Stop Masturbating in my Pussy.

TW: Sexual Assault— discussions of motherless.com

In my early 20’s I broke up with a guy by telling him, “when we have sex, it feels like you’re masturbating in my pussy.” He was shocked. My friends thought it was hilarious. I shrugged: I didn’t have a more elegant way of explaining it– but I knew there was a difference between a man fucking me and a man using my body to jerk himself off.

Years later, I started working in the sexuality space. Many of my male clients come to me with presentations (such as erectile dysfunction) that have developed as a result of “dysfunctional” masturbation patterns1. I resolve this in part by having them reorient to masturbation practices that are more replicable to penetrative sex (oral, anal, or vaginal). As a result, in my work, I speak a lot to the differences between solo versus partnered sex, from both a physiological and psychological perspective.

Most of my male clients masturbate using internet pornography, specifically watching videos of other people in staged coitus, to enhance their solo practice. Even though my client is watching humans, his experience with those humans is non-interactive– the people fucking on his computer screen are an object of gratification fulfillment for him2. Men watching porn are generally focused exclusively on their own internal experience; there is no inter-psychic element (meaning relational), only intra-psychic (meaning within the self). There is nothing wrong with the intrapsychic sexual experience of masturbation– the problem is when men try to make partnered sex replicate masturbation.

Partnered sex is fundamentally different from masturbation, especially for humans, so much so that its wired into our biology. We have evolved to have intercourse mostly face-to-face, with our extraordinarily large, white-rimmed, and expressive eyes facing one another. We are designed to pick up every subtle cue in each other’s faces– in fact, it’s literally how our brains develop . Unlike solo sex, partnered sex is a self-other dynamic– we are confronted with the self-hood of the other during relational sex. We notice when our partner’s face expresses pleasure, displeasure, boredom, excitement– and we react to it, as we are designed to do as social animals who are wired for connection. Interpersonal intimacy is in many ways more confrontational than independent intimacy, and requires a level of psychic maturity to withstand the additional social and logistical demands.

Diametrically opposed to this would be using another person’s body for our own satisfaction, without regard for their inner experience. This is how a young child interacts with his mother: he sees her breast as an object of his gratification, not as part of a separate human with needs, desires, etc. This ‘infant narcissism’ is developmentally appropriate, as the brain simply isn’t developed enough at this point to comprehend the idea of another’s personhood. As the child grows into an adult and his brain develops, he begins to understand that his mother, as well as all other people, have their own personhood, feelings, and self. Under the right circumstances, the child develops empathy and matures into an adult who is interested in the inner world of other people, and seeks to engage in relationships with others based in mutual care.

I need not tell you this doesn’t always work out as intended. The most recent example of the societal failure to create men who see women as people was revealed by CNN in their expose of the “Zzz” forum on a now-defunct website called motherless.com. To review: in said forum, men coached and collaborated with other men to drug their wives unconscious and then rape them.

What does this have to do with my ex boyfriend (whose name I can’t even remember) or masturbation coaching?

Because the men in the Zzz forum were drugging their wives in an attempt to make partnered sex more like masturbation. In rendering their spouses unconscious, these men got the pleasure of a woman’s physical body (inarguably superior to one’s hand), while shirking all of the social or relational responsibility that her consciousness would require. They have rendered their wives expressionless, needless, and without an inner world reflected on her face. These husbands reverted back to the obligation-less-ness of the infant: in the way the mother is reduced to the disembodied breast, the wife is reduced to the disembodied vagina. Through anesthetizing her, he need not be distracted by an expression or gesture that could shatter the intrapsychic experience he prefers– the psychic experience of masturbation, but while using the body of another person.

I have often said many men don’t actually like women– they like fucking and cumming. The “Zzz” forum is a perfect example of this– these men resorted to sociopathic criminality in order to access an asocial sexual experience— that is the degree to which they dislike witnessing the personhood of their wives.

I have learned in my work with men that many are terrorized by the idea of being witnessed by a woman while being unimpressive. Their greatest fear is to fail, or even worse, to be seen failing. This is especially true during sex, where we have cultural norms that men ‘do’ sex to women, and are thus expected to be naturally skilled leaders in the bedroom somehow, without any tutelage, instruction, or even basic sexual education. I have seen this performance anxiety manifest into sexual dysfunction, as well as total avoidance of women all together, and in extreme cases mutating into a hatred of women and even violent misogyny.

The choice to drug ones wife unconscious and rape her may seem extreme, but I would argue it exists along a spectrum of male discomfort with female personhood; an unwillingness to mentalize or empathize with women in general. Perhaps this spectrum begins with being unable to ask a woman a single question on a date, and moves along to being unwilling to contribute to the domestic labor of sharing a home unless asked directly to do so. The spectrum may progress to passivity around getting tested for STIs, weaponized incompetence in general, playing devil’s advocate when you hear that a man you know has been accused of sexual harm. At the further end of the spectrum we get to rape, family annihilation, and school shootings (in no particular order). The expression may increase in its extremeness, but the root cause is the same: the centering of the male-self and his feelings and desires, while simultaneously reducing women to objects that either gratify or impede him, instead of as human beings with their own personhood.

I found out years later that a girl I knew ended up dating that guy I broke up with for masturbating in my pussy. She told me he gave her a mix CD, and when we went over the tracklist, we discovered it contained the exact same songs in the exact same order he had given to me as well. We couldn’t stop laughing at the on-brand-ness of it all. How could a man who was incapable of seeing women as people think we were anything but interchangeable with one another?