear as kids are derogatory jokes, we probably won’t admit we do it. Instead, we’ll laugh along and maybe even make our own quips. The first step to breaking the taboo, then, is overcoming our embarrassment and talking about it — even if it’s as simple as bringing it up with our friends at a sleepover.
Written by Suzannah Weiss, editor of Complex and contributor to publications such as Vice, Teen Vogue, and Bustle.