Greetings Cave fans. My Friday posts are going to be a little more spicy and mainly dedicated to all things behind-the-scenes on my Sex Drive journey. I have a bag full of outtakes and video footage that I wasn’t sure where to place until now. Thanks here to Betty Dodson (above), A.K.A the Godmother of Masturbation, for this interview. We’ll be coming back to it later, but this snippet was conducted in her apartment in Madison Avenue in 2015 where Betty lived for 50-plus years doing her trailblazing masturbation workshops before she graduated to the multiverse on October 31, 2020. As you can see, she had a great sense of humor.
She inspired my memoir, Sex Drive (released this summer in paperback in the UK and US ) about my life-changing road trip across America interviewing the sex-positive legends of the 1970s and ‘80s. These courageous women dedicated their lives to helping women be shame-free about their bodies and their sexuality.
One of the things that surprised me as I was researching Sex Drive, was that people are more shocked by the word “masturbation” than they are about the word “sex.” Masturbation is just sex with yourself and generally much safer than sex with someone else.
Up until the 18th century there was no particular stigma against solo sex. But for the philosophers of the Enlightenment, masturbation suggested a dark side to their ideals of autonomy, independence and rationality. Fair enough, they were trying to change a world where a king was seen as the supreme ruler ordained by God and the people just had to buckle down. Enlightenment philosophers believed people needed to come out into the light rather than shut themselves up in the dark, feasting on dangerous fictions of the mind as they saw it.
The anti-masturbation rot set in around 1715 with the publication in London of an anonymous pamphlet called Onania: or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All its Frightful Consequences (in Both Sexes). Offering “physical and spiritual advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice,” it slams masturbation on moral, religious and medical counts. The author warns that indulgers will develop ‘meager jaws and pale looks, with feeble hams and legs without calves, their generative faculties weaken’d, if not destroyed in the prime of their years’.
A lucrative industry soon sprang up selling quack medicines to cure the eighteenth-century young from the iniquity that, Jean–Jacques Rousseau (he of the “noble savage,” although he never actually used this phrase) termed “the dangerous supplement” in young men. Masturbation, he asserted, was akin to rape since the young man can make any beauty, “Serve their pleasure, without the need of first obtaining her consent.”
Which brings me to the point of today’s post and the video below of San Francisco-based kink practitioner Eve Minax which I made in 2015, the giant year of that Sex Drive road trip. Listen to Minax make the point that masturbation is not going to turn you in to a “sex maniac.” It is rather the people who repress their sexual feelings, who feel that there is something weird about talking openly about them who have the problems. Men like Dominique Pélicot, the Frenchman who pimped his wife, Gisèle Pélicot out to more than 90 men recruited online. These men sexually assaulted Gisèle over a period of nine years while she was in a drugged state. Now that’s what you really call rape.
I lived in Paris for several years in the early 90s, as did Minax. As early as 1982 a plastic box called the Mintel, an early internet system was in most people’s houses. You could speak to people in real time and lots of people, me included, used it for what are today called sexual “hook-ups.” The French were proud of their reputation for “libertinage” and often sniggered at what they called “Anglo Saxon puritanism.” They had a point, but actually patriarchy is patriarchy whatever langauge it’s speaking, and some Frenchmen have backwards sexual mores just like men in other countries. One of the problems in this rape case which has shocked the world, is that France, unlike countries such as Belgium, Denmark and the UK, still defines rape as an act that involves “violence, coercion, threat or surprise.” Countries such as the Netherlands only reformed their outdated laws to follow the consent-based model in 2020.
Gisèle Pélicot wants to shine a light on the fact that much libertinage in France is not bright and joyful. She shocked the world by deciding to waive anonymity about the “torture” she underwent all those years and actively asked for the people in the court to view the hundreds of videos her husband made documenting the rapes. Clearly it’s not been easy for the 72-year-old to suddenly become a feminist heroine. Le Figaro described her demeanor in court thus: “Every so often, Gisèle looked up to the sky and took a deep breath, like a swimmer who briefly lifts their head out of the water before plunging it back in.”
While Gisèle’s story is tragic, it’s also incredibly important. The mural below by the artist Maca appeared in Paris depicting Gisèle and using the words, “Pour Que La Honte Change De Camp” or “Shame needs to change sides.” Meaning that sexual shame should be on the part of the (usually male) aggressors not the female victims. Maca (@maca_dessine on Insta) has been quoted as saying that most street art shows beautiful young women - and she herself is guilty of this. But “with rage in my belly” she knew she had to create this piece.
If this globally-watched rape trial is doing anything positive, it’s revealing that a huge swathe of men still act like Neanderthals around women. One of the 50 accused men (who are a cross-section of regular Joes: a fireman, a nurse, a truck driver, a journalist, a municipal councilor aged from 24 to 75) bleated to the judge, “the magistrate told me: even if you’re married, a woman doesn’t fully belong to you.” The judge then had to drop some sex education on him by informing him, “maybe not at all.” The defendant replied “Yes, women don’t belong to men. I hope they’ll teach that in schools. It took me 54 years.”
Teaching males the difference between healthy sexuality and dangerous sexuality is clearly a good start. Because the dangerous kind leads, As Eve Minax says, to men hanging out in playgrounds - or drugging their wives and filming men raping them. The Pélicot case underlines how men believe they own women in some way. As for women, one way they can fight back is by taking education into their own hands: learning their bodies in order to shed shame about their bodies and when they’ve seen the light, they can help lift up and support other women – just as Gisèle Pélicot is doing now.
I love it when men buy copies of Sex Drive at literary festivals. They buy it either because they want to learn how women work, or to give it to their girlfriends who are often too shy to come up and buy a copy themselves. I’ve also realised there are a lot of men who really don’t “get” Sex Drive. I was hanging out with a guy in the desert the other week and he seemed about to explode with excitement as I told him about my book. As if I’d written a porn book just for him. The idea about a book on sexuality aimed at women and not for his personal pleasure seemed hard for him to grasp. So I’ve learned that some men are immune to education. It’s too late for them.
Dominique Pélicot came across as a respectable member of society, unlike Minax here whose services can be very sexually exciting, but also liberating and healing. A professional BDSM relationship encourages people to excavate parts of themselves that society might frown upon. Yet Minax is constantly having to battle with censorship on social media. And she can’t go round boasting about her job like a journalist, firefighter or municipal councellor can. I’m glad she was inducted into the Dominatrix Hall of fame this year, a community organization honoring the legends of female domination. Go Minax! And sending much strength and gratitude to Gisèle Pélicot.
To end on a more sunny note, here’s sex artist Annie Sprinkle talking some real post-grad level sex education. My Sex Drive involved a huge amount of learning, including conversations like this about the “pleasuring the planetary clitoris.”
Thanks for subscribing everyone. Have a great weekend, and make sure you treat yourself to some supersonic private time!
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