The History of National Masturbation Month
How the firing of a high-ranking government official led to a celebration of self-service
Let’s face it: Masturbation sells itself. As soon as we realized during adolescence that there was a whole host of pleasure we could give ourselves downstairs, no more convincing was needed. So you’d think that a national month dedicated to masturbation isn’t really necessary.
But back in the nineties, it was, according to the staff at San Francisco-based sex toy company Good Vibrations. In order to shed light on why National Masturbation Month, which occurs every May, was created, as well as the stigmas about masturbation that still persist to this day, I spoke to the company’s sexologist Dr. Carol Queen — who is also the Founder of the Center for Sex & Culture and author of The Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations Guide to Great Sex for Everyone*.
“This idea that just mentioning masturbation in public got this woman ousted was horrifying to us.”
Why did Good Vibrations create National Masturbation Month?
The way that Masturbation Month got started was, at the very end of 1994, the then Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the country’s first female and African-American surgeon general, was at a conference and somebody asked her a question about sex education including masturbation. She said as far as she was concerned, masturbation was perhaps something that should be taught as part of sex ed. She didn’t say students should learn how to masturbate, she just acknowledged that it was part of human sexuality, and if sex ed was going to try to talk about sexuality, that maybe it should be mentioned. That got her fired.
At Good Vibrations, this freaked us out so badly. It shocked and appalled us because she was this groundbreaking surgeon general and all of a sudden, she was gone for what we considered to be a really dubious reason. Also, one of the things we’ve always recommended to many, many people is that they can learn more about their sexuality, what is pleasurable to them, and how their sexual anatomy works through masturbation. We believe that you don’t have to be ashamed of this completely natural act that many people value and find not only enjoyable, but it adds to their lives positively in so many different ways. This idea that just mentioning masturbation in public got this woman ousted was horrifying to us.
We decided we had to do something and National Masturbation Month is what we did. We wanted to bring the irony and the hypocrisy out and also really help educate people around the fact that this was still a real problem in many people’s sex lives. So basically every year, we tried to think of a new thing to add to Masturbation Month. We had a masturbation euphemism contest, we collected masturbation stories one year and Dan Savage helped us choose the winners, and we partnered with other sex-positive companies like Babeland and Come As You Are to get the word out.
What was the reaction to National Masturbation Month when it started?
In San Francisco, the press already knew about us, so they were up for seeing what we were doing and promoting it. Press entities like the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the LGBTQ papers were right on it, but it was very interesting to send out the press release beyond the bubble of the Bay Area and to see who would pick it up and who would respond. The strongest response we got early on was from radio stations. For several years, I would get up at four or five in the morning some mornings in April and May to do drive time radio on the East Coast. It didn’t do my sleep cycle any good, but it was amazing to have these conversations. This was the era when the shock jocks were pretty well-distributed all around, and I think the reason it was radio was because those folks were making themselves a brand where they would talk about anything and say anything. A lot of them were actually not very respectful, but I felt like I got my point across most of the time and some of them thought it was great.
From the drive time folks that were local to The Howard Stern Show, we knew it was useful as a way to give our business some legs in other parts of the country, as well as do this thing we totally cared about and thought was important. Through this medium of alternative media and shock radio, lots of people started to hear about Masturbation Month and whether they laughed or not, it was at least slightly normalizing to people.
“I hear people saying that it freaks them out that their partner still masturbates even though they’re together, like almost sort of a jealousy thing about their partner’s solo sexuality.”
How do you feel attitudes about masturbation have changed over the years since National Masturbation Month started?
I still certainly hear some masturbation negative, or not very positive, sentiments. I don’t think they are completely gone. I think there are still people who are coming up in communities that are not masturbation positive and don’t get what a natural — I’ll even use the word normal — part of someone’s sex life it can be.
But as much as anything now, I think the challenging message is about masturbation when somebody is partnered. I hear people saying that it freaks them out that their partner still masturbates even though they’re together, like almost sort of a jealousy thing about their partner’s solo sexuality. It really recapitulates the idea that masturbation is for people who don’t have partners to do that with. It’s really comparable to — though maybe it doesn’t go as far as — the people who used to say masturbation is for losers. Instead, it’s the idea that masturbation is for when someone doesn’t have intimacy in their life and now that they do have me, why are they doing that?
I try to explain to people that conceptually, solo sex and partner sex can be two different things in a person’s life and both can really be extremely valuable. In fact, some research suggests that more masturbating can lead to better partner sex and partner sex can lead to more masturbating. There’s generally a degree of sexual comfort and arousability that a person might experience in a masturbation context that can feed their success sexually when they get with a partner. So I wish more people got that level of information as a regular thing, but I do think that masturbation is more successfully part of our cultural profile now than it used to be. I think the general idea about masturbation is more positive than it used to be, but I also would not say the stigma is gone.
In terms of jealousy, is the issue that people feel like they should be the one pleasing their partner? Or are people jealous of the porn their partner may be watching?
I think it can be either of those things and another thing that I hear referenced sometimes is jealousy of fantasy — what’s in their partner’s mind, what’s going through their mind when they’re doing this. Certainly some partners are completely secure and happy about their significant other’s masturbation interests, and don’t mind it one way or another and don’t see it as a problem at all. But some really think of it as a crisis, especially a person who isn’t fully secure about the way their partner values and views them.
“If God didn’t want us to masturbate, he wouldn’t have made our arms the length that they are.”
This is associated to some degree with sexual conservatism, but I don’t think that’s the only thing. I think it really is a form of jealousy and if the partner uses porn, and that person who is concerned has a negative viewpoint about porn, it can really make an otherwise mild discomfort about someone’s masturbation much less mild because there certainly are still people who think that porn is problematic and who don’t want to think of their partner as someone who enjoys porn — even though porn as a form of sexual arousal entertainment is very common and most people can incorporate it into their solo time without it being problematic.
How can someone who experiences shame and guilt about masturbation alleviate those feelings?
I’ll start with the joke “If God didn’t want us to masturbate, he wouldn’t have made our arms the length that they are.” I think that the first step towards recovering from this kind of shame is just to recognize that it has been in your life and that it’s had an impact. Just recognizing that it’s part of your heritage is the first step in being able to lay it down. If you’re ashamed about masturbating, or you’re ashamed about your libido, or you’re ashamed about what you’re fantasizing about when you masturbate, know that those fantasizes and activities don’t run you. It’s not, in most cases, the sum total of your sexuality.
So many people are afraid that they’ll never be able to find someone to love because they think they’re too different or they think that masturbation has ruined them somehow. None of that is true. There are people who like all kinds of things and if you can lay some of that burden and shame down, your chances are much better that you will meet them and find the people in the world who aren’t going to reinforce that shame, but help you get over it. Remember that these sexual feelings, whether they’re in the context of partner sex or solo sex, are natural to us humans. It’s not the case that the source of our sexuality is a partner. Our sexuality is built in. It’s part of how we’re made, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
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