Carolyn, a rela­tion­ship coun­sellor in her fifties, told me she thought it unwise to posit­ively encourage female masturb­a­tion. She did not give her reasons.

“Many women think of masturb­a­tion as unnat­ural and disgusting and a complete waste of time, and don’t under­stand why anybody does it and are unsym­path­etic to the view that people might continue to do it even though they have sexual part­ners. The majority of men, though they may keep their feel­ings to them­selves, don’t agree.” (p52 Healthy Sex 1998)

It is often implied that for a hetero­sexual woman, sex is an emotional exper­i­ence and that orgasm (if acknow­ledged at all) comes from simply loving her partner. The unspoken fear is that any activity as sexu­ally explicit as masturb­a­tion might inter­fere with the more accept­able loving exper­i­ences that a sexual rela­tion­ship can provide.

Carolyn knew that I masturb­ated and she asked me, rather tact­lessly I thought, whether I had ever had any lesbian tend­en­cies. It reminds me of the joke told by a char­acter in the film ‘Flash­dance’. A male chef asks, “What’s this?” and sticks his tongue out flat. The answer – “A lesbian with a hard on!”.

Lesbian women are seen to enjoy explicit sexual arousal (involving the clit­oris). For hetero­sexual women, enjoying sexual pleasure is primarily asso­ci­ated with immoral beha­viour. Within loving rela­tion­ships hetero­sexual women usually settle for vaginal inter­course, which can be justi­fied morally on the grounds of reproduction.

“Although 58 per cent of the females in our sample were masturb­ating to orgasm at some time in their lives, it was a much smaller percentage which had masturb­ated within any partic­ular year or period of years. Because of the consid­er­able discon­tinuity of most of the masturb­atory histories, it is prob­able that not more than a fifth — 20 per cent — of the females were masturb­ating within any partic­ular year.” (p143 Sexual beha­vior in the human female 1953)

We like to under­play the phys­ical aspects of hetero­sexual women’s sexual arousal. Even though women do have ‘hard-ons’ we rarely acknow­ledge this fact. We prefer to attribute strong phys­ical responses to male sexu­ality. I enjoy my own sexual arousal and orgasm but my focus is on what is happening in my head rather than to my body. In general, men are more tuned into the phys­ical side of sex (genital focus) but a woman appre­ci­ates the sensu­ality of her whole body (her power to arouse a man).

When a man masturb­ates, he uses firm and sustained stim­u­la­tion of his penis from the outset. When I first masturb­ated a partner, I was surprised by how vigorous I could be when stim­u­lating his penis with my hand. A man can expect the reverse: he will need to use much more subtle stim­u­la­tion on a woman’s clit­oris than he is used to when masturb­ating himself.

When I masturbate I don’t even consider clit­oral stim­u­la­tion until I can feel some stir­rings of arousal (by tuning into an effective fantasy). Even then I only rub my vulva (stim­u­lating the clit­oris through the surrounding skin) relat­ively slowly and gently with phys­ical stim­u­la­tion focused mainly on the peak of orgasm itself.

Our inter­pret­a­tion of women’s sexu­ality is faulty. We assume women are sexual if they support the view that inter­course is mutu­ally orgasmic (despite the known facts). Women who masturbate are dismissed as sexu­ally dysfunc­tional (pre-orgasmic). In fact such women are more sexual than average because they learn how to orgasm through genital stim­u­la­tion as men do.

“Masturb­a­tion is a normal sexual outlet, which is most common in adoles­cence, but which is prac­tised at all ages, by people with and without sexual part­ners. Masturb­a­tion is a healthy way of learning to explore your body, of devel­oping your sexu­ality and your sexual fantasies. All of these are important for a fulfilling sexual life.” (p56 EveryMan 1980)

One disad­vantage of masturb­a­tion and learning how to give your­self an orgasm early on in life is that your expect­a­tion is set much higher than a woman who does not know what an orgasm is. You are then sure to face disap­point­ment if you assume that a sexual exper­i­ence shared with a lover will neces­sarily be as easily pleasurable.