If I were to start Googling for favorite sexual positions I’d get so many hits the lights might go dim up and down the west coast if I tried to visit them all. Everybody’s got a favorite! Everybody’s got a theory. (Almost) everybody’s posted a list.
I think I’ve posted a couple of times on nice positions. (For instance a nice variation on rear entry intercourse.) And like everyone else I have my favorites. I’m sure you have your own.
This post isn’t about positions for intercourse though. It’s about positions for an equally common form kind of sex: masturbation. I remember Shere Hite produced a catalog of masturbation styles and positions in her two major reports. Her list for women is available online here at TheClitoris.com. I wasn’t able to locate her corresponding list for men online but you can probably track down a copy of her report on men’s sexuality in any large used bookstore.
Actually I’m going to narrow the topic of positions down even further, to positions that are particularly nice to watch someone masturbate in.
This is in keeping with my recent advocacy of seeing yourself as others do. We spend a lot of time with ourselves, and (at least when both parties consent) most people are curious about, and excited by, watching their partners touch themselves.
Which finally brings us to the question: If you want to show someone how you masturbate, with an eye perhaps towards showing him or her what you like or maybe just to show them a lovely view your perfectly average and therefore perfectly beautiful body as you climb to climax and descend into resolution.
It’s not an immaterial question. I’ve noticed that the difference between real and porn masturbation is about as wide as that between real and porn, well, anything else.
I bring this up for a couple of reasons. First because the other day Magdelena of Myths and Metawhores: Embodied Spirituality wrote a stirring tribute to masturbation that ended with
I wrote to someone last night, saying how masturbation is a most wonderfully intimate act to observe. I’m curious as to how rare it is for one person to self-pleasure before another. For many reasons, it evokes a raft of anxieties, concerning different judgments and fears. Yet once past these, we are in a secret garden of celestial beauty. The lover before us is emotionally nude and vulnerable. It’s a deeply touching involvement and a joy to share in. A most profane act made sacred again.
So lean in close my love, my body is talking with you and for you. And on my most intimate lips are silent words, spoken only for your eyes.
And because, by coincidence, I was reminded of one a very convenient position for watching each other by the lovely couple at bisexuel.dk.
There are lots of other great positions though. I remember sitting in armchairs across from each other in a guest-house living room on a fiercely warm day when she was wearing nothing but a long dress and I nothing but baggy shorts and we, too hot to do much more, teased each other by parting our legs — she lifting her skirt and I slipping myself out of a leg bottom — and languidly stroking ourselves. And another time, the first time in a bed after a very long camping trip where we lay naked on top of the covers in the hot dry night air with the full moon casting almost enough light on the bed to read by. I thought she was asleep, and I was just stroking myself all over, reveling in the newly-remembered feel of clean dry skin. This led to that (ok, a massive erection) and first little squeezes and then spidering my testicles with my fingernails and finally long strokes up and down, enjoying the sensation tremendously. I’m not sure I could have had an orgasm — I was moving unusually slowly since I was trying not to shake the bed — but fortunately it turned out she was awake and watching the whole time. And jumped my bones before I could finish.
Then there are the wonderfully lurid ways to show off. Being plopped on a chair before someone knelt in front of me and used her hands to guide mine and then, when I finally got the hint, sat there with a huge grin on her face, so close I could feel her breath on my thighs. Or kneeling over each other sixty-nine style so you both have a total ring-side seat.
The best position, though, I think, is also like sixty-nine where you’re both lying on your sides, your heads pillowed on your partner’s turned-out thigh. It’s intimate, nobody has to support their weight, you can help with kisses here or there if you like, and you both have all the time in the world.
So those are some of my favorite positions. What’s yours?
