Masturbation used to be called the great taboo for women because it was sexual satisfaction outside of a relationship.\u00a0 Masturbation meant a measure of autonomy, and nobody wanted women to have that much control over themselves.<\/p>\n
[…]<\/p>\n
The hand on the genitals isn’t the culprit.\u00a0 The hand may be doing something forbidden, but the hand is obvious, external.\u00a0 It is the mind that carries the genesis of sexual life, inhibits us from orgasm or releases us.\u00a0 Masturbation gets its fire, its life from what is sparked in the mind.\u00a0 The fingers might move across the clitoris indefinitely without orgasm, only when the mind structures the correct image, a scenario meaningful and powerful to us alone because it carries us up and past all fears of reprisals and into that forbidden, interior world that is our own sexual psyche–only then do we come.<\/p>\n
[…]<\/p>\n
I remember a woman who painted huge canvases of vaginas and conducted classes in masturbation.\u00a0 While women sitting in a group discovering their clitorises may sound as far out and remote as naked hippies dancing in the rain at Woodstock, from this extremism came the small piece of ground that supports the women in this book.\u00a0 It was a different time–a lifetime ago, it seems to me now.<\/p>\n
What a cramped, guilt-ridden world we once lived in.\u00a0 And it wasn’t all that long ago, not so distant that we can’t return, indeed haven’t already started slipping back.<\/p>\n
[…]<\/p>\n
To the contemporary Western mind it sounds mad, a sadistic piece of science fiction.\u00a0 But clitoridectomies were performed in this country in the early part of the century.\u00a0 That was your grandmother’s or great-grandmother’s time, when some of the most eminent, celebrated surgeons in the land routinely took knife in hand and skillfully removed various parts of a woman’s genitalia for reasons of insanity, hysteria, and oh yes, hygiene.<\/p>\n
Masturbation was considered to be at the core of these female disorders; the removal of the clitoris got to the heart of the problem.\u00a0 Records show that clitoridectomies were still being performed in certain mental hospitals as late as the 1930s.<\/p>\n
In time, clitoridectomies were no longer necessary in this country.\u00a0 Men found they didn’t have to do anything.\u00a0 Women had so totally taken in men’s attitudes toward female sexuality that we had come to judge ourselves by their needs.\u00a0 No Nice Woman would think of touching herself, exploring her sexuality.\u00a0 The less sexual the woman, the nicer.\u00a0 Mothers raised their daughters dutifully in the art of sexual avoidance.\u00a0 Women learned to loathe their genitals.\u00a0 Sex was not a pleasure but a duty.\u00a0 That was in your mother’s or grandmother’s time.\u00a0 Not long ago.\u00a0 Not long ago at all.<\/p>\n
[…]<\/p>\n
When we lose interest in sex and will not tolerate in others what we once enjoyed ourselves, we are reacting to more than the cautionary voices of our parents;\u00a0 there is a cultural voice, our heritage that has never been comfortable with sex and has abhorred masturbation in particular.\u00a0 Whatever popular support for sexual freedom the women in this book knew growing up, the very real, deep-down “feel” of this country, the fiber and character of the people, is modeled on a Calvinist work ethic and an inherent puritanical attitude toward sex.\u00a0 It would be foolish to think that a few decades of sexual celebration and tolerance could significantly alter our antisexual nature.<\/p>\n
–Nancy Friday<\/p>\n
Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Sexual Fantasies<\/p>\n