Day 65 of 66 Days of No Sex
Mood: Pleased
My friend with benefits closed my squeaky bedroom door behind us. He took off his baseball cap and wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead, victim to the autumn’s dry heat.
“I was so bored today I jerked off like twice,” he said and flopped onto my bed.
“Yeah, I jerked off before you got here.” He raised a brow.
“Girls can’t jerk off.”
“Why?” I asked.
“…because you don’t have a penis.”
“You know what I mean though.”
“Why don’t you say masturbate?”
“It sounds so textbook-y. Like what you would say in sex ed. I like saying jerk off.”
He gave me that look whenever I did weird things like smell his armpits (I told him I liked the pheromones). We dropped the subject and did our business, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how women didn’t have the as many options as men when it came to talking casually about masturbation.
Wank it, whack off, jerk it, jack off. A million nursery rhyme combinations for guys going to town with their right hand.
And what do women get?
Flick the bean.
Perhaps the most underwhelming terminology one could think of for female self-love, especially when you consider that the clitoris has 8,000 nerve endings compared to the penis’s 4,000.
While guys refer to their privates as one-eyed sea dragons, soldiers, and even pork swords, female anatomy is reduced to pantry legumes.
We deserve at least a dignified salutation like Ms. Bean or Duchess Bean. But even then, I don’t like how female masturbation is classified as a dainty and graceful thing like blurry, soft-core porn where the camera man pans off into Naria like he forgot he was on set.
“Flick the bean” would be appropriate in a world where I exclusively wore white lace dresses, frolicked in pastures, and drank afternoon tea with Mary Poppins, not a world where I am a proactive and assertive working woman who touches herself to get shit done.
Female needs and our reactions are just as intense (and dare I say common) as our male counterparts. Women should be able to speak as nonchalantly as our guy friends do about masturbation without resorting to dated and misrepresentative phrases like “flick the bean.”
So today, I’m officially coining the term “stab the cat” for female masturbation.
It’s spicy and playful like Taco Tuesday for your vagina, minus the hot sauce unless that’s your thing.
It’s an aggressive action word—because who doesn’t want to think about Detroit’s crime rate when they are pleasuring themselves?
Most importantly, it gives credit to female orgasms because when you stab a cat once, it still has eight lives.
The great thing about “stab the cat” is you can put your own spin on it:
- “My boyfriend was out of town so I cut up a full litter last week.”
- “I had some time before work so I killed Cecil in the shower.”
- “My fuck buddy asked if he could watch, so I ripped off my Tigger onesie said, ‘Meeeoooooww STABBY STABBY DOWNTON ABBEY.'”
I’m not trying to be ostentatious about my sexuality, which is the unfortunate default for any woman who talks or writes about sex. To me, masturbation is as natural as the desire for love and connection.
Acknowledging sex but not masturbation is like being okay with people eating, but then expecting them to pretend they aren’t hungry when they don’t have food.
It’s time we normalize female masturbation.
And as weird as it sounds, I think part of the problem is society oversexualizes the idea of female pleasure. Maybe overhype would be a better word.
When a guy admits he jerks off, he’s being honest. When a girl admits she stabs the cat, she’s a freak nasty pornstar who thinks about sex 24/7.
It shocks me when men are taken aback by how common female masturbation is—or better yet, how they react to a woman who owns up to touching herself. It’s comparable to me saying I pay taxes and someone responding with, “Wow, you’re so financially responsible!”
It’s not a big deal. And this disconnect in sexual liberation isn’t all on men. Ladies need to stop feeling ashamed. I certainly understand the average woman is not as vocal as I am and that is perfectly okay.
However, there’s a difference between being private and being apologetic about your sex life. To my closet feline abusers who may feel iffy about owning the masturbation movement:
You are human. You bleed from your crotch plus or minus 12 times a year, you eat fancy brunches then poop them out, and you are allowed to touch your genitals once in a while. Say it with me: I am woman, hear me roar.
***
Data is a beautiful thing, and so is the curing of curiosity. I knew people would wonder about this “loophole” for a girl who thought 66 days without sex was a dry spell. No way Connie’s going cold turkey….
So from Day 1 of my challenge, I tracked how often I stabbed the cat. It’s cool to see my physical urges visually quantified, especially when I correlate the data to how I was feeling each week.
The hardest weeks were 3 and 4. After that, no sex felt like a normal part of my life. On Week 5, I was so busy at my writer’s conference that I didn’t really allocate any alone time. I think that short break stabilized my libido for the remaining weeks. Aside from my technical foul on Day 55, there wasn’t much temptation or general horniness from my end, which brought me to nice plateau.
So there you have it: sex fiend to statistician in 65 days.
I’ll end with a gold nugget from a little bird. Last week, I heard a girl was upset with her boyfriend for liking my latest post—she thought my writing was too erotic.
No comment, but I love the idea of someone having to clear my blog from their browser history. Life goals I didn’t know I had ’til now.