Indeed, it is even possible for adolescent girls to masturbate to orgasm without being entirely aware of what they are doing. This is probably less true now than a generation or two ago. The increase in the sexual knowledge and, just as important, in the sexual awareness and sexual orientation of modern youth is such that this unwitting masturbation is less likely to occur. In the past, though, girls have often made a practice of rubbing their thighs together in such a fashion that the clitoris and the labia received sufficient direct stimulation to heighten sexual excitement and even bring on a climax—all without identifying the process as essentially sexual, without understanding that the “good feeling” was an orgasm, and without ever labeling their activity, even in their own minds, as masturbation.
The greater number of cases of female masturbation consist of digital stimulation of the genitalia and especially of the clitoris. This is not difficult to comprehend. As we have seen earlier, sexual excitement among the young and inexperienced is likely to be focused in this area, with the clitoris considerably more erotogenically important than the vagina. Among some Arabian and African groups, this is precisely what has provoked the barbaric practice of female circumcision. This operation, performed in infancy, generally consists of removal of the clitoris but may involve removal of labial tissue as well. It is aimed at discouraging youthful masturbation and also at discouraging clitoral sensitivity and localizing sensual responsiveness in the vagina itself, thus rendering the girl more suitable for coitus at a later date. In Western eyes, the operation can only be viewed as deplorable, whatever its dubious merits.
The clitoris, then, is most apt to receive attention in masturbation. Girls may rub the organ with the tips of their fingers, may stroke it rhythmically, or may grip it between the thumb and forefinger and rotate it in such a manner as to provide the most intensely pleasurable sensations possible.
Digital stimulation of the vagina itself is also frequently employed. Some girls begin at once by thrusting their fingers into their vaginal openings in an attempt to mimic what they conceive coitus to be like. Others begin with clitoral masturbation and “discover” that the vagina is also particularly responsive to digital stimulation. Similar investigation may lead to urethral masturbation. The urinary passage is apt to be quite responsive for many young women, especially when the bladder is distended with urine, and may lend itself to manipulation in this fashion.
For girls and boys alike, masturbation may be either discovered or learned. Many young boys learn masturbation from a comrade or an older boy or are initiated into the practice by a deviant adult; those who are not taught the practice in this fashion generally learn it by themselves when they spontaneously discover that handling is pleasurable, learn ways to increase the pleasure, and ultimately find that orgasm may be thus achieved.
For girls, the process is more likely to be self-discovered, although playmates and older women may play a role in the child’s learning process. The daughters of the upper classes, especially in England and France, were frequently taught to masturbate by nursemaids who handled the girls’ genitalia until sexual excitement resulted; later the girls would imitate the nursemaid’s actions and masturbate themselves. Either Lesbian impulses or a desire to calm the child might lead nursemaids to abuse their charges in this fashion. The following passage, although from a work of English hardcore pornography of dubious origin, is typical. After an interlude with a male in which mutual oral copulation and vaginal coitus are performed, the young woman is persuaded to narrate her first masturbatory experiences, as follows.
“When I was just ten years old,” Velda reminisced, “we had a French maid working for us, and at night she would put me to bed. She had stunning breasts and a (vernacular for vulva) fringed with the finest blonde hair. Now that I think on it. I’ll wager Father used to tumble her every chance he had, but that’s by the way.
“Her name was Mignette. At night she bathed me, and one night when I stepped from the tub she kissed me and told me how pretty I was. Then she said she had something to show me that would make me feel delicious inside. We went to my room, and while I lay back upon the bed she opened my legs and began toying with my little pussy. Almost at once it grew moist, so you may see what a nature I had! First she rubbed my tickler, and then with her slender fingers she poked in and out, and finally opened her wrapper and rubbed each of her pretty titties against my (vernacular for vulva) until I came…
“Later she taught me other things, and instructed me how to do the same for her, and, when I expressed an eagerness to know more, she taught me Frenching. Many nights when my parents thought me safely asleep she shared my bed, she at the foot and I at the head, and we would French each other madly, devouring one another’s pussies with eager lips and tongues… When she was fired I was unconsolable, but soon learned to do with my own hands as she had done for me.”
—♦♦♦—
We saw earlier that unconscious masturbation may be managed by rubbing the thighs together in such a way as to stimulate the clitoris and labia. This is most often done with the legs crossed, and girls given to the practice are often able to manage it with a minimum of obvious movement. Sexological literature contains many accounts of women who reported practicing adolescent masturbation in a schoolroom, with other children on either side, simply by crossing the legs, flexing the thigh muscles, and thus rubbing the clitoris in an extremely stimulating manner.
The sewing machine—not the modern models but the old treadle devices operated with the feet—was often used in much the same fashion, often involuntarily. Porter Davis mentions such a case in his rather comprehensive handbook Autoerotic Practices, in which a writer reported visiting an old-fashioned sewing factory where pedal-operated machines were employed. He there witnessed an evidently spontaneous masturbatory scene in which one of the young women began working the pedals at a steadily increasing speed, began perspiring profusely and displaying all the signs of sexual excitement, until she finally climaxed and stopped altogether. The factory foreman explained that such incidents were so commonplace as to pass without comment or notice and were especially likely to occur with younger girls who sat on the edge of their seats in such a way as to bring pressure to bear upon their labia.
A considerable variety of mechanical devices have been fashioned as penile substitutes for use in female masturbation, while any number of “natural” objects have been pressed into this service. The use of the banana as an artificial penis is legendary, and the candle is so automatically identifiable with masturbation that at least one literary scholar has suggested an unorthodox but intriguing interpretation for Edna St. Vincent Millay’s immortal lines
My candle burns at both ends;
It shall not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.
Pornographic motion pictures are frequently apt to depict female masturbation as an introduction to more high-pitched erotic scenes. Many of the obvious phallic symbols are used in such sequences; bananas, candles, sausages, broom handles, and the like are often manipulated into and out of the vaginas of the actresses who appear in these celluloid epics. A recent advertisement in a Canadian tabloid newspaper offered the following item to its readers:
WOMEN!
Latest scientific discovery
Soft rubber broom-handle cover
Perfect fit guaranteed
Skinlike texture, soft and smooth
Ends annoying splinters in hands…
Since it would seem that relatively few housewives would be moved to pay $5.95 for a broom-handle cover to protect their hands from occasional splinters, the reader should require little imagination to appreciate its actual purpose as a rather obvious do-it-yourself dildo kit. Yet one can hardly avoid applauding the manufacturer’s ingenuity in having managed to find a way to offer a masturbatory device through the mails.
In one form or another, the dildo has existed since the beginning of time.
Artificial phalli have been found in Egyptian tombs, in Chinese and Japanese erotic drawings, in the sexological literature of all nations and all eras. Straight or curved, large or small, of leather or rubber or bone or wood or silver, the artificial penis seems to have been timeless and universal. Harem wives were commonly supplied with them, occasionally given them by sultans who thought they would be less apt to seek satisfaction with other males or turn to lesbianism if provided with relief through masturbation. Crusaders gave carved and polished wooden phalli to their wives before leaving on their long journeys; this was surely a more humane method than the chastity belt of striving to guarantee fidelity. The dildo was known poetically as the widow’s consolation, the nun’s companion.
The simplest dildo is any object of the approximate size and shape one would expect. More involved or sophisticated objects may be astonishingly similar in appearance to the penis, with every feature of that organ rendered in what can only be called loving detail. Because they are not limited by Nature, the fashioners of dildos (or consolateurs, or godemiches, or whatever) are able to improve on their model. The artificial phallus may be made considerably larger in either length or girth than that which it represents and may be ridged concentrically to increase the sensory impact it will have upon the walls of the vaginal canal.
Certain dildos even come equipped with a sac attached as a sort of mock scrotum. This is filled with warm water or milk (or, for the very height of realism, warmish eggs). At the moment of orgasm, the female need only squeeze the sac in order to mimic a male orgasm by permitting the dildo to “ejaculate” its payload.
While all these dildos operate upon a common principle, other methods for assisting female masturbation have been variously in vogue. The love balls or love apples of Japan are very well known, although Dr. Iwan Bloch has suggested that these pommes d’amour actually existed in eighteenth-century France before Japan was opened to Westerners. Porter Davis offers the following description of the principle upon which these objects work.
The women of Japan are given credit for developing mechanical stimulation to the highest degree of perfection… The method employs two brass balls about the size of a pigeon’s egg. One is hollow and the other contains a smaller solid ball or some quicksilver. The hollow ball is first introduced into the vagina until it touches the cervix. Then the loaded ball, called the little man, is inserted until it rests against the other one. They are retained within the vagina by a paper tampon. With such an arrangement, the slightest muscular contractions cause the balls to vibrate rapidly. By moving the hips or pelvis, the vibrations from the loaded ball are transferred to the hollow one. This vibration produces a prolonged voluptuous titillation creating tremendously pleasurable sensations… sometimes described as similar to a weak electric shock within the vagina…
Sometimes the woman preferred to use one ball. The balls created the greatest voluptuousness when the woman swung herself in a hammock or rocked back and forth in a rocking chair. The delicate vibrations could be regulated and prolonged until the extremely pleasurable climax was desired. It is by far the most effective means of masturbation employed by Asiatic women, having spread all over the Orient and even to India…
Two other masturbating devices might merit a brief description, if only to show how one era’s fantasy becomes the reality of another age. In Juliette, the Marquis de Sade describes a fanciful “engine” by means of which a woman might gratify herself endlessly without any active effort on her own part; she could merely arrange herself in a suitable position and turn the machine on, whereupon a false penis would be guided into and out of her vagina (or such other orifice as her ingenuity might devise and her dimensions permit) until she desired to end the performance; furthermore, she could make the machine act at whatever speed she desired and could regulate the depth of the strokes and the girth of the phallus to be employed.
Fantasy, of course. However extraordinary the sexological inventiveness of France under the ancien régime, it does seem safe to say that no such machine existed.
But at the present time, a variety of magazines and newspapers offer their readers the opportunity to buy a device known as a “Vibra-Finger,” an incredible machine, electrically operated, consisting of a very long, very thick rubber finger that vibrates. “A scientific marvel,” the ad copy proclaims. “Provides stimulating massage in needed areas to assure physical well-being.”
Now, no one with a modicum of sexual sophistication would any more believe that anyone would purchase a Vibra-Finger to massage her gums than he would accept the broom-handle cover as a legitimate aid in conventional housework. The Vibra-Finger has a distinctly sexual purpose, a very definitely autoerotic purpose, and according to general observation fills this function admirably, if a trifle dangerously. The effect of electrically induced vibration upon a vaginal canal is tremendous; the sensory possibilities are in a way unparalleled, and it is a matter of record that women who have accustomed themselves to this device have found it more satisfying in several respects than any other form of sexual activity, with or without a partner.
The wonder is not that such a satisfactory realization of Sade’s “engine” has been visited upon womankind. This should not be at all surprising, for the special combination of curiosity and hunger that leads us to ask the same sexual questions over and over must occasionally enable one epoch to live what a preceding age has dreamed of. Given the technological skill to design such a device and the manufacturing capacity to produce it at a feasible price, the gadget had to come into existence.
The marvel is one of marketing, not of invention or manufacture. The genius who sells Vibra-Fingers, like the psychological superman who peddles broom-handle covers, had to find a way to call his product something else, to find another conceivable use for it, and sell it upon those terms. Otherwise he could not advertise it; otherwise he could not send it through the mails; otherwise he could not practically sell it. It does not seem to matter that this explanation for his device, its ostensible raison d’être, will not matter a damn to one woman in a thousand who purchases it.
There is, certainly, a lesson to be learned. No doubt one could sell condoms through the mail by describing them as
Oiled balloons
Guaranteed not to break
And spoil the party.
Will not stick to walls.
And diaphragms, surely, might be presented as trampolines for pet hamsters and white mice.
—♦♦♦—
The attitude of pornography and erotic literature in respect to masturbation might deserve brief mention. The literature of the Orient often ignores autoeroticism entirely, discussing masturbatory practices only in respect to homosexual or heterosexual activities by itself, combined with anal or oral intercourse, or however performed. This is not because masturbation was rigidly condemned in those areas or by those authors—such was certainly not the case—but rather because these cultures were more inclined to regard masturbation of an autoerotic nature as a normal and natural function, particularly for the young, and a subject in which one would no more expect instruction than restriction. The fine points of the sexual relationship, the subtleties of beginning an affair, of creating desire, of kindling passion, of heightening sexual tension, of finding new ways to do the same old things, of bringing sexual episodes to thrilling, jolting climaxes—these were matters of major concern to Eastern sexologists. What one did by oneself was one’s own concern.
Western works of erotic realism reflect, predictably enough, the general attitudes of Western culture itself, in whatever phase the author or, through him, his characters have been moved to accept or reject this societal position. The views of Western sexologists, varying from the qualified rejection to qualified endorsement to wholehearted acclaim, have already been rather intensively discussed in an earlier chapter to which the reader might refer if so moved; they need not detain us here.
Hardcore pornography is apt to display a somewhat different attitude from any
other of our sources and is important in that it puts yet another light on autoerotic sex practices and the attitudes that surround them. The pornographer writes wholly and solely to arouse his readers and hence includes descriptions of masturbation much as he describes any other type of sexual activity in the hope and expectation that such descriptions will be sexually stimulating to a portion of his readers. Accordingly, pornographers strive to stress the provocative aspects of masturbatory scenes—the excitement of the masturbating male or female, the excellence of his or her physical appearance, the abandon with which the act is performed, the pleasure involved, the quantity of sperm discharged by male masturbators, the vaginal secretions of female masturbators, and, finally, descriptions of especially ingenious or unlikely methods of autoeroticism.
The general “philosophy” of most hardcore pornography holds that any sexual activity is better than no sexual activity at all, that masturbation is inferior to sexual activity involving a partner but infinitely superior to abstinence. Thus pornographic heroes and heroines rarely masturbate because that is their special pleasure in life—although occasional books do sport sideline characters with a preference for the solitary vice. For the most part, the major characters engage in autoerotic acts because they are highly sexed and are temporarily deprived of a partner. Masturbation is thus viewed as a substitute, ethically permissible and surely valuable, however inferior to other sexual practices.
Thus the reader of The Lascivious Hypocrite is parenthetically advised by the author to masturbate if he does not have a partner handy. Thus Sheila, the blonde heroine of Love Knot,
…was much saddened by the thought that she would not see Claude that night, but decided at last to console herself as best she could. First she drew each breast in turn to her mouth and sucked her pink nipples ‘til they ached with a burning hunger. Then she plunged first one and then two fingers into her moistened pussy and worked them dreamily in and out. She slipped her other hand beneath her buttocks, and another finger thrust up her tight little asshole completed the game. It was nothing like being screwed fore and aft, but it was better than nothing and would have to do…
Eros & Capricorn: A Cross-Cultural Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Techniques (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 1) Page 14