It’s 2025. You’d think masturbation would no longer need a PR campaign. And yet, here we are.

Every May, Masturbation Month rolls around. For some, it’s a celebration. For others, it’s still an uncomfortable nudge into a conversation we’ve been taught to avoid, hide, or joke about in a way that keeps it safely at arm’s length.

Because despite the progress of sex-positive culture, masturbation, when we’re talking about women, queer bodies, or anyone outside the cis-het script, is still tangled in stigma, shame, and silence.

The Ongoing Taboo of Self-Touch

Why is it that something as human, healing, and personal as masturbation still gets side-eyed?

Maybe it’s because solo sex doesn’t sell in the same way as partnered sex.
Maybe it’s because self-pleasure is harder to police, commodify, or control.
Maybe it’s because when people (especially women, queer folks, and marginalised bodies) claim agency over their own pleasure, it threatens systems that rely on their disconnection.

Too often, we’re taught our bodies are for others' pleasure. Choosing to touch ourselves - just for us - it’s a tender, radical thing, it’s reclaiming our bodies and unlearning the objectification that is sadly instilled in a lot of us.

Beyond Orgasms: What’s Really at Stake

The conversation about masturbation often starts, and stops, at orgasms. But when we zoom out, it’s really about something deeper:

• Who gets to feel pleasure without apology?
• Who is taught to explore their bodies with curiosity instead of fear?
• Who is allowed to name their desires in the first place?

Masturbation May isn’t just a quirky awareness campaign. It’s a reminder that access to self-pleasure is political. It’s about autonomy, body literacy, and the right to feel good in your skin without shame.

Masturbation as Resistance

In a world that profits from our self-doubt, our guilt, our disconnect from our own bodies, choosing to masturbate can feel quietly revolutionary.
It’s a way to return to yourself on your own terms.
It’s a place where no one else’s expectations, gaze, or judgment gets a say.
It’s where you can explore what turns you on, what makes you soft, what makes you feel alive, without anyone watching.

And yet, for many, this is still hard. Decades of conditioning don’t unravel overnight. Even in sex-positive spaces, the conversation often skips over the people who struggle to connect with solo pleasure. Trauma, body shame, religious guilt, and internalized narratives run deep.

What’s Next?

Maybe Masturbation May can move beyond awareness and into deeper conversations:

• How do we create space for people who feel disconnected from self-touch?
• How do we acknowledge the complicated, messy feelings people carry around masturbation — without rushing them toward “empowerment” narratives they’re not ready for?
• How do we expand the definition of masturbation to include all bodies, all abilities, all genders — without centering orgasm as the only goal?

Masturbation May isn’t just about masturbation. It’s about choice. Autonomy. Intimacy with the self.

It’s about asking: What do I want? How do I want to feel?
And how can I give that to myself, on my own terms?

Maybe that’s the real invitation of this month.
To touch ourselves not just for pleasure, but for the radical act of coming home to our own bodies.