VICE UK offers the Argument for Masturbating During Childbirth.
Doula Angela Gallo describes her experience:
As I neared transition, near the end of labor, I was feeling very vulnerable and stressed-out; I went into the shower to find some relief, and my husband asked if I would like to have sex. I said no, but it reminded me I could self-stimulate,” she told me. “The second I started using clitoral stimulation, the resting period between contractions was more pleasurable and I could use more force to meet the climax of the contractions.” Gallo described the sensation as “taking the edge off” the pain more than sexual gratification.
Childbirth educator Kate Dimpfl explains:
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]How could masturbating to release MORE oxytocin ease labor pain?[/pullquote]
“The hormones in birth and sex are identical,” explained Dimpfl in her TEDx talk, “We Must Put the Sex Back into Birth,” pointing to the hormone oxytocin, which was literally named after the Greek term for “swift birth.” Oxytocin is released during sexual arousal and orgasm, but also during childbirth, skin-to-skin contact with a newborn, and breast-feeding. With oxytocin comes a rise of endorphins, which can naturally reduce pain.
Really? And yet the idea of masturbation during childbirth appears to be restricted to privileged Western, white women who have marinated in the natural childbirth literature. To my knowledge, it was unknown in any time, place or culture across the entirety of human experience until it was promoted by Ina May Gaskin. Gaskin is a privileged Western, white woman with no medical, nursing or midwifery training who is considered the grandmother of the American homebirth movement.
Gaskin* didn’t promote masturbation per se; she extolled the virtues of the provider sexually touching the laboring women:
It helps the mother to relax around her puss if you massage her there using a liberal amount of baby oil to lubricate the skin. Sometimes touching her very gently on or around her button (clitoris) will enable her to relax even more. I keep both hands there and busy all the time while crowning … doing whatever seems most necessary.
And:
Sometimes I see that a husband is afraid to touch his wife’s tits because of the midwife’s presence, so I touch them, get in there and squeeze them, talk about how nice they are, and make him welcome.
Subsequently, Gaskin elaborated a theory to explain why sexually touching other women benefits them, the theory parroted by childbirth educator Dimpfl. Gaskin made it up; it is pseudoscience invoked to justify her sexual touching of other vulnerable women while they were in agony.
Another privileged, Western white women, Debra Pascali-Bonnaro, embellished the theory to fabricate “orgasmic birth,” another phenomenon never described by anyone else, anywhere else, at any other time throughout the millennia of human existence until it was “discovered” by privileged Western white women steeped in the natural childbirth literature.
There’s no harm to masturbating during labor, just like there’s no harm to imbibing homeopathic preparations that are nothing more than water. But just as the harm of homeopathy comes from expectations of efficacy, the harm of promoting masturbation in labor is also of raising expectations of efficacy. Moreover, the belief that childbirth is a form of performance art, whereby a woman demonstrates mastery of her own pain to such an extent that she engages in sexual play during labor, is also harmful.
Advocates of sexual touching during childbirth proclaim that the hormones of sex are also the hormones of childbirth … yet they neglect to mention that they are also the hormones of miscarriage. That fact seems to have escaped them.
Many, perhaps most, hormones have multiple functions within the body. Cortisone, for example, is known as a stress hormone, but it is also important in fighting inflammation. That doesn’t mean that the two are inevitably connected; when your body produces cortisone to fight an infection in your finger, it doesn’t lead to the fight or flight response at the same time.
Oxytocin also has multiple functions in the body. It is involved in both sexual arousal and in labor pain but it obviously doesn’t create the same effect. Indeed, the idea of sexual touching in childbirth to reduce pain is nonsensical. During labor circulating levels of oxytocin are highest and labor is usually agonizing. How could masturbating to release more oxytocin ease labor pain? That doesn’t make much sense, does it?
The sad fact is that, to my knowledge, sexual touching during childbirth was virtually unheard of until Ina May Gaskin started doing it to women under her care. She made up a theory to justify it and she is held in such high esteem by her acolytes that instead looking askance at her behavior, they emulated it, albeit modified to self-stimulation instead of provider stimulation. That’s unfortunate.
The history of and the historical justification for sexual touching in labor is deplorable. Women should be questioning it, not copying it.
*The quotes come from Spiritual Midwifery, 3rd and 4th Editions.
