Orgasms are good for you. You should add them to your self-love practice

There, I said it. Orgasms. That’s what I want to talk about today. About how they’re good for you, how they help keep you healthy, can make you love yourself more, and why I think you should consider adding orgasms to your self-love practice.

I’ve been binge watching Masters of Sex on Netflix recently. I started on a Sunday afternoon, randomly, just looking for a quick R&R fix, and I’ve been hooked since. I enjoy watching the show – it’s set in the 60’s and 70’s, the actors are so talented (I have a real girl crush on Lizzy Caplan), and the mood fits the subject so beautifully – but that’s not what got me so hooked. What grabbed my attention is it’s subject: the scientific pursuit of knowledge about the female orgasm.

If you’ve watched the show you know there’s a lot of sex going on. Even if you haven’t, going by the title, I bet you’d kind of know. That’s not to say that it’s too much, or over the top. But it does put the subject front and center. Not only that, the show – because it’s set in a time before the sexual liberation of the 70’s – gives a well-paced, intelligent, sometimes hard, and probably pretty accurate account of how sex, orgasm, and masturbation were perceived, and understood, in a time were most of it was nothing but taboo.

That’s what makes the show so interesting to me, and why I wanted to talk about orgasms, and particularly about why I think enjoying them is a powerful self-love practice.

A quick dive into the history of the female orgasm is enough to understand how controversial a subject it’s always been, and how controlling it has always been a way to try and control women. Much like the history of women themselves: side-lined, oppressed, misunderstood, feared, yet never conquered, their power never really taken away. Of course we’ve come a long way since – at least in the Western world – both in terms of women rights and orgasms. But the taboo lingers on, and a lot of misconceptions remain. With it a lot of guilt, insecurity, and agitation.

I’ve always had what I would call a healthy relationship with my sexuality. I discovered masturabation at a young age, always enjoyed it, and although it wasn’t a guilt-free act at first, it wasn’t all that guilt-laden either (at least not consciously), rather something I intuitively knew required caution, and that I’d better keep to myself.

Still, it’s only in the last couple of years, through my journey of self-discovery, that the relationship I have with my orgasms matured, and that I realized I was in control of my own pleasure.

I also never bothered with the habits of my partners, and always felt that it was none of my business when, or why they wanted to make themselves feel good. I know that a lot of people think differently about this issue – especially women – and that within a relationship enjoying solo-pleasure is often considered a no-no. I remember one particular friend who gave her significant other a weekly interrogation about the subject, which predictably and unfortunately always ended with her calling me in tears.

My point is – and I’m shamelessly paraphrasing a line from the show here – that as human beings we have no problem satisfying our urges when it comes to hunger or thirst, but that our sexual needs have been the subject of so much debate, anguish, and even persecution throughout the whole of human existence – female sexual needs in particular. Since then, thankfully, a lot has been achieved, and the benefits of orgasm, and thus masturbation, are strongly established – even scientifically.

Among other things, having regular orgasms has been proved to be beneficial for a wide range of things, going from making you look younger, protecting your cardiovascular health, reducing stress, over boosting your immune system, all the way up to lowering rates of depression, and anxiety, and even possibly preventing breast cancer cells from developing into a tumor.

But we’re not there yet. Because to me – how wonderful all of these benefits might be – we, as a society, still have a hard time accepting that getting off is a need, and therefor that enjoying regular orgasms, just like eating when we’re hungry, or drinking when we’re thirsty, is essential to our well-being. In my own life I’ve been through periods without orgasms, sometimes because I gave away the control of my own pleasure to a partner (never a good idea, believe me), but more often because I let the busyness of life get in the way, something that I know a lot of women do. Each and every time this happened I experienced higher levels of stress, more anxiety, less appetite for life, and a dip in my overall health and feelings of joy.

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A few months ago I found myself in the same situation again. Working on multiple businesses at a time, trying to achieve big goals and dreams, I woke up one morning realizing I was letting this amazing source of pleasure slip away again. So I decided to make it part of my self-love practice again. Two months in, I can honestly say that it is life-changing. I already had a pretty good self-love routine, but adding some orgasms to the mix just makes everything better.

There’s another benefit that brings all of this home for me. Making a conscious commitment to pleasure is also good for you on a deeper, more soulful level. What I mean is that enjoying your orgasms is not simply a good self-love practice, it’s also good to teach you how to love yourself. By discovering, and understanding your physicality, your needs, and your sexual desires, and by allowing yourself to experiment with them, especially by taking control and giving into them, you are not only gaining more insight into who you really are, but developing a deeper sense of love, appreciation, and affection for yourself.

When you look at it like that, adding orgasms to your self-love practice becomes a conscious choice, a moment in space-time when you decide – every day – to choose yourself, to do something that has nothing but benefits for your well-being and your health, while literally making yourself feel amazingly good at the same time. And that to me is a powerful act of self-love, if not the most powerful one of all, and something that is yours, and yours alone, to have, to practice, and to own. So what are you waiting for?

It’s time to stop identifying sexual pleasure with true love, and start equating it with self-love instead.

I’d love to know about you. In the comments below, let me know what you think about sexual pleasure, orgasms and self-love. Or anything else this post brought up for you.