Photo by Flickr user Sharyn Morrow. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Jennifer P, a.k.a. Captain Awkward takes a crack at one of the giant double standards that, despite two decades of Sex and the City re-runs, plus maybe 50 years of Cosmopolitan magazine, continues to persist about young people and masturbation.  Particularly young women and masturbation. (See also Rule of Desire #1.)

The question was from a mom who asked her teenage daughter if she'd like a vibrator, expecting the daughter to say "eww, no." Instead the daughter said "heck yeah," at which point the mom started feeling a little "eww" about it. And asked Captain Awkward for advice. The advice, is, as usual, a masterful combination of diplomacy and non-common sense, and you should go read it yourself.

What I'd like to call out, though, is her quick summary of the whys and hows of that immediate squeamishness and surprise at the daughter's enthusiasm. (Hint: it also echos reasoning used by former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elder, Oprah, Heather Corinna, and others.) Check it out (emphasis mine.)

Teenage boys are FAMOUS for spending long periods of time alone in the bathroom or their bedrooms, and everyone knows what they’re doing and laughs it off as no big deal. It’s only fair that teenage girls get that same privacy and room to become their own first and best sex partners. I think that feeling that this makes you a bad parent is that old double standard you were raised with lurking in the back of your mind, the one that says that the sexuality of teen girls MUST BE CONTAINED or else SOCIETY CRUMBLES. I think that a teen girl who understands her own desires is going to be a better advocate for herself when she does start having sex. If you feel like people in your life would be judgy, invoke privacy. There is no reason that you have to share this decision with anyone other than your daughter or seek anyone’s approval.

Source: Captain Awkward

Quick aside: I gotta say that it's probably not ok that the theory, practice, and needs of teenage boys are left pretty much unspoken as well, leaving them in a lurch of their own when the time comes for them to have sex. Most notably, whereas society acts scandalized at the inconceivability that girls might masturbate, it acts disgusted that boys do. With the assumption that no "man" would masturbate if he could instead, including by hook or by crook, "get" sex from someone else. But I digress...

I can't find the link but there's a point in one of the CherryTV round-table discussions where one of the women says something like "growing up we thought masturbation was just a guy thing." So she ended up going much longer before trying it than she might have done. One doubts she was alone.

Anyway, I have it on very good authority that teenage boys spend a great deal of time in their rooms not masturbating (don't ask me how I know but even, um, 20 times a day leaves a young person quite a few hours in between for non-masturbatory pursuits.) And so it's a bit creepy that people laughingly assume that's what they're all doing just because gender stereotypes (not to mention the dominant paradigm of men as the obligatory "sex class") insist that's how it must be.

Meanwhile I have it on somewhat less-personal authority that some of the time teenage girls spend in their rooms sometimes does involve masturbation. And it's just as creepy that so many people primly assume they don't, wouldn't, maybe even couldn't just because gender stereotypes (not to mention the dominant paradigm of women as the disinterested, rather-knit-or-talk-about-their-feelings "no-sex class") insist that's how it must be.

Instead, left to our own devices (huh, huh, I said "devices") boys and girls probably would end up distributed across bell curves that largely overlap. Better to acknowledge it than pretend it ought to be some other way.