38 Years of Self-Love: How "Sex for One" Changed Our Ideas About Masturbation

But shows like “Sex and the City,” in which characters were always speaking openly about masturbation and sex toys,  did get a lot more people to talk about female masturbation, right?

So they talked about vibrators and stuff but now look at all the young women wearing those stupid high-heeled shoes. That means they are going to have back problems later on, kiddo, and they are going to break their fifth metatarsal. No, “Sex and the City” didn’t do us any good.

What about “American Pie”?

Oh, please. No, that was not helpful. That just made it seem like masturbation is always a joke, and that’s why guys continue to laugh at it. If everyone were honest — that it’s the sex most of us are doing most of the time — we would treat it with dignity.

So what do you think is necessary in order to make people more comfortable with the idea of masturbation?

Bottom line, parents and caregivers must not interfere with a child’s natural investigation of their genitals. The first line of sexual repression is non-verbal. It’s the way your mother or caregiver diapers you and cleans and washes and handles your genitals as a baby. It’s whether she’s doing that with some love in her heart and she’s going “look at that cute little thing, oh that is so sweet,” or she is going “eww nasty, I’ll cut it off.” Those feelings have power. If a kid is caught masturbating, often the first message is, “That’s disgusting” or “Honey, that’s not a good idea. I don’t want you to do that too much.” Of course their kids will still do it, because it feels good.

Why do you think that it’s taken so long for a male sex toy, like the Fleshlight, to catch on.

Because a man who masturbates is a loser. He should be fucking. And part of men’s animalistic procreative drive is that they want to stick their penis in something. That is very primal. And now you don’t need to go into a store to buy it. You can do it online.

Why do you think that jerking off is still funny to people?

We make things funny when we are embarrassed. When we are embarrassed about something, we laugh. And if you laugh at something people are embarrassed about, you’re hip. We are ashamed of our bodies. We are ashamed of sex. We are ashamed of pleasure. The reason masturbation is so political is because if we take control of our sexuality, the church loses its power over us. The government loses power over us. We become free-formed thinkers.