Masturbation in females

Females also masturbate but not as frequently as males. This is because in the latter the sexual urge is overpowering and localised in the penis while in females it is less demanding and diffused over her whole body.

Masturbation, however, especially in the cities has been showing an upward trend during the last four decades as a growing number of young women are embarking on higher education and a professional career before marriage. In these days of inflation, an earning bride commands a higher premium in the matrimonial market. Modern movies and magazines provide an erotic stimulus arousing her sexuality and sheltered 'Miss Touch me not' is suddenly exposed to the pawing animals in the executive jungles. She has been forewarned about them but that does not mean she is forearmed. Her puritan background prevents her from taking the ultimate plunge so she secretly resorts to masturbation to relieve her sexual tension.

Needless to say, she enjoys it physically. It gives her a feeling of intense ecstasy followed by release. But she is mentally and emotionally disturbed and unhappy, being plagued by innumerable doubts. Will masturbation damage her delicate organs? Can her future partner find out that she has been masturbating? Is playing with herself childish and inconsistent with being a grown up young lady? Will she get hooked on stimulating herself and prefer it to normal sexual intercourse? Will she become sterile and not have babies? The answer to all these questions is a definite 'NO'. 'Masturbation is our primary sex life,' writes Betty Dodson in Liberating Masturbation. 'It is the sexual base. Everything we do beyond that is simply how we choose to socialize our sex life.' Apes and monkeys also masturbate from childhood.

A large number of married women and widows also resort to masturbation. Innumerable males still lack sexual skill and invariably leave their partners unfulfilled during penis vagina intercourse as they are ignorant of the art of manually stimulating women to orgasm. Besides, the jobs of so many executives, salesmen, jawans and seamen involve long separation from their wives. In many cases, the acute housing shortage in cities forces wives to stay away from their husbands and live with their parents. Nor is it uncommon to find an eighteen year old girl married to a male of fifty plus. Often the husband dies a few years after marriage, leaving a young widow. Our tradition bound society still wrongly frowns on such unfortunate females if they want to remarry and permissive sex is prohibited. So for all such women masturbation is the only outlet from sexual tension.

How do women masturbate? Like the male the female learns instinctively to masturbate, by stimulating her clitoral vulva area. According to Shere Hite, 73 per cent of women masturbate by lying on their backs and stimulating the clitoral vulva area with their hand or a vibrator. Many orgasm conscious, gadget oriented and time dominated Western women, especially in the USA, lean heavily on a vibrator to produce clitoral orgasm. 'Me and my vibrator,' quipped a single lady from the consulate. 'Back home, I rarely have the time to resort to the slow moving yet tremendously satisfying manual orgasm. When I am racing against the clock and need a quick release from tension, a blitzkrieg with the vibrator does the job.' The remaining 27 per cent of women, according to the Hite Report, either masturbate lying on their stomachs, or thrusting themselves back and forth against a pillow, while a few cross their legs and contract and relax the leg muscles. Women usually fantasize or listen to music or read erotic literature while they masturbate. A common fantasy is that they are forcibly possessed by their lover while they lie helpless and without a will to resist!

SO CALLED EVILS OF MASTURBATION: Young women are brought up not to masturbate in our puritan society. If ever she is discovered by her parents 'touching herself there', she is severely admonished, and warned of dire consequences like insanity, blindness, sexual promiscuity and perversion. Millions of women in Africa and West Asia have their clitoris excised when young, so they can never masturbate, or later derive pleasure from sex.

To conclude, masturbation is a perfectly normal and harmless sexual outlet in the *female until heterosexual intercourse is possible.