What is self-pleasure?
Is self-pleasure masturbation? Well, yes and no. Masturbation, in its Latin root, means "to disturb" or "to dishonor."
So you could see why someone who is all for getting to know the body through touch, who believes sexual touch is nourishing and can be a gateway to transcendent experiences, wouldn't use the term masturbation. Self-pleasuring is a journey, an honoring, and a form of deep self-care—the opposite of dishonoring.
Self-pleasure can be defined as giving yourself pleasure. It's re-patterning the beliefs that you don't deserve to take time for yourself, that you aren't worth a half hour of your devoted attention. As we self-pleasure, we can work with any shame or unworthiness that comes up. It’s a space of healing.
Self-pleasure can be as simple as a bath, or an oil massage. It can be as simple as listening: what would feel good to my body in the moment?
Follow the breadcrumbs: I'd love the feeling of my nails against my thighs. Mmm, now I'd like to run my fingers through my hair. I'd like to massage my jaw and throat. Start where we are, in the present moment, and keep following. If I desire sexy, I add some seduction. I light candles to mark my sacred space. I get out my fuzziest, coziest blanket to rub my skin against. I turn on sexy music and massage my entire body with coconut oil.
I give myself the permission to stop, to pause, to make sounds (any sound; it doesn’t have to sound like porn), to never even get to genital touch. You can be in pleasure, in the body, without getting off. You can be in pleasure, in the body, and get off three times. You can be in pleasure, in the body, and experience sensations that are brand new, that are weird, that are energetic.
Self-pleasure is as nuanced as we are. If you base it in the sensations of the body, and follow the pathway with curiosity, every session can be a new experience, leading to so many different sensations, taking you places you never knew possible.
What you might experience during self-pleasure
Sometimes self-pleasure is the farthest thing from pleasure.
Sometimes, we go into this space of sexual touch with ourselves, and we experience a contraction in our hearts, like we want to disappear and hide forever. Shame.
Sometimes, we experience a heaviness in our bellies, and it comes with wanting a lover desperately, with being so fucking tired of doing it ourselves. We long for someone, or we miss an ex deeply. Grief.
Other times, we experience a tightness in the solar plexus, a throbbing heat, perhaps coupled with numbness in our genitals. Anger. We came here to get something done, we came here for an orgasm. Why isn't my body fucking responding?
And all of these feelings, when we feel them, when we sound them, when we scream them, when we wail them ... perhaps paradoxically, they are all gateways to pleasure.
Normally, what do we do when these uncomfortable feelings come up? Most of us stifle. We ignore. We switch to a different porn. We search our brains for that fantasy, the one that always does the trick.
What would happen if instead, you gently faced what arose? You see the grief coming, you feel it in your heart, so you let it move through you. You sob. You use your hands to nourish your body. Instead of curling into a ball to cry, that old, defensive recycling, you cry UP. You don't let your body collapse. You cry up, you give your body nourishing touch, and you say, "it's okay. it's okay. I see you. I've got you. I'm here for you."
What would happen if you used that mounting frustration to turn and scream into your pillow, beating the bed, consciously following the anger to the root. If you stay present as you rage, feeling into the felt-sense of a body, you’ll release something. Get out of the story, and stay with the sensation.
You choose if an emotional release marks the end of your session, or you come back to self-pleasure. Pleasure as a gateway to healing. Pleasure not as a forced orgasm, switching off the body and plowing toward what the mind thinks might help.
The more you are with what IS, the more true pleasure is on the other side.
Self-pleasure doesn’t have to look like mainstream porn.
The masturbation we see in mainstream porn follows the biological male arousal pattern. Meaning: many people with penises get fully aroused in 30 seconds - 2 minutes. Meanwhile, the bio-female arousal pattern looks different. It takes a full 30-45 minutes for full genital engorgement, lubrication, and therefore arousal. In mainstream porn, women penetrate themselves fast and hard, and work toward the goal of climax.
For those in female bodies (or those who identify as more feminine), have you ever spent 30 minutes turning yourself on, rather than going straight for your genitals, and getting right to it?
In fact, what would it look like to take a half-hour and make your self-pleasure look as anti-porn as possible?
What if you gave yourself permission to be the anti-porn? What if you didn't contort your face or sounds to a mainstream standard? What if you experimented with growling, purring, trilling, singing in a soprano? What if you went at a quarter of your normal speed? What if you made that first penetration last five whole minutes, moving exactly at your body's speed, without pushing?
What if you got as weird and "ugly" as possible?? What if you gave yourself permission to be impulsive, bouncing around your bed and humping everything in sight? What if you roared, screamed, furrowed your brow, tensed all your muscles and turned your hands into lobster claws, slobbering and spitting with your pleasure like an orgasm monster from your own internal graphic novel? (Sure, it sounds over the top, yet inhabiting a destructive archetype can help you to birth your primal self, to feel and release suppressed emotion.)
Or, what if you gave yourself permission to be innocent? To be like a child, to laugh, to play, to spank your own booty, to wiggle, to discover your body through a lens of innocent pleasure?
What would happen? Thankfully, there are no self-pleasure police besides the ones living inside our heads. What would it look like to be yourself? To find out who that is, in every aspect. To lean into full expression, in self-pleasure, and in sex.
I invite you to bring these new elements into your self-pleasure practice.
Begin by setting a timer for 15 or 30 minutes, depending on how long you self-pleasure now. Go slowly and seduce yourself. Play music, touch your entire body, rub oil into your skin. As emotions come up, let them be there. Move them with sound, with movements of your body. Be gentle with yourself. And if you need help, I’m happy to support you.
Interested in diving in? I offer a self-pleasure course called Healing Self-Pleasure. It’s self-paced, and includes breathwork and guided self-pleasure practices to release shame and enhance bliss. Get the course here.