What is the point of pleasure? I know this sounds like a stupid question, and it's because it is. The point of pleasure is to feel good, to do something that brings us gratification, satisfaction, bliss. Pleasure is meant to make us feel closer to our partners, or to ourselves. This last bit is especially true, and something I've been leaning into more and more the older I get. Pleasure is personal; it's a journey of self-knowledge and discovery. Pleasure is the road map to self-love, and masturbation is my vehicle of choice for the ride.
I used to have a silly game that I played with a partner of mine for years. We would get into bed together side by side, and hold hands. Then, we would count to three simultaneously, and our free hands would zip under the covers to the warm and dark spaces between our legs, my fingers seeking the soft mound and wet lips of the vulva or him reaching around and gripping his firm member, stroking up and down. We would both begin masturbating furiously, bearing down and stroking those perfect, personal spaces that we knew would lead us to the ultimate point of pleasure. He would focus mainly on the shaft of his penis, the fleshy bit of his hand between his thumb and forefinger hitting gently against the underside of the head of his cock. My method was one I had been perfecting for years, using three fingertips to apply firm pressure on top of, and on either side of, the top of my clitoral hood to gently tickle and tease my fuck button to completion. It was a race to finish first, and I almost always won.
Obviously pleasure shouldn't always be a competition; pleasure deserves time and space. Rushing self-care or self-love defeats the point, most of the time. But I loved that I knew myself well enough to know exactly what it would take to orgasm, and quickly. I loved that I knew how to get myself there because I was the sole owner of a base of knowledge that had taken me years to cultivate, and dozens of different toys, inserts, digits, and partners. This was my life's work, my magnum opus. Partners could bring me to orgasm sure, but the 'perfect run' was mine alone.
I was proud of how efficiently I could masturbate because it was a translation of how well I could love myself. However, it wasn't always like that; there was a huge length of time when the idea of masturbating in front of a partner would fill me with horror. Or even a time when the idea of masturbating in general would make me feel guilty and ashamed. If you could do an archeological analysis of every rub of my hand onto my vulva or every bend of my finger slipping between the folds of my labia, you would find decades of careful and gentle work I did in discovering myself.
It's been a long time since I've raced someone in a masturbation marathon. Those were days when my partner and I worked jobs that had us traveling globally, and quickies before the morning commute were the norm, or more often than not, masturbating in a plane toilet or even on a long road trip. It was something to take the edge off, to refocus myself. This past year, the pandemic forced celibacy on me in a way that wasn't welcome or invited, but it led me to rediscovering myself, and taking my self-pleasure to an elevated form of sacrament. When we all had to suddenly and brutally face the fear of illness and death, we all reassessed the preciousness of our health and our physical bodies, and if our bodies are all temples, then we are also the gods to which they are devoted. While quarantined, I found the time and space to conduct and perfect my ceremonies of self-love. Masturbation became less about automatically going to the porn I would find most enticing, or turning on my strongest vibrator (if I am a goddess than the Lelo is my holy grail) to get my quick fix, but about exploring other ways of masturbating that would bring me new kinds of pleasure. Perhaps tonight is an evening of red wine, watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and THC lube. Or maybe it's grinding out a filthy piece of smut before bathing and making use of my detachable shower head. Maybe it is waltzing back and forth in front of my street-facing windows wearing nothing at all, listening to Girl in Red. Or even taking Polaroids of myself in a school girl uniform which I will then share on Tumblr.
This year made me reassess my own understanding of pleasure; seeing it less as a single direction and more like a spatial plane. addrienne marie brown wrote in her book Pleasure Activism that revolution doesn't happen until you make it feel good, but I posit that the opposite might also be true, that feeling good happens best when you revolutionize the way you seek it. When you diversify and discover the myriad of ways that pleasure can happen; and delight in the complexity of what feels good, you expand your definition of self. The point of pleasure being less a finishing line and more a treasure hunt, because we are certainly worth treasuring.
The Whorticulturalist is a sex-positive blogger and creative who enjoys rock climbing, dancing, and camping. She writes often about the intersections of sex, power and culture, and does a lot of sex work activism. In her spare time, she’s probably flirting. You can find more about her and her work at thewhorticulturalist.com
