Praise to the freedom of female pleasure, solo satisfaction and especially to self love.
I don’t think I was a precocious masturbator, because I have come to know some really interesting women who’ve confided in me to masturbating as children (which is either really weird… or super natural)… And I don’t pretend to know their family histories, but do know for myself that growing up with an Irish-Catholic-raised mother, in a protestant country like the United States, self pleasure and maybe even self care, were somehow taboo.
Women feeling free to explore our bodies, was and still remains a rare and precious thing.
Although I don’t have any young memories of masturbating, I did come across a couple of pictures of me as a baby where I seem to have hit on my own pleasurable point. It was before digital photography and my mom doesn’t recall realizing the situation until she got the prints developed.
I think most mothers in those days, and maybe even some today, would have brushed their child’s hands away from their anatomy to make them understand that touching themselves was bad and wrong like society and religion had taught them before. Even my cool mom would surely have done so, albeit perhaps laughingly, had she realized what she had been shooting.
So that just goes to show you what an independent and already lucky girl I was at such a young age, to have had the leeway to freely touch and feel my own body.
Raised in a male dominated world though, it still seemed to me, growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, that female bodies were simply objects for male indulgence. The world behaved as if our sexuality, our bodies and our pleasure were of interest to no one at all… as if feminine gratification was just a sub-text.
Boys’ desires dominated and masculine culture permeated every strata of society. Heterosexual coupling was what we heard and read and watched because those were the stories that were written and produced and distributed by men and for men.
Men owned the public conversation, so men owned eroticism too.
I grew up having boyfriends my whole life, practiced writing my married name with each and dreamt of my role as Mrs. So And So… As my own single mother worked, through which I saw more economic strife than freedom, my rebellion was in yearning to be a stay-at-home mom. Perhaps I thought I could please a man into providing me with happiness or perhaps I just idealistically thought that a wife and a mom was truly an equal partner in relationship.
In either case, those crazy social mores of the times ran deeply in my blood. So pleasing Mr. So and So was always more important to me than my own pleasure. My pleasure flowed through him and his. His desires were mine, would be, should be, must be… mine too. To be a good wife, to catch a good man, to keep a man at all, I knew I had to please him first.
My own fantasies, my desires, my accomplishments and my own dreams would always remain secondary to his.
When I was around 16 or 17 though, I remember my manicurist casually asking me if I had a vibrator. This was in the early 80’s in Los Angeles, which was pretty rock n’roll and where it wasn’t rare for teenagers to have manicured nails. When I admitted that I had no vibrator, Denise, who worked out of her home, promptly got up, went with a ladder to special storage closet in her bedroom and returned with a brand new Hitachi Magic Wand. She somehow had several in stock, for a friend in need, I guess or just in case her own went on the blink.
« You. Will never. Thank me. Enough for this, » she gasp-whispered, shaking her head back and forth as she slid the contraption across the table.
I took The Wand out of its box at home that night. It had a 10in mechanical body and a slightly flexible neck with a squash-ball sized plastic-y head attached… and most remarkably, it had a very short electric cord on the other end… making it imperative to masturbate too close to an electrical socket. It was also extremely noisy and crazy powerful… but she was absolutely right… I could never have thanked her enough.
I masturbated frequently but secretly, under my covers and alone. I had fantasies, mostly about sex with powerful men who were too forceful in compromising situations. I thought these were bad and wrong and felt guilty about my excitement. Especially because I had been raped by my birth father as a child, so I knew the compromising part of the scenario had some big hicks in it for me personally. I would come once with muffled squeaks and shakes of excitement and then wind the short cord around the big body and put her away.
I also had a real life during those years. I had my first very serious boyfriend with whom I lost my virginity when I was 16 and continued dating for the next four years. Somewhere, when he’d gone off to DC and my Wand and I were in New York at school, we’d parted ways and I had other lovers of different colors, ages, languages and nationalities… But I always kept my Wand to myself.
Then, when we moved further east to France, my Wand and I had to add an extra electric transformer to our duo which also added a couple of inches from the wall. I eventually married and had two kids with a French man who wanted me more than I wanted him and we divorced messily after 10 years of trying to make it work.
Through trail and tribulation, my old wand and I remained inseparable though.
But during the divorce proceedings and just like in a bad sitcom, I fell in love with none other than my divorce attorney.
Ted was a powerful man and I was definitely in a compromising situation. Sex with him was wild and hot and crazy and forbidden… and most rivetingly, always all about Ted and his fantasies. He spoke them out loud while making love… not sometimes, all the time… so our love making was never about the moment. It was his nostalgia for his past erections or his hopes and dreams for his future ejaculations. It can pretty much safely be said that our sex together was never about me at all.
Ted’s head ran the agenda and the agenda was only about sex as Ted desired it. Sex toys, Sexy lingerie, Sex parties, Sex vacations, Sex friends… There was most certainly no time for just my Wand and me.
In Ted’s head there were constantly at least two or three others in bed with us, even if we were alone. But as an exhibitionist Ted had a preference for group sex and public places. I agreed for a while because when Ted got what he wanted he could be a blast. I had no inhibitions and was always up for a good party, so making him happy seemed like an obvious choice. But then parties soon turned into appointments, the spontaneity into normality, the outrageousness into obsession.
Ted became insatiable, unstoppable, uncontrollable, intolerable and unbearable.
My Wand and I must have parted ways during that time too, although I remember nothing ceremonious. I actually miss her short cord, heavy body and loud engine now. I’m a bit nostalgic in retrospect.
I’ve been single and celibate for a while now… and it’s actually been the most relaxing, rejuvenating and refreshing time of my life.
I’ve built myself back from the smoldering embers of those very bad things that would have happened had Ted stayed or perhaps from the lingering ashes of the dynamite stick Ted used to destroy our marriage.
Whichever it was, I am very thankful to be alive today.
So now, when I spend time by myself and masturbate alone, I fantasize about me and my love for myself.
And what makes me come multiple times is when I hear myself say:
“ I love you Eva. You are safe with me. I’ll take care of you … always. You can trust me!!! Be who you want. Do what you want. Make your life what you want. Love who you want. Give only what you really want to give.”
That’s a very long way from powerful men in compromising situations. That is real love, real healing and real pleasure.
