Recently there was a bit of a kerfuffle...and it had to do with Masturbation Month.
Yay! I love kerfuffles!
Planned Parenthood in Florida actually tweeted about Masturbation Month. (cue end-of-world music)
Then...on the same day the main Planned Parenthood twitter account retweeted the message!
Well, you can imagine the shitstorm this kicked up from the sexually-repressed side of the spectrum.
Rather than using labels, let's just call them the "people who believe in abstinence-only sex education". They are going on and on about how our tax dollars are going towards teaching masturbation. (engage sarcasm filter) Because masturbation is of course a gateway behavior that will inevitably lead to out of control promiscuous sexual behavior, abortions, single parent families, AIDS, STIs, STDs, etc., resulting in large numbers of people turning into degenerate, non-contributing members of society. Right?
Seriously, some of them believe this. I had previously linked to a couple of websites to peruse and read through the comments. Neither link is available anymore. I found their thinking pretty humorous. Yet underneath it all there is a very angry, self-righteous, hateful tone. In my opinion, it's because these people are so sexually frustrated. They need more sex, masturbation, orgasms, fellatio, cunnilingus and yes, even pegging in their lives!
Dan Savage spoke to this a while back on one of his podcasts. He nailed it. (You can find the entire podcast here):
"...Because if you’re allowed to make different choices, to have non-procreative sex, to use birth control, to be gay if you’re gay, it really does make a mockery of the limitations they’ve placed on themselves.
If you can do all those things and be happy, healthy, a contributing member of society and not miserable…they die a little inside. They get hurt. They get angry because they’ve told themselves that this is how sex is supposed to work. This is the way the world is supposed to work. And there you are living your life proving every day…that it ain’t the way it works. That that’s not what sex is for. That you can live the life you’re living and live it successfully and you know what that does? That rubs their pitifully unfulfilling fear-warped sex lives back in their own faces and they hate you for that! They can’t forgive you for that! Hence the desire to control you, persecute you, punish you…because you’re everything they want to be, everything they’re wired to be…and nothing they’re allowing themselves to be."
That's it, isn't it. And now they're trying to take masturbation away from us, too? Wow. So...you "people who believe in abstinence-only sex education"? I am sad for you. Dan's words bring into sharp focus how restrained, rigid and controlled your lives must feel. I'm going to get myself off an extra time tonight, in your honor...in the hopes that you wake up one morning and realize that sexuality is normal, safe and fun!
Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, the source of the original tweet, has some awesome basic and very open-minded information about masturbation on their website here. Check it out! Make a donation to Planned Parenthood today. They are doing great work.
