When the topic of masturbation comes up, I usually feel the impulse to pull my friends in and whisper. I’ve been thinking a lot about that impulse and the ways that I talk about self-pleasuring with the people close to me.
There’s something inherently taboo about openly discussing things that we do alone in our rooms at night. Because of that, I often talk around it. The conversation with my friends usually begins with some pretty general discourse; a lot of “everyone masturbates” and nods to “self-care,” but never anything too explicit about what our experiences actually entail. If we’re all doing it, though, why do we feel the need to keep such a common thing so private?
I’ll be honest: even writing this essay feels complicated and scary. I’ve always felt at odds with my personal masturbation experience and the experience I perceive other women and femmes having. Even though it may seem irrational, a small part of me is prepping to have my feminism questioned in the aftermath of this piece and subconsciously arming myself to face judgments about my relationship to sex as a woman who watches porn and is open about the importance of masturbation.
Those fears come from the part of myself that learned that girls who masturbate and talk about it are unnatural. Worse, if you watched porn, you were a completely different breed. I’m conflicted about my relationship to porn because I’ve been told in so many ways that it isn’t for women. That stigma has left me wondering—can I even justify getting pleasure from an industry that profits off the objectification of women?
I decided to bring in an outside perspective and open these questions up to Maricela, an OnlyFans creator and writer currently based in Puerto Rico. I asked what their family said about masturbation and porn when they were a child and if they still hold any of those beliefs now. In their preteens, they said, they thought “masturbating was for men, and women just didn’t do it. After sex education in the sixth grade, I went home one day and did my own research and came across porn by accident. I never really saw it in a negative way. I was just confused by it and then I realized that it was actually great!”
Maricela’s discovery was refreshing to hear, especially because I also came across porn accidentally. I didn’t understand what it was or how people enjoyed it, but I didn’t have any automatic stigma against it. I remember feeling as though I had opened the door to something that I would continue to explore as I got older.
As boys began to whisper about it more and more in school, I decided to see if anyone else had taken it upon themselves to investigate. In the fifth grade, I remember asking my neighbor, who was around my age, what porn was. I’d heard murmurings of something called “Redtube” at school, always accompanied by giggles and sneers from the boys. When I brought this up to my neighbor, she was curious too, so we decided to bite the bullet and do some research.
We must have looked ridiculous in my dark room—under the covers, mouths wide, computer volume at the lowest setting. It makes me laugh to think about how little we understood. I’ll never forget the overwhelming wave of shame when my mom looked at my internet history afterward and saw what we’d been looking at. She felt responsible for us having watched porn in our house, so she decided to tell my neighbor’s mom what we’d been up to. I sat in the hallway and listened to my mom on the phone, wanting to curl into a ball the whole time.
I don’t disagree with my mother’s choice or her feeling that I shouldn’t have been watching those videos because they could skew my perception of what sex truly was. I just wish I’d had someone to let me know that there was nothing wrong with curiosity.
After this moment of humiliation, it became difficult for me to shake off my shame when I began masturbating in my early teens. It felt important that I kept the fact that I watched porn private, because I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable again.
Many times throughout high school, my guy friends would talk about how weird it was to them that girls masturbated—and I’d just laugh along. I wouldn’t have known how to defend it even if I tried. My female friends, too, would talk about how gross it was that men watched porn so much and how scary porn was to them. All signals from fifth grade to then pointed to the fact that what I did wasn’t normal. It didn’t seem like other girls I knew watched porn or even masturbated, and I didn’t know where that left me.
Luckily, once I got to college, I was able to talk to more women in my life about masturbation and it felt like the stereotypes that painted girls who masturbated as hypersexual and unattractive were much less present. Masturbation was a bigger part of sexual conversations with friends, and it no longer felt taboo.
I found that I was trying to balance two very different opinions: one stemming from childhood shame and one stemming from friends that I felt would disappear if they knew the specifics of how I made myself feel good. I can’t count the number of times I’ve wanted to ask women in my life whether or not they watch porn while masturbating but have stopped myself out of fear of being perceived as gross or fucked-up.
When I first read Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power,” I felt as though someone had finally articulated the way that I feel intrinsically tied to my erotic self and how alienating it was to try to separate from that. “In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness,” she writes. Lorde advocates for women to go to the deepest parts of themselves, channeled through the erotic. But eroticism doesn’t just mean sex. It informs many parts of our lives like language, selfhood, relationships, and power dynamics. She argues that patriarchal ideas have taught women that separating the “rational self” from the “erotic self” is correct and socially acceptable, but there’s inherent power in reclaiming the instinctual, sensual, and full-bodied parts of the self that are heightened by erotic knowledge.
Even though Audre Lorde champions the erotic, however, she strongly opposes pornography. At one point, she notes that it “emphasizes sensation without feeling.” She suggests that the porn industry perpetuates male stereotypes of the erotic that are often used against women—stereotypes that associate female eroticism with hysteria and irrationality, resulting in a vast disconnect between women and their erotic instincts. As someone who watches porn and is also a huge Audre Lorde fan, I’ve spent a lot of time debating whether I agree that pornography is working in opposition to erotic power.
When I asked Maricela what they thought about this, their response helped me articulate my own opinion. “For women and femme-presenting people, if [porn] is solely for the male gaze then that’s when it really becomes an issue. But I think when pornography is created for marginalized genders by marginalized genders it can be helpful.” It isn’t productive to have a black-and-white opinion on porn—especially not for a whole set of gender identities.
Accessing erotic power stems from possibility—the potential for empowerment outside of pre-packaged systems. In reality, erotic freedom has to exist on the outside of the socially acceptable—because those rules were set for me by exclusively male voices.
Lorde closes out her piece by musing, “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” Ultimately, shame for me means feeling like the most internal parts of myself are on display and twisted by the external. So now, I want to allow myself to practice approaching the erotic from a less fearful place—and to allow room for our deepest cravings to thrive without judgment.
By Mya Ison
