A quick follow up to my post about celibacy. First of all – thanks for the many emails and comments here and elsewhere. The post did what I thought it would – opened the floodgates, created conversation around this thing sex positive people aren’t supposed to have – a lack of partnered sex (maybe there are too many double negatives in that sentence – ah, fuck it). Also, just wanted to reaffirm – it’s ok to be fucked up about sex. It’s ok to not be having as much of it as you think you “should.”
One of the phrases people keep dropping at me is “dry spell” – so I just wanted to underscore that and say something about it. Yes, I have been in a weird partnerless void for many months. But I wouldn’t really call it a dry spell, because I’ve had more orgasms in the past six months than I had collectively in the first five or so years I was having partnered sex.
I know I dropped my line about masturbation in there as a slightly jokey and brief after thought, but seriously: dudes. Masturbation is awesome. You should check it out.
I think it’s problematic to think of being unpartnered as being sexless. Part of what the past bunch of months have been about for me is finding sex, finding where that’s located inside me. Though I’m still not totally tapped into my desires, I know for certain that my sexuality exists without there being other people in the room with me. My sexuality is (finally finally) not a reflection of other’s desire. And: I don’t think of masturbation as a substitute for partnersex (though I know many people do see it as an inferior thing to making the sex with someone else). Ideally they’d be complimentary – and yeah, I do miss the feeling of hands on me and the experience of having a witness to my pleasure. But what I’ve been up to is anything but dry.
1:07 am
this post is wonderful. awhile back i chose to be celibate for 6 mon as a buddhist practice on desire. i went for 6 mon with no intimate connections with myself or others! (which meant no masturbation
) this was a wonderful, hard, passionate, amazing 6 mon of my life. i learned alot about myself, my relationships (internal and external) and desire as it rises and falls in our lives. our attachment to it is often impressive and amazing but at times can be constrictive.
thanks for reminding me of my own experience!
ps. yay for masturbation. fuck yea.
6:06 am
I love what you’ve written about your sexuality walking into a room with you, without others being there, and still existing, i.e., not being a reflection of a partner or potential partner. I think that for women this is VERY empowering. Having recently broken up from a relationship that really liberated a great deal in my sexuality, I came to recognise, after the dust settled, that the sexually liberated, open, sensual being I was when with him, is most definitely who I am now, not a transient thing.
Keep writing, keep loving, keep masturbating!!!!!! love, C
8:25 pm
What, you mean there’s another unwritten rule to deal with? Something about you have to have sex to talk about sex?
I’m kind of in a long distance relationship here, it’s hard to align our schedules for physical contact. Webcamming sort of fills in in the mean time.
I think I know some people who would find a lot of comfort in this post. Thanks for saying it.
12:32 am
I’ve not had a sexual partner going on 5 years? not that I haven’t had opportunities, It just hasn’t felt like the right time. Most of the time it’s not the orgasms that I miss, but being touched. Skin deprivation?
I know my own boundaries and what I need to be physically intimate with another human being. Besides the touch part, I don’t think of it as a bad thing, more like just something that is.
I have to wonder if this is a bad thing? Before I transitioned I felt like a monkey at the zoo. I couldn’t keep my hands off myself. But it felt more of a craving like food or nicotine than a pleasure. I don’t miss that… at all.
I want to have someone play pierce my nipples, or throw me up a against a wall or two… but if it doesn’t happen for a while I’m ok with that. It seems weird, but that’s just how my life is now.
2:48 pm
Thank you for the comfort your article brought me with respect to my own relative celibacy but for masturbation and of course the posting of free panty photos of myself wearing women’s full brief ladies panties modeled back view at http://www.sissypantybuns.com/wordpress/?page_id=56 and at http://www.sissypantybuns.com/wordpress/?cat=4 I haven’t had a partner in 20 years or so (unless you count my having been on the receiving end in the Jennifer Brooks production entitled ‘Vicious Whips and Bloody Canes’ with co-stars Tori Sinclair and Felicia Gates). I’d begun to wonder if I am impotent even though I hump a pillow in my full brief nylon panties several times a day. Reading your post entitled ‘On Dry Spells’ definitely helped me to feel a little bit better about myself and to re-contemplated whether orgasms might be the purpose of life.
8:49 pm
Ma’am, you just blew me away.
I cannot thank you enough.
1:57 am
Isn’t it patronizing when people come down on someone (no pun intended) for masterbating their way through pre-post relations?
IT’s actually sickening to me how self gratification is the much maligned
(publicly) time filler/killer.
I’ve masterbated every day of my life since I was 15. Leaving some room
for possible sick days, its still a conservative average. I cant get enough of it. I’ve been with my girlfriend for the past 10 months, sexually satisfying one another, yet still I must throttle my penis given that nothing remotely resembling one rhymes with throttle.
7:14 pm
[...] What I learned from 6 months of celibacy – what, Audacia Ray, author of Naked on the Internet, doesn’t have a sex partner partner? But… but… Someone who talks about sex and thinks about it a lot and for whom sex is a large part of their life, yet she herself is currently not partnered. And still thinks about sex. Hey, welcome to the party. Join the club. Listen up. Listen… On a related note, On dry spells. [...]
9:59 pm
I love this:
~~My sexuality is (finally finally) not a reflection of other’s desire.
What a powerful place to standing in.
You have inspired me to look at that in my life.
Rock On!
Leah
7:18 pm
I really believe in the power of self-love. I really enjoy masturbation too. It’s how I learned how to come, and I will always have it.