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Let's talk about masturbation.
All right, get back here. This isn't going to be some sordid exposé of the Sally Jessy Raphael sort. This is a literary column after all, I have standards to maintain.
Okay, so maybe it'll get a little sordid.
Betty Dodson is a 60-year old grandmother whose profession, mission and calling in life is the promotion of masturbation, or selflove, as she prefers to call it. The author of Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving (Harmony, 1987) was in Montreal last week for a conference at the Cégep de Vieux Montréal sponsored by the Canadian Raëlian Movement. Entitled Yes to Selflove/Oui à la Masturbation, the conference featured presentations by Dodson, psychologist Daniel Chabot and Raëlian Movement founder Raël, formerly known as French journalist Michel Valmy.
So there I was, at a conference on masturbation sponsored by a French flying saucer cult, nervously eyeing the guy from CBC Radio on my right and the woman from The Gazette on my left. It was kind of amusing how we --particularly me and the CBC guy, I must admit-- overplayed our cynical newshound roles, harumphing and snorting and generally letting everyone in earshot know what we thought about this extra-terrestrial masturbation business.
And there were moments, I must say. When I saw the guy in the fishnet T-Shirt and bodypaint, I suspected this wasn't going to be a Redpath Hall lecture. When the introductory video to Betty Dodson's speech came on, and we were presented with the image of half-a-dozen nude women masturbating with objects the size of Chevette transmissions, I was sure of it.
I'm sorry. I have to make light of it because the subject matter makes me --and you, I would suspect-- a little nervous. And it's precisely that nervousness --that revulsion and repression-- that Dodson has spent her life challenging. Now armed with a Ph.D. from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, Dodson found her calling in the early 70s within New York's feminist movement.
"We were talking about everything but sex," says Dodson. "So I decided that I was going to bring the subject up. And within a short period of time I learned that many women were confused about sex. They weren't having orgasms and a lot of women didn't masturbate. I began to run physical and sexual consciousness-raising groups, which was basically the origins of the workshops that I do now."
Even in feminist circles Dodson quickly discovered that discussion of masturbation still remained a taboo subject. "It was seen as an unimportant kind of sex, and why would I be interested in it?" she says. "Everybody wanted to find Mr. Right and have a romantic love affair."
But what was it about masturbation that made it so important?
"It became apparant to me that it was the simplest way to learn about orgasm; with yourself," claims Dodson. "And that the best way to repress someone was to inhibit masturbation. I kept hearing stories from women about how their parents used to punish them for masturbating as children. And they developed all these guilt feelings. And many women went through their entire childhood --including their teens-- without any sexual feelings at all. That's a serious inhibition.
Do men experience the same thing?
"No, there's a double standard," she replies. "Men are expected to be sexual so there are less prohibitions on their sexual activity, including masturbation. I think a parent looks the other way with a son, but with a daughter the mother gets very worried."
It was only after Dodson turned her theories and experiences into an article for Ms. magazine in 1973 that she fully realized the extent and depth of interest in her work. It was also when she began to contemplate abandoning her successful career as a fine artist.
"When I received five thousand orders for a 17 page article, I said 'I've got to write the book right now!' And I did. I produced a book in three months. It was an extraordinary time."
Dodson sold Liberating Masturbation, the self-published first edition of her book for over ten years. She revised it in 1983, and again in 1987 when it was purchased by the Harmony Books imprint of Crown Publishing and retitled Sex for One. More recently however, her focus has shifted. Though she remains proud of her book, video has become her medium of choice for the 90s.
"I love it. It's the best way in the world to teach sex," she explains enthusiastically. "I believe we need to have a visual image with the words, because words don't really reach everyone. It's too intellectual. I learned mostly from the visual myself."