Happy International Masturbation Month!
How can you love yourself if you don’t love yourself?
If you haven’t heard yet, May is International Masturbation Month*! As a #SexPositive advocate, I believe that healthier and better sex starts with a good sense of self. What better way to learn what your body needs than to be the source of your own pleasure?
*Editor’s note: I couldn’t find a consensus on whether it’s ‘National’ or ‘International’ Masturbation Month, though it looked skewed towards International. National looked better on the image, though, so there you have it.
The origins are pretty fascinating. Good Vibrations, a San-Francisco-based, sex-positive retailer like Mystiq, declared May 14, 1995 National Masturbation Day after Bill Clinton fired Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders for suggesting that masturbation be addressed in sex education curriculum.
I’d love to say that we’ve come (get it?) so far since then, but… we haven’t.…
Happy International and/or National Masturbation Month!
Without being too explicit or otherwise inappropriate, I started masturbating at a very young age. I don’t even know how I discovered that it felt good, I just know that once I did, I literally took every opportunity I could to get myself off.
Once I hit my teen years, it was more out of necessity to work out all that unaddressed sexual frustration. Now, as an adult in a long-term, cohabiting relationship, I kind of miss my alone time. In theory, living with my partner and having consistent sex is a more ideal situation than needing to masturbate for sexual pleasure.
Don’t get me wrong, consistent sex is never a bad thing in my book but there is something about bringing yourself that kind of pleasure that can’t be beat. I see it almost as a form of meditation since I’m able to tune out the distractions of my surroundings, and just focus on feeling in tune with my body. Being able to completely focus on one’s self and one’s own desires is not something many of us get to experience in our day-to-day lives, which is all the more reason to broaden our perspectives, societally, and see masturbating as more than just a means to an end, quick release or punchline.
All month, I and the rest of team here at The Sex-Positive Blog will be sharing content focused on masturbation and undoing the stigma and shame surrounding it. In the meantime, we’ve posted some links to discussions or articles about masturbation from our archives. We hope you enjoy them, as well as the rest of the content celebrating masturbation and healthy sexuality that we publish this month.
And don’t forget to enjoy yourself, while you’re at it!
