The faux feminist credentials of self-love pop songs
By: Megan Leigh
Tags: Masturbation, Self Love, Pop Culture, Music, Feminism

Female pop stars are having a masturbatory moment. From Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Party for One’ and Hailee Steinfeld’s ‘Love Myself’ to Niki Minaj’s ‘Feeling Myself’, these women are shaking off the stigma and embracing pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Or so they would have us believe.

Journalists are eager to applaud buy into the narratives of these tracks as body-positive feminism entering the popular public domain. These pop stars are strong, independent women providing role models for young women, they say. Magazines like Pitchfork claim the trend ‘illustrate[s] the many ways self-sex can enhance women’s lives’. But is this trend really as celebratory and sex-positive as it at first seems?

Euphemisms only, please

While it might be the current ‘in thing’ for pop stars to sing about, masturbation has been present in popular music for decades. Why then, when this trend is so popular, do we still insist on being so coy about it? Lyricists use metaphors and oblique references rather than addressing the issue head-on. If anything, today’s incarnations are more intent on beating around the bush (pun intended) than their predecessors.

Female masturbation in pop songs took off in the 1980s, with trailblazer Cyndi Lauper’s ‘She Bop’ being one of the first mainstream tracks to (very) obliquely reference ‘jillin off’: ‘I want to go south and get me some more … They say I better stop or I’ll go blind.’ Lauper’s willingness to broach the subject shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the artist’s most famous track is a euphemism in and of itself: ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’.

Male singers — or Prince, at least — weren’t so coy. Prince strays far from euphemism, calling masturbation by its name on more than one occasion, including 1981’s ‘Jack U Off’ and ‘Darling Nikki’ from 1984’s classic Purple Rain album. Australian rock band The Divinyls broke euphemistic taboos among female vocalists in 1990 with ‘I Touch Myself’, but this frankness failed to catch on.

In 1993, Janet Jackson released the single ‘If’. She flirts with lyrical overtness but ultimately leans heavily on euphemism:

How many nights I’ve laid in bed Excited over you? I’ve closed my eyes and thought of us A hundred different ways I’ve gotten there so many times.

Pop’s masturbatory precision of language has only gone downhill since.

The preferred allusion in pop music is ‘touch myself’, presumably in homage to those taboo-smashing Divinyls. Toni Braxton sensually crooned ‘With just the thought of you / I can’t help but touch myself’ in 1996, starting a flood of similar usage from the early 2000s onwards. Big-name pop stars including Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, and Charlie XCX, rapper Missy Elliot, and even the more indie/cult darlings such as FKA Twigs and Tori Amos have subsequently used some variation of ‘touch myself’ in their musical masturbatory explorations.

While many argue we have become more open-minded and willing to discuss sex in public over the last decade, our increasing reliance on euphemism would suggest otherwise. We have seen a move from ‘touch myself’ as pop’s preferred metaphor to the increasingly veiled ‘love myself’.