BETTY DODSON MADE FEMALE MASTURBATION A FEMINIST ACT
She did not ask women to become more desirable. She taught them that their pleasure belonged to them.
By Teona Abuladze · 8 min read
Betty Dodson became famous for saying a word respectable society preferred to avoid: masturbation.
She said it in books, in interviews, on television and in rooms full of naked women. She said it plainly, without apology and without disguising it as a technique for pleasing a partner. For nearly five decades, Dodson argued that women should learn how their own bodies worked—and that the ability to give themselves pleasure was not a consolation prize for being single. It was a form of independence.
Today, when vibrators are sold by glossy lifestyle brands and conversations about the orgasm gap circulate freely online, her message can sound almost obvious. In the early 1970s, it was not. Female sexuality was still largely discussed in relation to marriage, reproduction and male desire. Even the sexual revolution had not necessarily placed women’s pleasure at its centre.
Dodson did.
BEFORE THE SEX EDUCATOR, THERE WAS THE ARTIST
Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1929, Dodson moved to New York City in 1950 to train as an artist. She married advertising executive Frederick Stern in 1959 and divorced him in 1965. Her own account of that marriage was not a romantic origin story: she later described herself as sexually unfulfilled and said that genuine sexual discovery began after it ended.
Art came first. In 1968, she staged a solo exhibition of erotic work in New York. The female body was already the subject she refused to treat as shameful.
But as she moved through the city’s sexual counterculture, she noticed a contradiction. A room could look liberated—people could be naked, unconventional and publicly permissive—while women were still performing pleasure they did not feel. Dodson said her early group-sex experiences showed her how many women were faking orgasms.
Freedom in appearance was not the same as freedom in the body.
That observation redirected her life. The artist began to teach.
THE ROOM WHERE WOMEN LOOKED
In the early 1970s, Dodson began holding women-only gatherings in her Manhattan apartment. They became known as Bodysex workshops.
The setting was deliberately collective. Women sat naked in a circle. They looked at their vulvas with mirrors, spoke about body image and sexual shame, and saw the physical variety that conventional images had hidden from them. Then they learned to masturbate, often using the powerful electric massager that would become known as the Magic Wand.
The workshops were explicit, but their radicalism was not simply that women masturbated in the same room. Dodson was dismantling several forms of isolation at once.
Women who believed their genitals looked wrong saw that bodies did not come in one approved design. Women who thought everyone else understood orgasm discovered how common uncertainty was. Women accustomed to waiting for a partner to unlock their sexuality were asked to become the authority on their own sensation.
Her method borrowed the circle format of feminist consciousness-raising and moved it into territory much of the women’s movement still considered too private.
Dodson believed sex was political precisely because it was treated as personal. If women did not know their own anatomy, could not name what felt good or believed pleasure required male permission, equality stopped at the bedroom door.
“She did not teach women how to perform desire. She taught them how to recognize their own.”
TAKING PLEASURE INTO THEIR OWN HANDS
Dodson self-published Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love in 1974. The illustrated booklet circulated through feminist bookstores and was later expanded into Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving.
The book rejected the idea that masturbation was merely what people did between relationships. Its premise was far more disruptive: self-pleasure could remain a valuable part of a woman’s sexuality throughout her life.
The language mattered. Dodson often called masturbation “selfloving.” She was not trying to make the act vague or delicate—she was famously incapable of delicacy for its own sake. She was challenging the hierarchy that treated partnered sex as real sex and everything else as a substitute.
That hierarchy gave another person enormous power.
If sexual satisfaction could only be delivered by a partner, then pleasure became something a woman had to be chosen for, granted or taught. Dodson reversed the arrangement.
Masturbation allowed a woman to discover her responses without performing, negotiating or worrying about someone else’s ego. That knowledge could then enter partnered sex, not as a demand to be rescued, but as information.
Her argument was never that women should withdraw from intimacy. It was that intimacy should not require ignorance of oneself.
WHY MASTURBATION WAS A FEMINIST ISSUE
Dodson’s commitment to female masturbation made her famous because she understood that pleasure and power were connected.
A woman who knows she can produce her own orgasm has learned something larger than a sexual technique. She has learned that desire does not automatically make another person its owner.
She does not need to measure the success of sex solely through penetration, male climax or her ability to appear satisfied. She has a standard grounded in what she actually feels.
This was a direct challenge to cultural stories about femininity.
Women were expected to be desirable but not desiring, sexually available but not sexually self-sufficient. Their bodies could be displayed everywhere while remaining mysterious to the women living inside them.
Dodson treated anatomical knowledge as a practical correction to that arrangement.
She also made female pleasure visible in old age. Dodson continued teaching and speaking publicly into her eighties and nineties, refusing the idea that erotic life belonged only to the young.
When a new generation rediscovered her work in the 2010s, she joked about becoming an overnight success at 85. Her appearance in Netflix’s The Goop Lab shortly before her death introduced Bodysex to another broad audience.
A DIFFICULT FEMINIST
Dodson did not fit comfortably inside every feminist room, and she did not try to.
She was associated with pro-sex feminism and clashed with strands of the movement that centred sexual danger, pornography and male violence. She believed discussions of women’s sexuality too often returned to trauma while leaving pleasure underdeveloped.
Her bluntness could be illuminating, but it could also flatten experiences unlike her own. Some of her comments about feminists, men and sexual politics were combative enough to alienate people who might otherwise have shared parts of her project.
That tension should not be edited out of her legacy.
Dodson was not a universally agreeable icon. She was forceful, provocative and convinced that the movement had made a serious mistake by treating pleasure as secondary.
Her work emerged from the conflicts later called the feminist sex wars, when feminists fiercely disagreed over pornography, censorship, sexual freedom and the meaning of consent.
Her answer was unapologetically bodily: women needed information, practice and the freedom to define pleasure for themselves.
WHAT SHE CHANGED
It is easy to mistake visibility for victory.
Sex toys are easier to buy now. The clitoris is discussed more openly. “Self-care” marketing has absorbed the language of pleasure.
None of that means women have stopped faking orgasms, feeling ashamed of their vulvas or organizing their sexuality around a partner’s expectations.
Dodson’s legacy survives because she addressed the structure beneath the embarrassment. She did not merely say masturbation was normal. She said it was useful knowledge.
She gave women a vocabulary, a mirror and permission to learn without an audience they had to impress.
Her influence can be seen in contemporary sex education that centres the clitoris, in the normalization of vibrators, in group workshops about anatomy and in the insistence that women’s pleasure deserves attention independent of reproduction or partnership.
Sex for One reached readers internationally, while Bodysex teachers continued the workshop model beyond Dodson’s own apartment.
She died in New York in 2020 at 91. By then, the subject that once pushed her to the margins had become an industry.
But the cleanest version of her message cannot be packaged into a product:
Your body is not a test someone else grades.
Your pleasure is not evidence of another person’s skill.
And knowing how to touch yourself is not an admission that nobody else will. It is the decision that access to your own sexuality begins with you.
Betty Dodson became famous for female masturbation.
What made her important was the freedom she attached to it.
Sources
- Sex for One — Penguin Random House
- Masturbation: The Secret to a Long Life? — The Guardian
- The Woman Who Taught Us Pleasure — The Cut
- Betty Dodson’s Feminist Sex Wars — Truthout
- Rest in Power: Betty Dodson — Ms. Magazine
- Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love — Internet Archive
- 38 Years of Self-Love — Salon
- The Erotic Art of Betty Dodson — Widener University Archives
- Betty Dodson — National Gallery of Art
