The Blowfish Blog

Couple’s Couch: Caught

My partner walked in on me masturbating this morning. After scrambling under the covers, upsetting a bottle of lube in the scuffle, I laid there with my heart pounding in my chest hoping that she mistook my fervent blush for just-woke-up-from-a-nap color.

Some hours later (but with a pink glow still gracing my face) I’m trying to figure out why I am so embarrassed.

My girlfriend and I have been dating for years. We’ve been through wonderful times and not so great time, times when our bodies rebelled against us with infections and gross secretions, and times when our bodies came together in bone-shaking lust. There is not a single square inch of my skin that she has not seen let alone touched, licked, or bitten. She knows my genitals so well that could likely pick them out of a lineup faster and with greater ease than I could. And it top it off, the woman has watched me get myself off more times than I could ever count.

So why am I still embarrassed that I got caught?

To be fair, getting walked-in on doing something blatantly unobjectionable is nerve wracking in and of itself. Heck, I would have jumped should she have come home and I’d been writing in my journal or something equally innocuous. But there is an additional level of trepidation that comes with being caught being sexual. Is it fear? Guilt, maybe?

I would argue that we’ve lived a long time with the message that, whether we agree with it or not, masturbation is something good boys and girls simply do not do. And if they were to do it, they ought to make certain that they were doing it somewhere very private where no one would ever discover their depravity. They should also make sure to clean up after they are done, hide the used tissues, the bottle of lotion, the semen-filled tube socks, and wash their hands before someone, god forbid, catches them.

I think it’s nearly impossible to keep these moral standards out of our adult lives. Even when I am well past the point of being comfortable touching myself with a partner present, it would be much thornier for them to sit across the room and watch me get off without participating. It would be even more difficult should I choose to masturbate for my own selfish pleasure with them present but not paying attention to me while I did it. I can’t fathom saying, “No babe, keep on watching the game, I’m just fooling around with my vibe over here and plan of getting off before I come join you” unless I had some distant hope that they would come over and lend a hand, so to speak. It’s just not done!

But I pee in front of my lovers. I blow my nose in front of them, get sick with them, clean my toenails in their presence without so much as doubting if I am overstepping the comfort lines. Why should masturbating be any different if it isn’t about some sense of internalized guilt?

What would that harbored guilt be about, I wonder. Guilt about being selfish? Guilt about being sexual without my partner’s permission (translating to being a sexual person outside of a relationship)? Guilt surrounding being dirty or perverted or not normal in some way?

Intellectually, I know all of these statements to be false. And yet, there I was, shaking under the blanket as if I had been caught in a scandalous affair with someone else.

I often wonder what our sex would be like if we could let go of all the leftover guilt and shame that was instilled in us over the years. What if we were all free to explore our bodies with one another without fear of our “O-face” or how much noise we make when we get riled up. I want to be comfortable when my partner comes home early from work and I am tangled up in the sheets three flicks away from coming. I hope that one day I will glance to the side and say, “Hi honey, I’m super close to getting off, can I come kiss you in a second?” and finish without feeling the need to hide under the blankets.

Undoing sexual guilt is a tricky thing but I have a hankering that it can be done. I’m planning on building a relationship where I can be selfish if I want to and have orgasms by myself, when I want them, without apology to my lover who may be present in the room when the urge strikes me. Perhaps this will translate into letting go of my embarrassment about being caught with my pants down. I’ll let you know how that goes over time. Wish me luck.

— Rebekah Skoor, MA

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This entry was posted on Friday, 28 December 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.