Riding Solo- learning to love yourself
By Ciara Barrett
If sex seems awkard and embarrassing, masturbation is ten times worse. In fact, some people are so repulsed at the idea of touching themselves down there that it’s impossible to say it out loud sometimes. Regardless, masturbation is completely normal and even has several health benefits.
I have always believed that one of the most important things that can come from masturbation is the comfort and understanding of your own body that you can gain. Everyone who has sex can probably attest to the fact that sex is better and more enjoyable when you’re actually attracted to the person you’re having sex with- so why wouldn’t this apply to you?
While being attracted to yourself is one of the most difficult conclusions to come to, it can improve both sex and masturbation ten-fold. Some people call it the ‘oxygen mask principle’. What that means is that you can’t help others before you help yourself, and this also applies to loving yourself. It’s really hard to love people and accept that they love you if you can’t love yourself, and masturbation can help with that.
People usually talk about masturbation as second place, a consolation prize in a search for someone to have sex with. That isn’t the case at all. If anything, it’s closer to winning the race. Being with someone who is literally inside your brain, who knows what you like and dislike, and who understands when to stop and when to keep going is the ultimate prize in intimacy, and you’re the only person who knows all of that about yourself.
Masturbation is self-care, and self-care is instrumental to self-love. There are so many benefits including stress relief, helping you to sleep better, having better sex, and even helping with period cramps. From a pretty young age we’re taught that masturbation is something we should feel guilty about, and that it’s wrong, but it’s natural and healthy, and it’s a good way to form a closer relationship with yourself and to improve sexual relationships in the future.
There are tips and tricks to it all over the internet, but the most important aspect of masturbation is figuring out what you actually enjoy. We see vibrators everywhere. Every article on masturbation or TikTok video or sponsored ad under a really popular tweet are just full of vibrators, but the same things don’t work for everyone. There are more kinds of sex toy than you could possibly imagine, and it’s a lot of fun to test out different ones and find out what actually works for you. It can be fun to take yourself out on a little date, grab some lunch, peruse the ranges of sex toys in shops, go home and light some candles and just test them out!
Some people panic when vibrators don’t work for them, but that’s perfectly normal! Different types of stimulation work better for different people, and sometimes people can just get overstimulated from vibrators in general. Testing the waters with your hands is a great place to start, just figuring out what feels good and what you absolutely don’t want anyone to do to you ever again.
There are so many ins and outs to masturbation, and honestly it can be kind of scary. It’s really likely that you’ve never been that intimate with your body before, and it can feel really weird, especially for people with vaginas as it’s pretty much a part of your body that you’ve never even seen before. However, there’s nothing wrong with just grabbing a mirror and looking. It feels really weird and it’s kind of funny when you do it, but you’ll learn more about yourself than you thought possible. Definitely more than they taught you in biology anyway.
Student Contributions
These contributions are kept anonymous at the request and for the comfort of the students who submitted them! Any submissions for future articles can be sent to sexpress@uccexpress.ie
Masturbation definitely helped me figure out what I like and thankfully I’m in a relationship where I’m comfortable talking about what I learned about myself with my girlfriend! I was also really lucky to grow up learning that it wasn’t a bad thing. I didn’t really learn anything about it and it was never talked about to be honest, but I was able to look at it neutrally and I didn’t have to deal with any guilt from that perspective.
I have no experience with toys whatsoever because I’ve always been kind of afraid of them. Honestly though, I don’t see any issue with it and I learned a lot from masturbation despite being a bit scared of it when I was a teenager. It’s made communicating with my partner so much easier and it’s taken a lot of the pressure off of sex because I can just straight up tell him what I already know I enjoy and he can do the same. It also made me realise how important it is to be with someone who actually listens to you. Masturbation has made me way more comfortable in myself and in experimenting both sexually and just in general. It gave me baseline confidence that just made everything else in life less daunting!
I was never really uncomfortable with masturbation in general, but I was never able to find anything that I liked and I thought I was broken or something. It wasn’t until I started thinking about what felt good instead of thinking about what other people told me was supposed to feel good that I figured out how much fun it could actually be. It’s given me so much confidence and made me very open in conversations about sex and about my body, and it’s my go-to when I’m stressed a lot of the time. It’s a pretty healthy coping mechanism as far as I’m concerned.
Masturbation definitely raised my standards for sex with other people. I know what feels good and I know how easy it was for me to do that, and I think other people should be able to do it too. That really helped me rely on other people less since I realised that I don’t need anyone else for pleasure, and I think that can extend to so many other parts of life! It’s so cathartic and made me way less stressed. I even used it for anger management for a while, the release doesn’t just have to be sexual. It was a really good way to deal with frustration, and now I mainly use it as a tool for prioritising my own pleasure, and I’m trying to be more intentional with it.
I consider myself to be a bit of an outlier because I didn’t ‘successfully’ masturbate until I was 18 (successfully being with climax). I didn’t even bother trying until I was 16 because of guilt associated with growing up pretty religious, and from 16-18 I wasn’t getting anywhere due to mental health issues, and I ended up frustrated more than anything else. The first time I successfully masturbated was when I turned 18 because I had bought a sex toy and that was the only way I could get anything done. Sex toys were great for stress relief and not having a partner in the room took away the performance and expectation aspect of sex that I struggle with as an AMAB individual. It also allowed me to take my time discovering more things about myself like what areas I'm sensitive in, where I do/don't like to be touched, etc. Using sex toys also can help make a person used to reacting to safe words and learning to come down from a heightened state of arousal. There's still a barrier of awkwardness if I'd want to suggest using toys with a partner but they only really help to be honest. Just please for the love of god whether it's with others or solo, please wash your toys after use.
All in all, masturbation can be an amazing journey of self-love, acceptance, and pleasure! While it can be stressful or scary, learning what you like is one of the best things you can do for yourself, and one of the best feelings in every sense. Have fun and stay safe<3