“I have an important question about married life, which remains incomprehensible to me, but I am trying to understand,” I Gchatted my childhood friend Vanessa last week. She’s been with her husband for a decade. “When the hell do you masturbate?”
If a hobby is an activity pursued for pleasure, then masturbation is perhaps the hobby most of humanity shares. Though the prevalence of masturbation varies by age, most men and women in all age groups say they do it, and the majority of Americans of both genders continue to indulge at least up to age 60. But contrary to what you might think about handsy adolescents, today’s most frequent masturbators are between the ages of 25 and 29 — a group very much in the relationship stage of their lives. Born not long after Betty Dodson published her revolutionary masturbation how-to Sex for One (the 85-year-old leads female-masturbation workshops to this day), they were raised solidly in an age of sex-positive feminism, easily accessible erotica, and general sexual openness and transparency.
Not that the role of masturbation in a sex-positive relationship is entirely clear. On the one hand, pioneers like Dodson have helped to align sexuality with self-empowerment, which has taught us to think of masturbation as a healthy element of a diverse sexual menu as opposed to a shameful, inadequate substitute for sex — even from day one in a fulfilling relationship. Most studies find that a big majority of married Americans report masturbating (and since it’s self-reporting, that probably undersells it). “Even if I had all the men in the world that I wanted in my bed, even if I had Ryan Gosling, I would still masturbate with sex toys,” French sex columnist Maïa Mazaurette recently told me. “I don’t want to go back to a world without plastic!”
On the other hand, well, masturbation is sort of inherently antisocial. Within the bounds of a relationship defined, in part, by both partners’ willingness to devote sexual energy to one another, it can be downright rude. Can we ever really get over the embarrassment of purely personal indulgence? Or take the indulgence of your partner as anything other than a rejection of you? Even if we want to be open, practically and emotionally, exposing deeply private habits to anyone — even the one you love — is reflexively uncomfortable. And hearing your girlfriend rev up her vibrator after saying she’s going to sleep early can be hard to shake. Just because everyone’s doing it doesn’t mean that the negotiations won’t be awkward or that the concessions will be easy to get used to. (...)
But — what kind of index of relationship happiness is masturbation? The relative importance is actually unclear. A 1991 study in the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy found that women who masturbate report better “marital satisfaction” than those who don’t, perhaps because women are less likely to orgasm from intercourse. Meanwhile, a 2014 study in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy found that married men who are bored with or distant from their wives report masturbating more than their happily married peers. As is the case with most sexual behaviors, the question is not what is happening but how (and many researchers point out that masturbation can be crucial in balancing partners’ occasionally disparate sex drives). In part, that’s because it’s as much a sexual exploration of autonomy as it is an autonomous sex act — a highly refined personal craft, honed and reinvented incrementally over the course of decades. How much can a routine that started before you learned to shave really say about adult relationships? Especially since, after a lifetime of solitary craftsmanship, masturbation can get, well, bizarre.
If a hobby is an activity pursued for pleasure, then masturbation is perhaps the hobby most of humanity shares. Though the prevalence of masturbation varies by age, most men and women in all age groups say they do it, and the majority of Americans of both genders continue to indulge at least up to age 60. But contrary to what you might think about handsy adolescents, today’s most frequent masturbators are between the ages of 25 and 29 — a group very much in the relationship stage of their lives. Born not long after Betty Dodson published her revolutionary masturbation how-to Sex for One (the 85-year-old leads female-masturbation workshops to this day), they were raised solidly in an age of sex-positive feminism, easily accessible erotica, and general sexual openness and transparency.
Not that the role of masturbation in a sex-positive relationship is entirely clear. On the one hand, pioneers like Dodson have helped to align sexuality with self-empowerment, which has taught us to think of masturbation as a healthy element of a diverse sexual menu as opposed to a shameful, inadequate substitute for sex — even from day one in a fulfilling relationship. Most studies find that a big majority of married Americans report masturbating (and since it’s self-reporting, that probably undersells it). “Even if I had all the men in the world that I wanted in my bed, even if I had Ryan Gosling, I would still masturbate with sex toys,” French sex columnist Maïa Mazaurette recently told me. “I don’t want to go back to a world without plastic!”On the other hand, well, masturbation is sort of inherently antisocial. Within the bounds of a relationship defined, in part, by both partners’ willingness to devote sexual energy to one another, it can be downright rude. Can we ever really get over the embarrassment of purely personal indulgence? Or take the indulgence of your partner as anything other than a rejection of you? Even if we want to be open, practically and emotionally, exposing deeply private habits to anyone — even the one you love — is reflexively uncomfortable. And hearing your girlfriend rev up her vibrator after saying she’s going to sleep early can be hard to shake. Just because everyone’s doing it doesn’t mean that the negotiations won’t be awkward or that the concessions will be easy to get used to. (...)
But — what kind of index of relationship happiness is masturbation? The relative importance is actually unclear. A 1991 study in the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy found that women who masturbate report better “marital satisfaction” than those who don’t, perhaps because women are less likely to orgasm from intercourse. Meanwhile, a 2014 study in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy found that married men who are bored with or distant from their wives report masturbating more than their happily married peers. As is the case with most sexual behaviors, the question is not what is happening but how (and many researchers point out that masturbation can be crucial in balancing partners’ occasionally disparate sex drives). In part, that’s because it’s as much a sexual exploration of autonomy as it is an autonomous sex act — a highly refined personal craft, honed and reinvented incrementally over the course of decades. How much can a routine that started before you learned to shave really say about adult relationships? Especially since, after a lifetime of solitary craftsmanship, masturbation can get, well, bizarre.
by Maureen O'Connor, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: John Wesley, Untitled (1991)
