Lily Allen doesn’t think enough high-profile women speak about masturbation – and she wants to change that.
The singer, 35, says the topic is still “taboo” – despite the fact that it’s something most people do.
“When a woman talks about masturbation, it’s always: ’Well you’re clearly not getting sex from a male partner so you must be undesirable or disappointed with your partner’s ability. It’s lazy, archaic and just not true,” she told Radio 1 Newsbeat.
“There’s a reason our bodies are made as they were. Women are given clitorises and G-spots – because they’re there to have orgasms with.”
Allen says it’s a “co-dependent attitude to pleasure” when people believe they have to rely on someone else to orgasm – especially when we can do it ourselves.
She wishes she spoke about it more openly when she was younger – “nobody talked about and I didn’t engage with it” – saying that it wasn’t until she committed to “masturbation, self love and ultimately sex toys” that she considered my own needs.
In HuffPost UK Life’s podcast, Am I Making You Uncomfortable, sex educator Alix Fox said many people feel awkward about masturbation because people “just don’t talk about it”.
“A lot of us worry about whether we should be doing it or shouldn’t be doing it,” she said. “And we don’t know what the normal is. So we can really scrutinise our own behaviours – or lack thereof.
“I think that conversation is starting to change, but still a lot of the images and a lot of the messages that people get about female masturbation come from porn where it’s something that’s performed often for male pleasure and as a result, it’s all play and display.”
Allen was speaking about the topic after the news she’s put her name to a brand of vibrators. Her title? “Chief Liberation Officer”.
“I wish I’d come to terms with [masturbation] much sooner, it would’ve saved me a lot of headaches,” she added.