Masturbation is one of the most important subjects to discuss. It is a cause for celebration, because it is such an easy source of orgasms for most women, as well as a way into understanding the type of stimulation each individual woman needs; her unique style of masturbation is self-tailored especially to suit her needs for orgasm. Women in my research say they can masturbate to orgasm with ease in just a few minutes, often more than once. (Of the 82 percent of women who said they masturbated, 95 percent could orgasm easily and regularly, whenever they wanted.) Many women use the term "masturbation" synonymously with orgasm: women assume masturbation includes orgasm.

The ease with which women orgasm during masturbation clearly contradicts the general stereotypes about female sexuality--that women are slow to become aroused, and able to orgasm only irregularly.

The truth seems to be that female sexuality is thriving--but unfortunately underground.

How women masturbate is one of the most important keys to understanding female sexuality from the point of view of orgasm: since it is almost always done alone and since almost no one is taught how to do it, masturbation provides a source of relatively pure biological feedback; it is one of the few forms of 'instinctive behavior' to which we have access. (Pornography and word-of-mouth may inform young people how to have coitus; no similar body of 'common wisdom' informs girls how to masturbate.) Although some women do not masturbate until after they had had sex with another person, most women (the vast majority) discover it on their own, very early: "I've never needed anyone to tell me where I have to be touched to have an orgasm; I've just been masturbating ever since I can remember." As Betty Dodson has written in "Liberating Masturbation," "Masturbation is our primary sex life...Everything we do beyond that is simply how we choose to socialize our sex life.'' Other data shows that female primates also masturbate more or less instinctively from childhood on.

Surprisingly, most researchers have not shown much interest in masturbation. Generally, they approach the study of sexuality through intercourse, with masturbation as a sidelight--since, it is argued, the "sex drive" is fundamentally for purposes of reproduction. However, to take intercourse as the starting point is an assumption, one that has led to widespread misunderstanding of female sexuality. To assume that intercourse is the basic expression of female sexuality, during which women should orgasm, and then analyze women's "responses" to intercourse, is to look at the issue backwards. What should be done is to look at what women are actually experiencing, what they enjoy, when they orgasm--and then draw conclusions. In other words, researchers and others (uninformed partners?) must stop telling women what they should feel sexually, and start asking them what they do feel sexually.

The fact that women can orgasm easily and pleasurably whenever they want (often several times in a row) shows beyond a doubt that women know how to enjoy their bodies in terms of orgasm; no one needs to tell them how. It is not female sexuality that has a problem ("dysfunction") but society that has a problem in its definition of sex, and the subordinate role the definition gives women.

For a woman to share her hidden sexuality by telling how she masturbates is a first step toward bringing female sexuality out into the world and beginning to redefine sex and physical relations as we know them.

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