What Is a Masturbation Workshop

The thought of being totally naked and pleasuring myself in front of strangers made my heart race—in a good way. As someone who’s gone to sex parties and clothing-optional resorts, I could handle the semi-public nudity and masturbation. Sure, it sounded potentially uncomfortable, but it also sounded adventurous, erotic and—if the accounts were to be believed—life changing.

It started last month, after I came across a titillating scene in Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy by Hallie Lieberman. It described one of feminist sex educator Betty Dodson’s Bodysex workshops, where women got naked and masturbated together in her apartment. After witnessing Dodson and her assistant orgasm before trying their technique herself, one participant recounted feeling “a new sense of power… independence, and control.”

For Dodson, orgasms were about more than physical pleasure—they were the key to feminist liberation. In a 1974 article for Ms., she preached that women should masturbate to be less sexually reliant on men, instead, becoming advocates for their own pleasure. Once women stopped depending on men for orgasms, she argued, they’d stop taking bullshit from them. I wanted in on this scheme to cut the patriarchy off from its source.

Curious about the sexual and political awakenings Betty’s group masturbation sessions could spark, I found her website with the tagline, Better Orgasms. Better World. "Men believe they must 'give' a woman her orgasm to prove they’re good lovers, while women have been conditioned to protect the male ego. Many women end up faking an orgasm to avoid hurting a lover's feelings and thus sacrificing their own pleasure," explains Dodson in one of her blog posts, titled Awakening the Clitoris. "As if that isn’t bad enough, we misname the female genitals by reducing all the parts down to a 'vagina'—which only refers to the birth canal. When was the last time you saw the word clitoris in print or heard it said on television?"

I was surprised to learn that at 88, Dodson still teaches the two-day Bodysex workshops she’s held since the '70s at her Midtown Manhattan apartment. For 10 hours of orgasm training, Dodson asks for a suggested donation of $1,200—vaginal barbell included. "We're here to heal body shame, overcome sexual guilt and experience true sisterhood," reads the class description. "There's no agenda and no expectations." I sign up immediately.

Perri Tomkiewicz//Getty Images

As I cautiously opened the door to Dodson's lobby, a doorman asked which apartment I was going to. I stuttered, and he gave an understanding nod. Two other women joined me in the elevator, and when one saw I was headed to the same floor, she asked if I was there for Betty’s workshop. We made polite conversation and her comfort with the situation put me at ease—which helped when Betty’s assistant, Carlin, greeted us already naked, while a few others were undressing right there in the entryway. Figuring I’d get it over with, I shoved my shirt, my pants, then finally my bra and underwear in my bag along with them.

Suddenly hyper aware of my stomach, of all things, I self consciously crossed my arms as I entered the main room, choosing a spot at random in a circle of pillows arranged around candles. As women trickled in, I covertly checked out their bodies, wondering if they were doing the same.

Once gathered, everyone looked surprisingly comfortable; some even look genuinely excited. I suppose these events attract a certain kind of crowd. First we were asked to answer two questions: “How do you feel about your body?” and “How do you feel about your orgasms?” One described feeling insecure about her thighs; another couldn’t orgasm during sex; others simply said they loved their bodies and orgasms and were there to learn all they could from the legendary Betty Dodson. Dodson, who was sitting to my left, explained that her orgasms were her life force, her power and the thing that keeps her young.

“My orgasms… are fine,” I told her. For me, masturbation had always felt like the fulfilling of a physical need, a quick physical release akin to drinking water when you're thirsty. I was here to develop a new goal: to make my orgasms spiritual, emotional, and political.

To get things started, Betty moved us onto a “genital show and tell,” where, in a lesson on female anatomy, we spread our legs in front of the group and learned what type of vulva we have, before being asked to give it a name. I learned that my vulva type is rare, with small, symmetrical lips. I suggested the name “Storm,” and everyone approved.

Several women began talking about having higher sex drives than their partners and wanting to open their relationships. It struck me how different their stories must be from the ones Betty heard in decades past, when many came to see her to masturbate or orgasm for the first time. In 1974, the same year Betty’s seminal Ms. article came out, a survey found that many women felt guilty, perverted or scared of "becoming insane" through masturbation.

I wondered how our evolving view of self-pleasure would change Betty’s masturbation sessions. Would women still struggle with shame or lack of knowledge about their own genitals? And if not, what new problems might replace the old ones?

After five hours of emotional discussions and sex education on Saturday, we arrived back at Betty's apartment on Sunday to acquire new masturbation techniques. After that, we were to break into “erotic recess” to try out what we had learned, as a group. My goal was to upgrade my orgasm from a quick release to a moving experience.

First, Carlin demonstrated Betty’s signature “rock and roll” technique—lying on your back and moving your hips up and down with a barbell in your vagina and a Hitachi magic wand on your clitoris. Then we tested it ourselves. I poised myself for an awakening as the circle of women got on their backs and started pleasuring themselves to a tape of tribal chants and drums, just a foot or two away from each other. Each of them looked immersed in their own world.

That’s when the fears I’d somehow managed to keep at bay kicked in. Would I do it wrong? Would I be the last one to orgasm and make everyone wait for me? Would I be the first one to orgasm and have nothing to do the rest of the time?

It turned out that those fears weren’t unfounded. After a minute or two, the vibrations became overwhelming. Crap. This was going to be another boring one. I came quickly and silently and sat up, feeling too hyper-sensitized to keep going. Sadness set in as everyone else appeared to be immersed in ecstatic sensation. As dramatic moans exploded around me, I felt left out of some sacred sisterhood.

“Keep going, Suzannah!” encourgaed Carlin.

“I can’t,” I said defeatedly before adding, “I had a lackluster orgasm as usual—only physical.”

That’s when Betty jumped in. “You have to keep going,” she said. “You’re just getting your juices warmed up.”

I tried to explain that it was painful to touch down there post-climax when another woman who had also already finished (along with a few others by that point) affirmed it. “I’m the same way,” she said. “One and done. I feel like people don’t talk about that.”

“Right? Female refractory periods are a thing!” We were bonding.

“I like it, though,” she added. “There’s nothing wrong with an orgasm being purely physical or not super intense.”

This was new. She’d had the same experience as me, but she was totally satisfied with it. Another woman told me she hadn’t come at all, and she seemed equally happy and unapologetic. These women were proudly owning the way they masturbated. They weren’t comparing themselves to anyone else. They weren’t concerned with any ideas about how a woman was supposed to masturbate. They were confident that their bodies were working just fine.

The purpose of these workshops had changed since the '70s, I thought. Rebelling against a culture that deemed women virtually asexual, Betty had pioneered a new version of female sexuality: one that allowed us to be voracious, insatiable, multi-orgasmic and, as Betty writes on her website, “bottomless pits of pleasure.” But I wasn’t a bottomless pit. It seemed I was a shallow pit. So what, though? Wasn’t the whole point of this workshop to embrace our authentic selves?

After we took a break to chat, Carlin taught us a new masturbation technique: humping a pillow with a Hitachi Magic Wand on top of it. I’d gone into the last session feeling deficient, but I went into this one determined to embrace whatever happened. I wasn’t going to conform to any idea of what my sexuality should look or feel like. I felt liberated for the first time all weekend.

As I humped that pillow to another silent, un-profound orgasm, I smiled throughout it, laughing afterward as I dropped a strawberry I was trying to grab from a bowl in the center of the circle.

“You say ‘I don’t feel anything’,” Carlin teased me, “but you can’t even get a strawberry.” OK, so I was feeling something.

We stopped to talk some more, and when the conversation turned to orgasm noises, I asked Carlin if it was normal to make no sound at all. She said it was, since many of us learn to masturbate silently in our parents’ homes. But adding noise, she said, can deepen the feeling. “Betty likes to say that orgasm lives in the breath,” she explained.

I lay back down again ready to try to masturbate with noise, while some women continued to talk and a few others were still masturbating. A minute later, I interrupted Carlin with a series of shouts, leading to clapping from the group and a “there you go” from Betty.

Afterward, Carlin asked how it was. I told her it was the same as the rest. “Well, your body was shaking,” she said. It had been the other two times as well.

That’s when I realized: my body was doing plenty. It was my expectations that were the problem. The other women weren’t having out-of-body experiences, either—the only difference was that they were enjoying what they had. Maybe that enjoyment was the emotional experience I was after.

I’d gone into the Bodysex workshop aiming to experience the biggest, best orgasm possible. But finally, I saw that liberation was not in the orgasm itself. It was in the defiance that it represented. In Betty’s time, when vibrators were just starting to be marketed as vibrators rather than “massagers,” it was radical for a woman to masturbate. For some women today, it may still feel radical. But what’s radical for me is masturbating in my own way.

The sexual revolution that Betty helped usher in made it more acceptable for women to be sexual, but it also created some expectations for how an orgasm should feel: long, loud, sensuous and emotional. You don’t often hear about men striving for better orgasms. Yet there’s a whole market of toys, books, classes and even vaginal injections marketed to women for this purpose. Society has been teaching us that our orgasms, like the rest of our bodies, aren’t good enough.

It was in falling short of this expectation that I found liberation. That was my defiance. I didn’t have to discover a new kind of orgasm; I had to free myself from the ideals that made me feel I should always be aiming for better orgasms.

I walked out of the workshop feeling, for the first time, that my orgasms were already sufficient—and that I didn’t need them to feel liberated, anyway. Betty Dodson is right that women shouldn’t rely on men to feel sexually adequate. But we shouldn’t rely on vibrators either. Liberation, after all, isn’t about having a mind-blowing sexual experience. It’s about unapologetically owning whatever experience you have.

Perri Tomkiewicz

Suzannah Weiss is a freelance writer, certified sex educator, and sex/love coach whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and more

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