ridin' solo: masturbation

...sorry ya'll, I couldn't resist that title after that Jason Derula song came on the radio earlier.

One of my earliest memories is of me being in the bathtub,probably around three years old, looking at my vagina and touching my clitoris simply because it felt good. I don't think I brought myself to climax until around age ten, but nonetheless, this set the stage for a lifelong love affair with myself.

I'm a big, huge, enormous fan of masturbation, both for myself and for all women. Most men don't seem to need to be encouraged to crank it (a fact that I learned head-on when my then-boyfriend Ram had incredible difficulty getting off during penetrative sex, since he was 20 year old virgin prior to meeting my acquaintanceship, and had grown quite used to his palm, though he did learn to love vagina too), but for women, especially teens, it's shrouded in all this shame and mystery and weirdness, as if responding to natural desires by touching oneself could somehow be a moral short coming. Which is a load of bullshit.

I gotta give the patriarchy props: the linking of sex and morality (as well as food and morality, from the perspective of a recovered anorexic...future blog post coming) was and is one of the most effective tools used culturally and socially to oppress women. When influenced culturally from every direction to believe this, it would take a pretty brave girl (or one who read The Feminine Mystique as a sixth grader, as the precocious young Sheriff did) to claim her sexuality as her own and touch herself if she damn well pleases.

Masturbation has a lot of benefits. Procrastination (or procrasturbation, as it's colloquially termed in college), no STD risk, stress relief, taking all the time you need to reach climax with no worry about a partner or their feelings, relaxation before bed (seriously!) are a few of them. For me, I've found the most beneficial aspect to be the fact that it allowed me to accrue the knowledge early on about what I liked and didn't, and how I wanted to be touched. This made sexual activity much more pleasurable much earlier for me than it did for most girls I knew, since I wasn't just lying back and taking it. I was actively showing my partners and taking matters into my own hands to be sure I enjoyed myself. And taking that active role in my sex life has been one of the most feminist things I've ever done (except for possibly my use of a Diva Cup and my vertical clitoral hood piercing...oh yeah, and attending Smith).

So ladies, men, and everyone else, I encourage you to find out whatpresses your own buttons, no matter how long it's been since you've tried to get yourself off. There's a whole world of amazing sex toys, lubes (warming/cooling/probably radioactive), and erotic material to help get you to cum, so why not take advantage of it?

Much (self) love,
The Albright Sheriff