"Masturbation has been a continuous part of my sex life since the age of five. It got me through childhood, puberty, romantic love, marriage and it will happily see me through old age. I am not typical in this respect." So wrote the immortal Detty Dodson in her 1974 book Liberating Masturbation...in nineteen seventy-four! In the decades that followed she said over and over that masturbation was natural, beautiful and even transformative. And while she did make progress in fulfilling the promise in the title of her book (published in the eighties as Sex for One), it seems we are not ready societally to declare the simple act of masturbation liberated. How many of us on this forum are here specifically because we can't be truly open about our enthusiasm for the Onanistic arts? I bet many of us wish we could tell our friends I love to masturbate! Or maybe even say around the water cooler at work one Monday, "I jacked off like a maniac all weekend and came like crazy!" A woman tells a coworker, "I can't wait to get home and fuck myself," is more likely to be a stalking victim than the object of approval and encouragement. We join this forum because we find we can't be the open masturbators we wish we could be. I grew up in a near-ideal situation for a masturbator. My parents knew I masturbated frequently and considered this to be perfectly natural. In fact, along with their tacit approval of my enthusiastic autoeroticism, I knew they were practitioners themselves. And yet I was unable to confide in anyone outside the family. The attitudes of society were blindingly obvious, even to my teenage mind, and so I yearned to share my love of masturbation but found no one with whom to share. As much as I loved to masturbate, I had to keep it a secret outside the family. I am actually quite fortunate. I have a couple of female friends who know all about my solo sex escapades, and I do get a kick out of regaling them with stories of whacking off under all manner of circumstances. But just the same, even I, the shameless masturbator, feels the need to be circumspect about my favorite hobby. Type 'masturbation' in the search box of YouTube and hundreds of factual, pro-masturbation videos appear, alongside thousands of anti-masturbation videos, mostly advancing the same old lies that it's bad for your health one way or another. While progress has been made since the AMA revised their opinion and declared masturbation 'normal' (in 1972), it seems there truly is still quite a way to go.
