Yes, Mastur

38 Years of Self-Love: How “Sex for One” Changed Our Ideas About Masturbation | | AlterNet.

How closely is masturbation tied to women’s rights?

I don’t think a woman can be fully sexual unless she does masturbate. What’s happening now is that these young girls don’t get around to it as teenagers. They give boys blow jobs to be popular and then when it comes to their turn, they have no idea what they want or what feels good. Can you imagine a young man not masturbating? I mean, I’ve had women in their 40s and 50s that have never even looked at their genitals, have never masturbated and they don’t know what a clitoris is.

But shows like “Sex and the City,” in which characters were always speaking openly about masturbation and sex toys,  did get a lot more people to talk about female masturbation, right?

So they talked about vibrators and stuff but now look at all the young women wearing those stupid high-heeled shoes. That means they are going to have back problems later on, kiddo, and they are going to break their fifth metatarsal. No, “Sex and the City” didn’t do us any good.

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We are ashamed of our bodies. We are ashamed of sex. We are ashamed of pleasure. The reason masturbation is so political is because if we take control of our sexuality, the church loses its power over us. The government loses power over us.

One thinks of Foucault’s repressive hypothesis from The History of Sexuality:

[The] repressive hypothesis, the widespread belief that we have, particularly since the nineteenth century, “repressed” our natural sexual drives. He shows that what we think of as “repression” of sexuality actually constituted sexuality as a core feature of our identities, and produced a proliferation of discourse on the subject.

In Volume One, Foucault points to a watershed in human history marking attempts to control people’s sexuality for the stability of the community. He highlights the Counter-Reformation, during which – he argues – the Catholic Church emphasised the need to attend confession more often. He notes a shift in 19th century France from regarding people as “subjects” or “citizens” to “a population“, a scientific concept that could be manipulated according to the needs of the economy. This was a trend that occurred across Europe as the Industrial Revolution spread.^[2]

Doubtless pleasure is political and pleasant.  And doubtless sexuality is an assertion of control, too, but not of our control over ourselves.  With the liberation of a semen-spurt or cervix-dip we are compelled to salute several flags, don prefab subjectivities and enter sexily into new realms of power.  To attain self-knowledge is to make oneself known and accessible to discourses of being, sin and agency that call you by the same name you call yourself.  What comes after, when you cum again, alone and with others,  is your sedimentation into sensuous strata of personhood, obedience, transgression and subjection.  Desire made flesh will pierce you, as if with a bayonet, back into being who you are.  Fucking is becoming, and I recommend it if you love somebody or someone you like doesn’t mind.  If subjection’s unavoidable I’d recommend yours begins and ends with sex, because texts and even records are just as fraught.

I’m not religious, but I’ve learned how being in the world means being on behalf of something, not someone, else. It’s not an Other or a Mother, but a nuclear metallic force: the only violence that truly communicates. It resides in a clear, real silence and conjugates bodies. There is an architecture of acts and an irrigation of desire, underwritten by the aforementioned semiotic violence.  We will never learn to confuse this force with a godhead, we will only always reside in our bodies and forage for pleasures.  Whatever else we imagine, it won’t be the erasure of the desire-cum-discipline that positions our imagination.

Anyway, that’s what I say to you, masturbation-liberation lady: the metallic-steel force predicates violence through your tits.