Editor’s Note: This week’s sex-and-relationships guest-post comes from sex and culture writer Rachel Kramer Bussel, and was originally published on The Frisky. — Amanda
I read Eliza Jules’ essay “I Obsessively Monitor My Husband’s Lube Bottle” over at xoJane and was left with this question: Is a partner’s masturbation something we should worry about? The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more I’ve concluded that, for me, I’m at the very opposite end of the spectrum as Jules; I’d be worried if someone I was dating didn’t masturbate, all the more so if I was the cause behind them holding off in the self-love department. I also wouldn’t expect someone’s firmly entrenched patterns of masturbation and porn use, especially if I met them well into their adult life, to change just because they were with me.
I’ll even go so far as to say I would definitely not want to be the sole source of my partner’s masturbation fodder. Part of it? Sure. But imagine the pressure if every single time they jerked off, they were thinking about you. That would creep me out a bit, and while I’m not an expert, I don’t think that’s a realistic goal, especially when you’re talking about long-term relationships.
I get where that desire comes from; we all want to be respected and lusted after, and don’t want to feel threatened by, say, some “perfect”-looking model or actress or porn star, or someone closer to home. But is masturbation truly a threat, or simply something they do separate from you (and vice versa)?
I asked my friend Jamye Waxman, sex educator and author of Getting Off: A Woman’s Guide to Masturbation, who agreed with me that a lot of this hoopla is a result of an over-reliance on the myth of love conquering all. “I think women are so concerned with their boyfriends fantasizing, masturbation or porn use because we’re conditioned to believe that if they loved us, they wouldn’t need these other things. So we feel threatened in our relationship when we’re aware of their sexual ‘habits’ because we may lose them to a barely legal porn star or to their own right hand.”
It’s one thing if the person is refusing sex in favor of masturbation. But what Jules is talking about sounds like your everyday horniness. Some people might have the urge more often than others, and if it’s not detracting from what you do in bed together, I say, go at it as much as you want to. But we’ve become so locked into a wildly out-of-control devotion to monogamy that it has been extended beyond the physical; now women are demanding mental monogamy too. That’s like saying, “I don’t just want your body, but also your mind.”