Can We Stop Shaming Girls for Masturbating?
Confused and embarrassed about self-pleasure, I gave it up until I finally learned more at age 18
When I was around 10 years old, I began to feel immense guilt and shame for masturbating — well, at the time, I didn’t know the word for it, just that it was something I had been doing ever since I could remember.
That indignity began after my mom and grandma had walked in on me on separate occasions, reacting shocked and upset. Clearly, I was mortified. And because no adult clarified for me what I was doing or what it meant, I associated it only with getting in trouble.
When I returned to Christian school for fifth grade, I couldn’t stop obsessing over every bad thing I had ever done, so much so that I started getting cold sweats during Friday mass. My mom would joke about my “daily confessions” to her about every “sin” I had committed that day. Eventually, this tendency manifested into an actual obsessive-compulsive disorder, which made it impossible to get through a day without feeling anxious about everything I considered “wrong,” including masturbating. As a result of my ignorance and mental illness, I unconsciously quit doing it for eight years.
It wasn’t until I was 18 or 19 years old that I actually researched what self-pleasure is. What I found left me relieved but also upset that I hadn’t known it was a normal and healthy behavior sooner. Since then, however, I’ve learned that it’s not at all surprising that I had never learned about masturbation. While it’s completely normal for children to engage in self-pleasure from an early age, it’s still deeply stigmatized—especially when it comes to women and girls — and the taboo topic is rarely brought up, even in liberal households like mine.
When it comes to my parents, they were always pretty open. They never sat me down and gave me “the talk” about the birds and the bees, because it had been an ongoing conversation ever since I could remember. My mom spent many long car rides telling my sister and me about sex, drugs and peer pressure — not much was censored in our house. But masturbation never came up once.
Because it’s uncomfortable for adults, we as a society pretend children are too young to learn about their own bodies or engage in self-pleasure. By our silence, we teach them that it’s wrong to talk about or do it in the first place.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned just how off-limits and seemingly uncomfortable the topic can be for people, even though it’s extremely common for children to engage in self-pleasure as early as their toddler years.
According to a study by Indiana University in 2011 that surveyed 14-to-17-year-olds, about three-quarters of boys and nearly half of girls said they masturbate (but since that relies on self-reporting, the numbers are probably even higher). Yet because it’s uncomfortable for adults, we as a society pretend children are too young to learn about their own bodies or engage in self-pleasure. By our silence, we teach them that it’s wrong to talk about it or do it in the first place.
The issue first came up in a high-level setting in 1994 by former US Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders at a United Nations AIDS conference, when she said, “I think [masturbation] is something that is a part of human sexuality, and it’s a part of something that perhaps should be taught. But we’ve not even taught our children the very basics.”
It was controversial, to say the least — former President Bill Clinton fired her shortly thereafter. The following year, San Francisco sex shop Good Vibrations created International Masturbation Day in her honor, which later expanded to a full month.
When it comes to educating children and adolescents about masturbation, school is no help. It definitely never came up in any of my sex-ed classes in public school in California, and I’m sure it didn’t come up in yours either.
Given America’s abysmal record of including information about contraception in sex ed, it appears to be an even harder feat to teach students that masturbation is normal and healthy. After all, half the country is still relying on abstinence-only education, and only 13 states require sex-ed to be medically accurate. Just last month, the Oceanside Unified School District in Southern California had to scrap its progressive sex-ed program because parents complained about graphic content, including information on masturbation.
The topic is also much more likely to come up when it comes to boys — it’s often an open joke in TV story lines or among friends that age. But it’s much more hush-hush for girls. Comedian Cameron Esposito has joked about this very fact, and how her lessons on sex in Catholic school were limited to a video of an abortion. As a result, Esposito didn’t start masturbating until her late 20s.
“The biology that I have—nobody ever told me that if you have a vagina, you should check this out,” she said on her podcast, called Queery. “Like, I literally just didn’t know until I was dating women who were like, ‘I’ve been masturbating since I was, like, four.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, what?!’ I thought this was some sort of, like, fringe behavior. I don’t know what I thought, but I thought that people with penises did, and people with vaginas didn’t.”
America has a long history of stigmatizing self-pleasure, especially when it comes to women or those under 18. As early as the 13th century, women’s sexual frustration was diagnosed as hysteria. Moreover, physicians throughout history have gone to great lengths to stop it among children, including inventing special diets, tying children’s hands to their bedposts and even genital mutilation.
“Masturbate and have orgasms for feminism!”
Peggy Orenstein, journalist and author of Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life, agrees. In an email to me, she wrote that she believes we need to flip the script on how we talk to children about sex and their bodies. She argues that sex-ed should be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ students and include lessons on consent and refusal skills, in addition to letting them know that sexual exploration, including masturbation, isn’t just normal and healthy, it’s a human right.
“I’d say to young women, if you can’t do it for yourself, do it for the team — female pleasure is political as well as personal,” she said. “Masturbate and have orgasms for feminism! I’m only half joking.”
I can get down with that. If we continue to teach girls that masturbation is wrong or dirty or bad, but that it’s OK when boys do it, what kind of message is that sending? The wrong one. Let’s start talking about it.
I’ll never forget the day I Googled what had been plaguing my psyche for years. This thing that I’d been ashamed and guilty about for nearly a decade was not only OK, it was good for you. I’ll spare you the details about what happened next, but I’ll always remember the rush of feelings afterward: elated, euphoric and kind of pissed I hadn’t known about this way earlier.
Hey! The Bold Italic recently launched a podcast, This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley. Check out the full season or listen to the episode below featuring Eileen Rinaldi, CEO and founder of Ritual Coffee. More coming soon, so stay tuned!
