Well of course now we have to do a post about how women need to be able to masturbate from adolescence as well and how it should be looked on the same as guys, that is, that masturbation for women starting from adolescence can be very healthy and should just be normalised so that no woman needs to feel bad about masturbating. In Western societies worldwide, for the last 50 years, there has been a change in the emphasis given to female sexuality, in that it has been given the much greater respect and endorsement it deserves, the result of that being that women are becoming more like men in terms of sex drive and desire. In the community this is expressed in various ways, but at this point it’s not really clear how this happens in the Christian community. We have seen some stats on masturbation that suggest well over 90% of women will have masturbated at some time during their adolescence, but few adult women especially in a marriage do so with any significant frequency. Churches are however starting to come to terms with an increasing percentage of women who are becoming addicted to pornography which is a very crude measure of masturbation uptake, and a number of recent publications by Christian women have challenged the blanket condemnation of masturbation from evangelical/conservative pulpits.
Our desire in this post is to remove stigmatisation of female masturbation for Christian women as much as possible. There are lots of aspects to this, one being traditional conservative views of female sexuality in the Church, and another is the likely perception by at least some women about masturbation itself, that it is a guy’s thing and women shouldn’t be doing it. This is really in the same league as nonsense ideas that pubic hair is masculine and women should therefore shave off all theirs – well they should shave their head while they are at it, then. Every woman has sexual parts that respond to physical touch that brings her to a state of heightened arousal leading on to orgasm and that is what her body is designed for. It is true that there are differences in her anatomy and in the way things happen for her during a masturbation session (or sexual intercourse) but that is no reason to denounce masturbation as unfeminine. What should be the true perspective and approach to be taken is that whilst masturbation has been condemned for women in the past, so has a great deal more of female sexuality in general, and normalising masturbation for women is totally about normalising female sexuality as a whole.
Of course where it gets particularly controversial for women is the conservative (complementarian) attitude to female sexuality, which led to the purity movement, which essentially says women aren’t sexual, don’t have sexual thoughts and purely exist as their husband’s sexual playthings. Everything we know about female bodies shows they are sexually different really only in the physical design of their sex organs and in the way these operate; for obvious reasons. This is no more than pure prejudice against female sexuality that goes back to the Dark Ages but for some reason it persists to the present day. It has its disturbing roots in even more backward beliefs that men are incapable of controlling their sex drive and that women are solely responsible for achieving this. The real problem is that a significant majority of men in society are incapable of acting towards women in a respectful way and treat them as sex objects and playthings as a matter of course, justifying sexual assault and rape as more or less their right. Society’s attitudes in this are only changing very slowly as men are simply unwilling to stop treating women as sex objects and playthings for themselves but it’s not hard to think there has been a backlash against feminism and that the sexual revolution also gave men the idea that women would become easier to seduce and manipulate sexually as a result. The widespread distribution of pornography over the internet continues to fuel misogynistic attitudes in society to a very disturbing extent, and whilst a lot of positive change continues to develop, the established male sexual privileges are not seriously being challenged to date in the educational system and the testimonies of school age students in Australia on the “Teach Us Consent” website are actually very concerning.
In this post we aren’t going to say much more about female sex drive. Either that is occurring because society is becoming more affirming of female sexuality in general or because women are under increased pressure in a highly sexualised society, or a bit of both. These two concepts overlap to a considerable degree, but the main concern about increased pressure is where it is coming from men with a misogynistic approach, rather than from those who want to affirm female sexuality in general. The important theme of this post is that masturbation by women can be used to help address and manage sex drive just as it can for men, but also for the very important role of self-affirmation in sexuality. We feel that women need this partly because of the enduring misogyny in society as well as because the more complex nature of female sexuality gives an average women considerably more challenges and questions than men and they will benefit from spending more time in self affirmation. Masturbation gives them a great opportunity to achieve this, and for female Christians, we are focusing on masturbation that excludes sinful practices such as lust and pornography, and enshrines the 3-D concepts that have been well articulated elsewhere in this blog. The affirmation is not just for single women but also those who are married. We believe married women are likely to find masturbation helpful as a devotional practice between times of sexual intimacy with their husbands, to help keep on track what their sexuality is about and being able to reflect on this without the distraction of having to share their body with their husband and having to serve him at the same time.
Normalisation simply says to Christian women that there is no real harm in any of them discovering their body and starting to masturbate in their teens, as many will these days. The reasons for them to want to masturbate are somewhat different from men, but bring with them the same opportunities as Christian men have for the management of sex drive as well as affirmation of their sexuality. As such therefore, the potential for masturbation to be seen as a spiritual gift is substantial, and it should be encouraged and supported as a means for Christian men and women to uphold a life of godly character.