How to Please Yourself

Tips and advice to make sex with your favorite person even better: a how-to masturbation guide.

It doesn't matter that masturbation is the safest and possibly most satisfying sex you can have, when it comes to a ménage a moi, lots of ladies (and men) are still in the closet. For starters, let's applaud the fact that we're not living in the Victorian era, when women were restricted from riding bicycles and horses, and some from sewing and squatting, lest they get too excited. And we don't have to visit the doctor's offices anymore just so they can use a large vibratory apparatus to calm us from "hysteria." We can also eat graham crackers and corn flakes without the knowledge that both foods were once made to stop people from having sexy time with themselves. No longer do most of us believe that masturbating will cause us to go blind, lose a limb or even lose our lives. But lots of us still see masturbation as second-tier sex, or the sex you have when you can't get the sex you want, when the truth is, if you don't know your body, how can you expect anyone else to know your body?

In the 1994 book Sex in America, the question of who puts their own hands down their own pants, was, hands down, an act that less than 50% of women admitted to doing. Today, between 45 and 80% of women have at least tried masturbation, a larger number indeed, but still, not enough of us are decorating our own closets, even if we’re hiding in them.