Masturbation, Religion, An Unfortunate Lack of Lady-gasms, and Emoticons
I, as you know, am a lover and champion of some good, old fashioned masturbation. Besides just enjoying it in general, I think it's incredibly important to the Orgasm Equality Movement. Women as a whole just don't masturbate enough. We have more barriers to cross before we discover this treasure of a activity, and so we tend to start at it later than boys, often well after we have partnered sexual interactions or intercourse.
I would argue that going into a sexual encounter already having experienced an orgasm and already having a clear understanding of at least one reliable method for physically attaining orgasm is miles ahead of going into the encounter with no personal orgasmic experience.
I know there are lots of issues at play when it comes to why women are faking and not having orgasms so often during intercourse, but one possible issue is a rather simply solved one. When intercourse is happening without additional clitoral stimulation (either manually, with a vibrator or through friction against the partner's body) then orgasm just ain't gonna happen. The clitoris is the female organ of sexual pleasure, just as the penis is the male organ of sexual pleasure, and if you don't stimulate those organs (and straight up intercourse probably isn't), don't expect orgasm. Probably, many more women would be able to reach orgasm during intercourse if they just, well, rubbed one out while the P was in the V. If women masturbated more and earlier, maybe rubbing one out during the act of intercourse would start to seem less weird and more of a sensible thing to do. It's so simple, but it's also so invisible among sexual acts in our media - and that's too bad.
All that to bring up an article from the Kinsey Institute website about what the 5 major religions think of masturbation. It's a quick read - just the basics, so go check it out HERE
Here's my quick overview of the article's descriptions, which may or may not be that accurate to official stances. I'm not a scholar of religions, so feel free to criticize. I just wanted to do a summary using mostly emoticons:
Judaism - depends. :( :/ :)
Catholicism - boys :( girls :/
Islam - if ya got to ;/
Buddhism - gonna lead to more suffering but whatevs ;/
Hinduism - if you can make a wise and virtuous case for it... :)