The Joy of Making Love to Yourself

By Fern Levy

Countess: "You are a wonderful lover." · Boris: "I practice a lot when I am alone." Woody Allen, Love and Death

When I was a senior in college, I went to New York City with a friend during semester break to sightsee and take in some Broadway shows. I brought three things home with me from that memorable trip: a strep throat, an unexpurgated copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover, and the experience of seeing Hair on Broadway. The strep throat I got rid of, but I still have my red copy of Lady Chatterly, a classic literary celebration of sensuality and sexuality, and I still remember the song from Hair, a classic musical celebration of sensuality and sexuality, that made the first positive statement about masturbation I had heard in my twenty-one years.

In fact, with its nudity, its rejection of traditional values, and its "masturbation can be fun" song, I

found myself reeling with the contradictions the show presented to me. After all, I had grown up believing that nudity was bad, tradition was good, and masturbation was terrible. Anything that could cause blindness ("Can I just do it until I need glasses?"), psychosis, warts, hairy palms, sterility, deformity, personality changes, acne, and morbid changes in the nose couldn't be very good for you. Anything referred to as the solitary vice, infantile self-abuse, and self-pollution couldn't be very good for you. And anything called masturbation from the Latin "manus" (hand) and "struprare" (to defile, deflower) from "struprum" (dishonor) couldn't be very good for you. Who could dishonor, defile, and deflower oneself with one's soon to be warty, hairy hand and not feel guilty about it? In fact, just saying the word is enough to make you feel bad.

As we grew up, most of us heard our well-meaning parents say things like, "Don't touch down there, it's dirty," or when we had to touch, "Be sure to wipe good" or "Be sure to wash your hands good after

Peace Research and Feminism

By Debbie Gross

I recently took a course entitled "Peaceful World Change" at Cleveland State University. I had expected at least a glimpse of how the future might look from a feminist view, since feminism involves changing the world. Unfortunately, I found that peace research, global studies, and future world orders are

Why We Oppose Votes For Men

1.

Because man's place is in the army.

2.

Because no really inanly man wants

to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.

3.

Because it men should adopt peaceable methods women will no longer look up to them.

4.

Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters Zhan feats of arms, uniforms and drums.

5.

Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and politi ical conventions shows this, while their Hinnate tendency to appeal to foren renders thom particularly unfit for the task of

-Alice Duer Miller, 1915

the Americas

1 from 1874 to 1042

as much a male domain as making war and running the present world order. The two major texts, Toward a Just World Order and To End War, were collections of essays written almost exclusively by men about other men. All of the major groups studied, such as the World Order Model Project, were run by men. I wondered if this wasn't simply another case of bias in selecting the reading materials, but I soon learned that there simply isn't

much material being published from a feminist perspective.

Part of the problem is that there is a long list of qualifications required to be an "expert" in the field-qualifications, of course, established and judged according to male standards. The other part of the problem worries me more. Some feminists, although perhaps not the majority, are working for

equal roles in the current system. They argue, for example, that women should be a part of the military system. It comes down to the question of whether feminism is fighting for the right to have an equal chance to oppress people or if feminism is fighting to

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you go to the bathroom." I used to believe that my hands became instantaneously contaminated when I sat down on the john. How else could they get so dirty that I needed to be reminded so many times? After all, I was using toilet paper. We were being trained that below the waist was not only off-limits to others, but to ourselves as well. What a mystery our vulvas were to us-invisible, unavailable, and yet such a powerful source of pleasurable feelings.

All girls, through self-discovery, are aware of the pleasure that results from rubbing certain areas of the body, including the vulval area. We attempted to reconcile our own innate wisdom about our bodies with the assumed wisdom of our parents by masturbating with guilt and the fear of being discovered and punished.

And if our parents didn't punish us, then God surely would. A psychologist friend of mine, as a teenager, held his rosary beads in one hand while he masturbated with the other. The Judeo-Christian ethic strongly discourages any and all sexual behaviors that do not potentially lead to procreation.

Jessie Potter, on the faculty of the human sexuality program at Northwestern University, summarizes the female socialization process this way in Nancy Friday's My Mother, My Self:

If we can repress and police a young girl enough about her genitals, she'll never find them. Even if she does, she is going to have had so many negative messages, she will have been anesthetized from knees to belly button. After we've taught her that part of her body is so awful you can't even call it by name, that it smells bad and she'd better not even look at it, then we must tell her she must save it for the man she loves. Women must be pardoned for being less than enthusiastic about such a gift. But what could be more self-affirming than knowing your own body from head to toes including what lies between the knees and bellybutton? And what could be more self-affirming than looking at your body, no matter how it stacks up to society's crazy standards of beauty, and learning to love your body and make love to your body? Not doing these things for whatever reason denies our natural sensual and erotic nature.

I have counselled women in their late twenties who have never had an orgasm either with a partner or by themselves. Because they have never masturbated, they don't know what they like or don't like and are therefore unable to communicate this to their partners. They subscribe to the male-oriented orchestra conductor sex-expert theory of sexual fulfillment whereby men are supposed to know everything about women's bodies and play on them like musical instruments, as we lie back passively and pretend we are Stradivarius violins. Sometimes this experience is like entrusting a rare and expensive violin to an eightyear-old in his first year of the Suzuki method of violin instruction.

And so through masturbation, we gain our sexual autonomy and become independent sexual beings who affirm our own bodies through self-loving, selfcaressing and self-hugging. In fact, masturbation is recommended to women who have never had or who have difficulty achieving orgasm with a partner. Betty Dodson in Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love, writes:

Masturbation is the way we discover our eroticism, the way we learn to respond sexually, and the way we learn to love ourselves and build self-esteem. Sex is like any other skill-it (continued on page 15)

April May, 1983/What She Wants/Page 5