Photo by Flickr user spike55151. Used under a Creative Commons license.Photo by Flickr user spike55151. Used under a Creative Commons license.XXXX" class="imagecache-Normal" />

Kate McCombs says

Sometimes “hand jobs” get a bad rap. “Intercourse’s [or a blow job’s] poor cousin,” some people say. And as it applies to women, “fingering,” while an accurate descriptor for some vulva/vagina stimulation activities, evokes a rapid in-out motion of finger-in-vagina, which is insufficient for most women to to experience orgasm. The phrase often invoked to bring some legitimacy to the act, “mutual masturbation,” brings to mind more routine self-pleasure rather than the exchange of delicious, playful climaxes. Despite the negative press, the manual pleasuring of your partner’s sexy bits can be a delightful addition to your sexual repertoire. Variety is, after all, the spice of (sex) life.

Source: Debby Herbenick's My Sex Professor

I'm really not sure why we're so quick to pooh-pooh manual pleasuring, although as McCombs laments, compared to almost every other kind of sex act there are very few euphemisms for it and few of those make it sound either interesting, desirable, or very pleasurable.

Which is a shame because while like pretty much everything else about sex it takes time and practice but, once taken, the results can be elegant, intimate, erotic, and eye-rollingly enjoyable.

I mean, seriously, to the extent we're able to use our hands* is there any limit to the situations our hands can't be central to?  We already use our hands for timid first-time explorations, for gleefully surreptitious mischief, for foreplay, for massage, and for even the most operatic moments of domination and submission.  And as I pointed out years ago in Giving everybody a warm round of (self) applause "let's get over even the faintest fantasy that women's orgasms from hands-free intercourse are 'normal' or 'real' orgasms.  Nor should we forget about using our hands on ourselves to show our partners what we enjoy.  And while we're at it let's remember that very often our partners are able to take their own pleasure seeing, or at least knowing, when we touch ourselves.

And finally, while McComb is careful to point out that there are some illnesses that can be transmitted hand to hand, she also reminds us that while hands are a great way to transmit pleasure to each other, they really are a remarkably safe way to minimize transmitting other things.

Anyway, point is, rather than look at... darn it all I really want more vocabulary for this... rather than look at "manual stimulation" as high-school substitutes for "real thing" activities we should recognize and embrace what we can do with them, in bed and... elsewhere.

* It would be ableist to assume that everybody has uses of their hands.

Photo by Flickr user spike55151. Used under a Creative Commons license.XXXX" class="imagecache-Normal" />

Paradox of Paper Cuts and Plastic finds a great off-label use for a male-masturbation product. It relates to a widely-experienced but little-mentioned hassle with a legendary sex toy used mainly by women.

I got a Tenga Egg from Good Vibrations!

You might be asking yourself why I would choose a male masturbator as my first toy to review. You might be thinking that I do not have a bio cock (although I do have a few less-sensate ones in my drawer at home) and therefore might not be able to write a detailed review of this kind of product. You might then conclude that I’ve used it with one of my male partners, but you’d actually be wrong!

Source: Paper Cuts and Plastic

The legendary sex toy, of course, is the Hitachi Magic Wand
. It’s been around for years. They were the primary learning tool in Betty Dodson’s masturbation workshops for decades. Genuinely countless women say the Magic Wand gave them their first orgasms, sometimes when nothing else from hands to partners to prayer had worked before.

The widely-experienced but little-mentioned hassle, though, is that while it’s well designed and of course perfectly, perfectly safe, they’re made with the same electric motor Hitachi puts in its consumer-grade electric sanders! (Hitachi being better known around the world for its construction tools and kitchen appliances than its one-and-only sex aid.) Consequently their vibrations are very intense.

Intense enough that, like Paradox, most of the women I know who use them at least started out using them through clothes (don’t ask how I know tight jeans work well) or folded towels or, when even that’s too intense, folded pillows!

Turns out that Tenga Eggs (a very stretchy plastic-gel single-use penis stimulator I probably ought to try some day) can be stretched over the vibrating end of a Magic Wand. Once in place the very soft, jiggly egg material buffers the vibrations enough to permit direct clitoral contact.

The downside for most people would be the Egg’s single-use construction and relatively high price ($7-$10 each.) And since there are a number of after-market attachments for the Magic Wand I’m guessing you might find a more permanent but still impact-buffering solution at Babeland or other quality sex-toy shops.

But worth a try.

Quick questions: What’s been your experience with Hitachi-style wand vibrators? Do you go for direct contact? (I know some people can handle it right away and many more work up to it.) Do you use padding? How about turning it around and “riding” the relatively less-intense handle (as one person I know does)? Did you have your first orgasm with one? Is it still the only one that works for you?

So the other day twit-o-sphere is all a tweet about Delaware Senate Candidate Christine O’Donnell’s record of discouraging masturbation. And that really is ridiculous. Thing is, while O’Donnell’s MTV-era anti-masturbation activism might be what all the buzz is about, it was just a superficial gloss Kathleen Reeves of RHReality Check used to introduce deeper issues at the heart of the nominally conservative pro-ignorance, pro-denial agenda:

Her campaign against masturbation was only the beginning of a lifelong assault on human well-being. She opposed President Bush’s restrictions on stem-cell research on the grounds that they were not restrictive enough, and she argued that sex education would cause us to become blasé about sexual predators. This last argument is a particularly helpful illumination of the conservative position on sexuality: this aspect of being a human is dirty and shameful and deserving of punishment. Healthy sex or even just sex education is not distinguished from sexual molestation.

This kind of repression and denial is, of course, what gets people into trouble: we’re not really having sex so let’s not use a condom; we weren’t supposed to have sex so let’s abandon the baby in a trash can.

Read the quote in context here.

That sounds about right. For all their talk about “protecting the unborn,” or “protecting maidenly virtue” or even “avoiding oxytocin exhaustion” the real end results are higher risks, more stress, increased but inappropriate use of sex as leverage and use of leverage to obtain sex, and even graver “sins.”

But masturbation sounds funny and it’s a little embarrassing to talk about so let’s all squeeze our knees and have a nice nervous giggle about that small element of their equally ridiculous but even more dangerous agenda.

Kink In Exile tackles head on the masturbation question that’s been percolating around the intertubes (and, obviously, in real life) recently

Someone did in fact ask why it might be hard for some people to orgasm with a partner if most of their orgasms have been through masturbation. I should first clarify that question to say “...if they can masturbate to orgasm successfully.”

...

The way people masturbate is often different from the mechanics of partnered sex. You may have learned to masturbate in an environment of secrecy and so you do it quickly, but find that partnered sex doesn’t allow you to reach that tempo. Or maybe you find an angle from which to approach your own genitals that feels soo good, but is harder to do with partnered sex. Your body gets used to the way you’ve been getting it off and expects that kind of contact; you change things up, don’t go fast enough, or don’t hit the right spots and suddenly it doesn’t work. Keep in mind also that many women can’t orgasm from vaginal penetration alone. So what do you do? Pay attention to how you masturbate, how your partnered sex looks and what physical differences exist there in. You can then try masturbating in a way that is more reflective of partnered sex or adding toys to partnered sex to make sure you’re hitting all the right spots.

She said it here.

There’s been a fair amount of conversation lately about the merits and demerits of masturbation as it relates to partnered sex. Given that masturbation is now effectively mainstream… as is conversation about sexual function and dysfunction… it’s a good time to talk about integrating solo and partner sex competency instead of imagining they are or should be separate.

At least for women back in the 1970s Shere Hite announced a strong correlation between learned masturbation position and, I think, orgasms during intercourse. (Darn it I’m probably going to have to look it up now.) Anyway, I distinctly remember her saying something about women who learned to masturbate in face-down or curled-up, upper-legs-crossed positions having difficulty and thinking yeah, that could be a problem. Although that was so long ago now that rear-entry intercourse was still largely considered a (demeaning, intimacy-avoiding) kink.

I had a little epiphany about sex and masturbation a couple of years ago, based on remarks from someone who said she never got off on intercourse and so she’d wait till her partner was asleep and then masturbate really surreptitiously. That experience was probably more unusual for men but since the advent of Prozac and other anti-depressants many men need a manual override to have orgasms during partner sex as well. There’s also, as you hint, a bit of a subculture among young men (at least) who might fantasize madly about whoever they’re oriented to… but in practice prefer the pace and, possibly, the auto-focus of masturbation. Oh, and finally, there are any number of people in kink who don’t care for or who even actively dislike, say, being beaten black and blue while it’s happening,_ who nevertheless get off hard in anticipation, on recollection, or both. So my epiphany was that we ought to get over the idea that we ought to reconsider not just the 70’s notion of “simultaneous orgasms” as ideal but the idea that intercourse is the “right” way to have orgasms at all.

The key, though — one that Hite missed or disregarded in her post — is that just because you develop one set of neural pathways to orgasm (through this position or that sensation) it doesn’t mean that’s the only way you’ll ever be able to do it. The obstacle, at least physically, is that it can take almost as long to grow the nerve pathways as it did to learn the first way. That’s fine if you mix it up while learning (something Betty Dodson talked about at least in her workshops.) It’s harder if you learn on the sly, if you’re uncomfortable or in denial about doing it at all, or if you get the idea (from porn, say, or bible-study classes) that it’s supposed to be this way instead of one’s own way. Or, preferably, ways.

None of this is to say orgasms during partnered sex is bad (in fact, as they say in the blogosphere, “heh.”) It’s just that as Kink In Exile points out, if you’re pretty good at having them by yourself, and if neither you nor your partner are brow-beaten and/or drum-beaten into being embarrassed that it might be so. And while I’d never make promises, who knows? Given that expectation stress and performance anxiety are major buzzkills, not worrying about it might even improve one’s odds with one’s partners.

See also:

• The Masturbation Industry from Noli Irritare Leones
• Why Am I Boner Kryptonite from The Beautiful Kind
• It Was Bound to Happen from Secret Lovers Lane
• And No, I Accuse! from Skin::filter()

• And most recently, Did You Come? from Calico

If you’re an adult you can click here to see a probably-not-work-safe image.