The Clitical Guide to Female Self-Pleasure: How to Please Yourself So Your Partner Can Too

It was this sanitarium that Sister Ellen White of the Seventh Day Adventists visited and asked Jackson to duplicate his Dansville establishment in Battle Creek, Michigan, the home and world headquarters of the Seventh Day Adventist movement. This facility would later become known as the Kellogg Sanitarium, or just ‘the Sans’, but the fact is the institute was to play a key role in not only revolutionizing the American breakfast but also the ideas behind health, nutrition, and sex.

When Sister White first opened the Sans she, too, was considered a health reformer. Inspired by Jackson and Graham, she too published a book on masturbation in 1864 called, An Appeal to Mothers: The Great Cause of the Physical, Mental and Moral Ruin of Many of the Children of Our Time. As we can see from the passage below, even though this text was written by a woman, women were still regarded as the weaker sex.

‘Females possess less vital force than the other sex, and are deprived very much of the bracing, invigorating air, by their indoors life. The results of self-abuse in them is seen in various diseases, such as catarrh, dropsy, headache, loss of memory and sight, great weakness in the back and loins, afflictions of the spine, the head often decays inwardly. Cancerous humor, which would lay dormant in the system their lifetime, is inflamed, and commences its eating, destructive work. The mind is often utterly ruined, and insanity takes place.’

Sister White, although intelligent, proved to be no leader and the Sans floundered for about ten years until a quirky young doctor named John Harvey Kellogg took over daily operations. Kellogg was another Graham disciple and advocate. He was also highly regarded within the Adventists for his hard-hitting medical journalism. Unlike Graham, he openly embraced medical science and was constantly experimenting with wholegrain foods. Two years into the job, he invented the first Battle Creek health treat, which consisted of a mixture of oatmeal and corn meal baked into biscuits and then ground into bits.

For some reason he decided to call his treat ‘Granula’, a strange decision when you consider that the only other cereal on the market was also called Granula. Once they finished suing him, Kellogg took the decision to rename his new product ‘Granola’. Granola wasn't the only delicacy that was served to the inmates of the Sans. Other specialties included caramel cereal coffee, Bulgarian yogurt and meat substitutes.

At one point in his career Kellogg concentrated his research solely on nuts. He wrote a paper entitled ‘Nuts May Save the Race’. During this period of his studies he is believed to have invented peanut butter as well as malted nuts. As strange as it may seem now, this bland diet helped turn around the fortunes of the once-failing Sans. Kellogg believed that most of the patients admitted to the Sans simply suffered from Americanitis and the remedy was simply a change in diet. The cure rate at the Sans was remarkably high simply because no one who was seriously ill was ever admitted. Kellogg never admitted any chronic masturbators to the Sans, either. This suited his purpose and like Graham he continued to preach the doom and gloom of such abhorrent practices.

For example, on the night of his honeymoon, Kellogg spent his time writing his most famous book, Plain Facts for Old and Young, a Warning on the Evils of Sex. This book featured an amazing collection of symptoms and cures for the curse known as ‘self-pollution’ as well as covering all important sexual ills of the time, but self- pollution was by far the biggest. In this book, he included the 39 signs that would indicate to an outsider that someone in fact masturbated. The fact that this list covers just about anyone who even vaguely looks human was no accident. For example:

Sleeplessness, love of solitude, bashfulness, unnatural boldness, confusion of ideas, capricious appetite, use of tobacco, and acne.

This was a clever ploy from his point of view. Just as Graham had done before him, it was extremely difficult for anyone to prove the theories wrong. Dr Kellogg was never wrong, his way was the only way and to prove a point, although he married he never consummated his marriage to Ells Eaton and they lived in separate apartments. This was supposed to prove that sexual relationships were not necessary to obtain good health.

It's quite likely, though, that the doctor was in some way dysfunctional (one book suggests he had mumps). After breakfast every morning, he had an orderly give him an enema. This may mean he had klismaphilia, an anomaly of sexual functioning traceable to childhood in which an enema substitutes for regular sexual intercourse. For the klismaphile, putting the penis in the vagina is experienced as hard, dangerous, and repulsive work.

Whatever the reasons for his beliefs, they had long-lasting effects on society and many of the myths that still surround masturbation can be directly attributed to his way of thinking. The Sans became more and more famous and Dr Kellogg himself became something of a demagogue. He began to concentrate less on his fundamental beliefs and more on scientific facts and theories.

A major step in this direction came when a patient showed him a little wheat mattress a friend had sent her to aid her digestive problems. Invented by Henry Perky from Denver, they were what we now know as Shredded Wheat. At this time Shredded Wheat was not thought of as a breakfast food. Originally it was a main course, a natural food that followed the true Grahamite tradition. As well as the original Shredded Wheat there was a whole host of recipes associated with this biscuit. These ranged from banana croquettes with Shredded Wheat to cheese and Shredded Wheat toast – the list was endless. Perky even founded a scientific institute devoted to training demonstrators on how to educate the ordinary housewife on its uses.

In the humble Shredded Wheat the good Dr Kellogg saw the potential for the first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal and went about creating his own. After much experimentation he came up with Granose, the first flaked wheat cereal. Once again the Sans featured heavily in the development of this little wonder flake. As Kellogg put his ideas into commercial production he met with some stiff opposition, not least from Perky himself, who wasn't about to let anyone rip off his invention and had taken no less than 47 patents out with regards to Shredded Wheat. The effect of the cereal wars was that Battle Creek exploded with cereal and health-food manufacturers and almost overnight the place became known as ‘cereal central’. Many more wars ensued in the battle for the cereal that would rid the world of all its ailments.

John Kellogg was finally forced to turn the ailing Kellogg’s company over to his brother, William, who although he had worked at the Sans with John, had little interest in curing the public of bad eating habits and masturbation but in making money. So was born the Kellogg’s brand as we now know it today, but its original founder left his legacy in the myths that still surround masturbation to this day.

Late 19th Century to early 20th Century

Remember, as far back as Ancient Egyptian times we saw the emergence of the medical but vague term ‘hysteria’. At the same time as Kellogg’s and Graham were busy producing cornflakes and crackers, the medical profession was busy curing women of what was thought to be the often life-threatening disease known as, you guessed it, ‘hysteria’. Just as in Ancient Egypt, this disease only afflicted the female sex and caused a myriad symptoms, running the gamut from anxiety, irritability, nervousness, feelings of heaviness in the lower abdomen, sleepiness, to name but a few. Of course nowadays we recognize ‘hysteria’ for what it actually is: horniness.

Back then, though, the cure for hysteria was a simple one. Doctors would manually masturbate their female patients to orgasm. Of course the end results were not called ‘orgasms’; instead they would be referred to as ‘paroxysms’. As you can imagine, this was, in many cases, a time-consuming cure, and often a temporary one. Can you imagine how tired these doctors’ hands must have been?

So, being as this was the start of the Industrial Revolution, nothing was, or at least seemed, impossible and in order to relieve their cramped hands, many doctors turned to mechanical methods to help their patients reach the desired state of paroxysm. Unfortunately these machines were often poorly constructed and caused injury to the patient, but, as is often the case, electricity came to the rescue. In 1880, more than a decade before the invention of the electric iron and vacuum cleaner, an enterprising English physician, Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville, patented the electromechanical vibrator.

The vibrator was an immediate hit with doctors and patients alike and at the turn of the century, as electricity became more widely available across American homes, the humble, if often scary by today's standards, electric vibrator became a staple in many homes. Of course, when you consider this was a time when women were still considered the ‘fairer sex’, the actual use for the vibrator had to be disguised. Many popular magazines of the time would sell them as ‘personal massagers’, although their actual use was not exactly a well-kept secret.

For a while electric vibrators were acceptable and commonplace in most American homes, but that would change with the advent of the silent movie. Silent movies were not just used to make Charlie Chaplin a superstar of his time, but also by some enterprising young men, who saw their potential to provide pornographic images. As the trade in pornography grew and images of what were considered loose, wanton women using the humble electric vibrator began to grow, the popularity of the Personal Massager became tarnished and over time vibrators all but disappeared from the American home. For now…

Late 20h Century

In spite of anti-masturbation zealots like Graham and Kellogg, masturbation was by all accounts still a popular, if secret, pastime. During the 1940s and ‘50s the interest in people's sexual habits began to grow, at least from a scientific and medical standpoint. The most famous of the early pioneers of American sexuality, who was not afraid to ask Americans about their sexual habits was Alfred Kinsey. His work in the ‘40s and ‘50s included studies that asked Americans what were then considered shocking questions, such as, did they masturbate to orgasm? These studies revealed that at the time 94 per cent of American men who were asked did masturbate to orgasm, while approximately 40 per cent of American women reported that they also masturbated. Kinsey's research was, at the time, groundbreaking and in many ways opened the doors to modern-day sexual research.

In the early 1970s there was a veritable explosion in the interest surrounding America's bedroom habits. By this time we had seen the sexual revolution, women had access to the Pill and the feminist movement was gaining momentum, all of which help contribute to that interest. For example: Shere Hite surveyed 1,000,000 American women and the results were then published in a report that was known as the Hite Report. This was a document consisting of 510 pages that detailed the masturbation habits of the respondents. Whenever I go back and read the Hite Report of 1976, I'm always struck by how little attitudes to masturbation have changed since that report was done. Many of the answers to the survey mirror questions and comments I get from Clitical visitors to this day. Many women back then reported a feeling of guilt, even when they physically enjoyed the act of masturbating, and any subsequent orgasm, but we will delve into that subject a little later. What Hite did discover was this: 82 per cent of those who responded to the survey reported masturbating, so women were doing it for themselves, albeit then often feeling guilty about it.

At the same time as Hite was moving and shaking the world of female sexuality, another prominent figure was also emerging. Betty Dodson, who is now often referred to as the 'mother of masturbation’.Dodson was busy at this time extolling the benefits of masturbation, and yet her teaching encompassed so much more. Dodson would actively encourage women to embrace their vulvas and to stop thinking of them as something dirty, instead realizing that they were as unique and beautiful as their owners. I can recall the first time I ever saw her now-famous collection of pictures that, as an artist, she had drawn. Each one depicted a real woman's vulva and highlighted beautifully that every one was different. Dobson was the first sex educator to actively promote the use of the vibrator when it came to masturbation.

During the ‘70s and ‘80s we began to see a slight change in attitudes toward masturbation in general. Whilst it was still not something that you could openly discuss with your parents, or even your friends, the shame and guilt that for so long had been a part of something that was a natural and healthy act of sexuality began to subside, at least a little.

This change in the ‘90s, when we once more saw something of a backlash against not just masturbation, but open sexuality in general, culminated in an incident that featured the then Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, who agreed that masturbation should be included in any meaningful sex education programs that were to be taught in either schools or colleges across the USA. A common misconception about that incident was that Dr Elders was condoning masturbation. She was, in fact, merely agreeing with the finding of the day as opposed to actually recommending or promoting masturbation. As a result of the media coverage of this event, President Clinton was left with little choice but to ask Dr Elders to step down from her post.

As is often the case when an incident such as the detailed one above occurs, there is a backlash. In this case that backlash took the form of one of the earlier female-friendly sex-toy stores in San Francisco, ‘Good Vibrations’, taking a stand. They declared that from May 1995 henceforth, May would be forever known as Masturbation Month and this is still the case at the time of writing. The masturbation movement was just getting underway, though, and when ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘Babeland’ and ‘Grand Opening’ teamed up in 1999, creating the very first national, Masturbation-a-Thon. The first of these events took place at San Francisco's campus theater and has, over the years, raised money for many sex-positive-based charities. In 2006, London held its first-ever live Masturbate-a-Thon, with Montreal, Canada, following suit in May 2013. All of these events have raised the profile of the much-maligned practice of masturbation and helped to shape modern-day attitudes toward masturbation.

Conclusion:

Whew, that was one journey! But as you can see from this brief and somewhat abbreviated history of masturbation, it is slowly becoming more acceptable, though there is a lot of work yet to be done before we can say it is acceptable to masturbate or, more importantly, to discuss the subject amongst our peers. It’s also possible to see where many of the myths that surround self-pleasure and I figured it might be a good time to look at some of the more popular and persuasive ones that still persist.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_c77a1e05-1967-5231-a713-0bc2bea7761c)

Masturbation Myths and Realities (#ulink_c77a1e05-1967-5231-a713-0bc2bea7761c)

According to Webster’s dictionary the definition of a myth is this:'a widely held but false belief or idea.' And, as we saw when we took our spin back in time, masturbation at various times has not just been considered as dangerous, but in some cases fatal. So if you think about it, it kind of makes sense that so many myths would have grown up around the practice. I'm pretty sure that you are familiar with many of these myths, but just in case, let's take a quick look at some of the more common ones.

You will go blind

You will grow hair on the palms of your hands

You will no longer be a virgin

It's dirty

It will stunt your growth.

Now consider this for a moment. If, according to the Hite Report, around 80 per cent of women choose to masturbate at some stage in their lives, the female species, as we know it, should consist of blind, hairy-palmed midgets. I think it's fair to say that I have just made my point that for the most part these myths are just that, myths, or stories told by parents to curtail their young offspring from engaging in a practice that they honestly believed would cause them real harm. These stories have persisted over generations and in many cases have taken on a life of their own.

While on the surface these myths often sound funny when applied to our modern-day lives, what they can do is lead to a great degree of guilt still being felt by a large percentage of the female population. It's also worth noting, as we discovered earlier, that the majority of these myths were directed at the guys and, to some degree, they still are. We have a tendency to forget that it has only been over the last hundred or so years that women have been seen as anywhere near equal to men and this is also true in the world of sex. Women and their sexual habits were just not as important as those of their male counterparts, and it's easy to see why much of the older sexuality texts were focused on the guys.

This is No Joke

These myths have now been swallowed, in the most part, by popular culture and, in fact, many have been turned into jokes. Masturbation has turned from something to be ashamed of to something to be ridiculed. For example: if you masturbate it's because you can't get a man. If you masturbate it's because you are ugly. If you masturbate it's because you are desperate.

These are forms of myths as well, but they are myths that have been disguised in the form of being humorous, or simply a joke, in most instances. We have even created an entire new set of words for not only masturbation itself, but most of the parts of our body that are thought of as sexual. As this book is about female masturbation, let's take a look at some of the terms that have been submitted by Clitical visitorsover the years to describe the act of masturbation.

The Top Terms for Female Masturbation

Battery testing, Beat the clit, Bop, Bruise the beaver, Buff the muff, Butter the biscuit, Churn the butter, Club the clam, Clit flicking, Clit pick, Deck the nun, Dial ‘o’ on the pink telephone, Diddle yourself, Dig your own hole, Double-click your mouse, Feed the beaver, Feel the love, Finger bang old Mary Rotten Crotch, Finger fuck, Finger the bottle, Finger the love hole, Finger yourself, Finger your pussy, Flick the bean, Flick the flab, Flip the clit, Flip your flossy, Frigging, Get lost in the deep end, Get your fingers wet, Go knuckle deep, Jill off, Jillin’, Juicin’ out, Knitting, Lip Curlin’, Make love juice, Mine the hole, Part the pink sea, Pat the bunny, Pat the little man in the canoe, Pedicure the camel toes, Perfume the fingers, Pet the kitty, Play piano, Play with the cat, Play the hairy banjo, Play with your remote control, Play with your yo-yo, Poke the flounder, Polish the pearl, Praise the kooter, Pump your puni, Punch Jerry Garcia in the face, Push the love button, Ride the two-finger cowboy, Rough the muff, Rub off, Rub it, Rub the button, Rub the elf, Rub the love lips, Rub the nub, Rub the pussy, Scratch the snatch, Sing in the shower, Slap the lips, Slippin’ the kitten, Snuff the muff, Spank the kitty, Squeeze Mary, Squeeze the bean, Stroke the kitty, Stroke the nub, Tease the tuna taco, Tender the meat curtains, Think pink, Tickle clitty, Tickle the twat, Touch type, Touchy touch, Two-finger salute.

The one thing I think that really sticks out as you read through these names, is that none of them portray female masturbation in a good light. Several could even be described as downright distasteful, and yet they exist. The worst part is that many of these terms are used by women as a way to avoid uttering the dreaded ‘M’ word and I personally think that's a shame. When we disguise something by using a different term, what we do is give it new meaning. While declaring to your friends that you are off to polish your pearl, or flick your bean, what you are actually saying is, ‘I masturbate, but I'm still too embarrassed to use the proper word, instead I prefer to dress it up in a neat, tidy package, or as an inside joke.’