In a sex recession, consider the benefits of a DIY approach.
Many of us grew up reading glossy instruction manuals full of increasingly eccentric tips for pleasing a partner. A few memorable ones from my own tween reading years: Eat a doughnut off their genitals. Run an ice cube down their abs. Prior to sex, perform a chair-based dance routine. Moisten your mouth by imagining that it is full of Skittles. There were fewer instructions, of course, on how to help your partner please you.
If you have the kind of social media feed prone to churning up sex-positive Instagram infographics — or if you’ve ever masturbated — you are likely aware of the benefits of self-pleasure. Masturbation, wrote radical sex educator Betty Dodson in her 1987 classic Sex for One, is “the ongoing love affair that each of us has with ourselves throughout our lifetime.” Dodson, who later schooled Gwyneth Paltrow on vaginas for her Goop Netflix show, saw in masturbation nothing short of a path to world peace.
Sex educators rightly extol the endless upsides of masturbation: physical pleasure, relaxation, absolute safety from sexually transmitted infection, the powerful feeling of meeting your own needs. But telling people to masturbate for wellness reasons can begin to feel a bit like telling someone with depression to take a walk and drink a glass of water: It’s probably a good idea, but it’s annoying to hear.
For some people, this pervasive messaging has the opposite of its intended effect. “I have, over the years, also heard from many young women, especially, who feel pressured to masturbate—and some young men,” sex researcher Debby Herbenick tells Vox. Instead of masturbation as an act of personal discovery, it can feel like another tedious opportunity for self-optimization.
What the pro-self-service discourse sometimes neglects is this: Addressing your erotic needs through masturbation is a key strategy to bringing those same impulses to partnered sex, and for people with vaginas, it’s worth getting some reps in. And, of course, most of the research included in this space is on cis, straight people, so I recognize that these experiences won’t be universal — but everyone can benefit from a reminder that our bodies are worthy of pleasure.
Taking time to figure out what feels good
If you’re having meh sex with casual partners, pleasure-phobic pundits and well-intentioned friends might urge you to seek deeper emotional connection and monogamous commitment. Which, sure! If that’s what you’re into. There’s another option, though: Getting better at getting yourself off, so that you can give clearer instructions in the future.
“A lot of us are having unsatisfying sex. And they want that to change, but they want it to just change overnight,” says Dominique Oster, a sex and relationships therapist. “They want their partner to just suddenly get it. They want them to just suddenly know, but they don’t want to do the work that it takes to get there.”
When clients come to her sharing that they are unable to orgasm, or that they want sex but are simply unable to enjoy it in the moment, she, like many sex therapists, encourages them to practice masturbation.
“We owe it to ourselves to give ourselves and our nervous system a chance to re-regulate and create some new neural pathways,” Oster says. “This is not like a ‘Cosmo Five Tips to Better Orgasm.’ This is: How do I have better mental health around my body and my sexuality?”
Betty Dodson, in her ’80s masturbation manifesto, called it “the best way to gain sexual self-knowledge and to let go of old sexual fears and inhibitions.” She added, “For women especially, it’s a way to build confidence so we can communicate clearly with our lovers.”
A 2019 study of over 2,000 women found a stark contrast in the ways women were bringing themselves to orgasm through masturbation and the ways they attempted to orgasm with a partner. On their own, women “tend to use less conventional techniques for arousal during masturbation compared with partnered sex,” the researchers found. Those who were able to align their solo style with the way they had sex with a partner — conjuring fantasies, using vibrators, positioning their bodies in their preferred ways — had more orgasms, and better ones.
Of course, orgasm is not the only marker of a positive sexual experience, but it is a significant one. A study of young adults in 2019 found that people who orgasmed in casual sexual encounters were more likely to have positive emotions about those encounters. Critics of casual sex argue that it can lead participants, particularly women, to feel empty and worthless afterward. The reason could be a sense of loneliness or shame, but it could also be that sex didn’t feel that good physically. If that’s the case, the answer might not be to give up on sex, but to try to figure out what would actually feel good.
That’s what Maria Yagoda did. Yagoda is a sex writer who spent years recounting her sexual exploits online, writing articles with headlines like “What It’s Like to Ride a $2,000 Vibrating ‘Sex Machine.’” At 28, she finally admitted that she wasn’t enjoying sex — she was simply “enduring” it. She faked orgasms, approximating moans while thinking about the IRS. Even though she was technically a sex expert, she found it hard to acknowledge that, as she writes in her new book Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop, that “sex is meant to be pleasurable, not a method-acted performance of pleasure so gripping even the actor believes it.”
A pathway to better sex — including casual sex
It’s easy to read an account like Yagoda’s and conclude that casual sex is simply unfulfilling, and ought to be abandoned. Anti-hookup culture screeds, which often marry puritanism to the language of progressivism, argue that the answer is to contain sex within the framework of committed monogamy. Amid the often troubling critiques of hooking up is genuine concern for women’s sexual satisfaction and sense of erotic self-worth. In 2006, then-Washington Post reporter Laura Sessions Stepp fretted about the implications of hookup culture for girls’ futures as “mothers, workers, and members of a community.” She also worried, rightly, about whether the girls’ and women’s partners were treating them with care.
In a 2022 TikTok viewed nearly a million times, “very much pro-ho” creator Cindy Noir echoed these concerns, urging women to ask of their casual sex partners, “Does he value you and consider you and your pleasure? Is he trustworthy and safe for you and your body?” Hookup culture can sometimes be a “scam” for women, said Cindy. This is statistically true, at least as far as orgasms go — in heterosexual partnerships, men are vastly more likely than women to orgasm during casual sex.
Lack of pleasure is an excellent reason to avoid any kind of sex, casual or committed. But as Yagoda argues, “Pleasure is a practice.” Instead of renouncing casual sex, she set about discovering how to make sex more pleasurable for herself. She took up a period of celibacy to figure out, on her own, what she wanted. She practiced meditation and tried out various sex toys and lubes, enacting what Dodson called “the ongoing love affair” with herself. “I had never touched myself like this before, like a person I loved,” Yagoda wrote of her new approach to masturbation.
“The age-old difference between how men and women approach sex and sexuality is that men tend to be self-focused in their sexual experience or their exploration, and women tend to be more focused on the other person,” says Oster. “And that really gets in the way of us being able to experience what’s actually physically happening in our bodies.”
Getting your reps in
With self-pleasure, intentionality is key. “I don’t shy away from turning it into a chore,” says Oster of encouraging her clients to masturbate. “I really do like to remove some of the mysticism and some of the romance from this as a practice.” Lighting a scented candle is nice, she says. A clearer way to get in touch with the sensations might be to ask yourself, “What does this physically feel like? What thoughts are coming into my head? Can I return my body to the physical sensation when they do? Can I move through that and breathe through that and stay in my body?”
In 2022, researchers led by Herbenick published the first nationally representative survey on American masturbation habits in 10 years. Asked to share their primary motivation for masturbating, a significant number of women participants said they wanted to explore their sexuality. The study looked into a question that is debated by sex researchers: Does masturbating, in general, make people want to have more sex? Or less?
There is some evidence for both theories, Herbenick told me in an interview, but the 2022 study found more evidence for the “complementary model” among women, meaning that women who had more partnered sex also had more solo sex. “You might be somebody who really enjoys your own fantasy and desire and arousal and orgasm through masturbation,” says Herbenick. “Doing so may help you to kind of feel enlivened and desirous, and sometimes the focus of that may be a partner.”
Couldn’t it be that women who have more frequent sex with men are actually masturbating more because they are unsatisfied?
“For some portion? For sure,” says Herbenick. But there is data, she says, that “certainly some people actually masturbate right then and there, right? Like they didn’t get an orgasm through their sex with their partner. So they will say, ‘Well, I just sort of rolled over and finished myself off.’” Practicing by yourself is good for that, too.
Practice makes pleasure
Two decades before Dodson’s masturbation manifesto, in 1966, sex researchers Virginia E. Johnson and William H. Masters published a groundbreaking report that included the following bombshell: “If there is no psychosocial distraction to repress sexual tensions, many well-adjusted women enjoy a minimum of three or four orgasmic experiences before they reach apparent satiation,” they wrote. After a decade of observing individuals masturbating and couples having sex, they had seen the truth with their own eyes:
Masturbating women concentrating only on their own sexual demands, without the psychic distractions of a coital partner, may enjoy many sequential orgasmic experiences without allowing their sexual tensions to resolve below plateau-phase levels.
Writing in crisp, clinical terms that nevertheless thrilled the reading public, they added: “Usually physical exhaustion alone terminates such an active masturbatory session.”
Masters and Johnson advised men to pay attention to their partners’ wants and stop guessing, applicable advice to people of all genders. “Rather than following any preconceived plan for stimulating his sexual partner, the male will be infinitely more effective if he encourages vocalization on her part,” they concluded. “The individual woman knows best the areas of her strongest sensual focus and the rapidity and intensity of manipulative technique that provides her with the greatest degree of sexual stimulation.”
Unfortunately, the average layperson has not read Masters and Johnson’s 1966 findings — so with that in mind, one must communicate one’s sexual desires directly. Doing so, instead of hoping that a sex partner somehow figures it out, involves “rejecting the idea of sexual chemistry as a rigid, fixed thing,” writes Yagoda. She cites the work of therapist Pamela Joy, who argues that people who want to get better at talking about their needs during sex should start with a much smaller step: just getting comfortable talking about sex outside of the actual act. You can take tiny sex talk steps by talking more honestly with friends, listening to sex education podcasts, and following sex and kink educators on Instagram.
Yagoda also recommends frontloading the communication — “Do you mind if we go slow tonight?” is a great thing to say to a hookup partner while the night is young and the Netflix original is still playing in the background. And when in doubt, she says, there are a few words to keep in your toolbox: “‘Faster.’ ‘Slower.’ Harder.’ ‘Softer.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ ‘Ouch.’ ‘Wrong hole.’”
Oster adds that if you have a consistent partner, telling them about your self-pleasure practice will help them keep up with what you like. “If we can encourage our partners to see that we are changing, that we are exploring, that can kind of reduce some of the charge of, ‘Well, she used to like this. Now she just must not like sex anymore.’” It’s not always obvious that people have evolving sexual tastes and desires, but those things can be framed as “dynamic,” Oster says, rather than a dead end.
Masturbation, like other sex-related things, is increasingly celebrated in the mainstream, while stigma is continually reinforced everywhere else. Mentioning masturbation in a sex ed class is still enough to garner a teacher death threats, but you can stand in a Target aisle and compare the Rabbit, the LELO, and the Dame vibrators. Jane Fonda recently gave Drew Barrymore a sex toy on daytime TV, but shame and fear still prevent people from being direct with their partners about pleasure.
“There is no specific technique that can turn bad sex into pleasurable sex,” Yagoda writes. “There is no new angle or position that can rehabilitate your relationship with pleasure. But there are so many little practices, little shifts in perspectives that can open our bodies up to pleasure.”
It’s true that masturbation has not yet brought about world peace, as Dodson once dreamed. Still, we’ll keep practicing until we get there.
Patricia C. Wrede just published her first book in a decade. Here’s how she enchanted a generation.
When I heard that Patricia C. Wrede was publishing a new book for the first time in 10 years, I gasped. Then I forwarded the news to multiple people with a screaming emoji appended.
Patricia C. Wrede’s middle-grade novels are the kind of books that I can best describe as “formative.” You encounter them when you’re 8 or 9 or 10, fall madly in love with their no-nonsense wit and warm charm, and then use them as the basis of your personality for months after reading them.
Wrede’s new book, The Dark Lord’s Daughter, deals with a thoroughly normal 14-year-old girl who finds herself abruptly transported to a magical kingdom, where everyone expects her to reign in splendor and terror as their Dark Lady. It will surely find favors with the children of today. But for me, and for the rest of the Wrede addicts who first met her in the 1990s, her greatest achievement will always be The Enchanted Forest Chronicles.
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles are a quartet Wrede wrote from 1985 to 1993. It features a group of unconventional fairy tale characters (a princess, a king, a witch, and an adventuring boy) who face the whimsy and chaos of their magical land with determined practicality. In the Enchanted Forest, talking squirrels hand out advice to questing heroes, and you can bet every single one of Wrede’s protagonists knows better than to ignore it.
The final volume of the series, Talking to Dragons, was originally the first volume, with the others intended to serve as its prequels. Once the whole quartet was out, Wrede’s publishers shuffled the series around to follow the events of the story so that Book One is now Dealing With Dragons, which is where I started. I still think it’s the best place for anyone new to Wrede to begin, if only because Dealing With Dragons is the book built around Wrede’s best character, Princess Cimorene.
Princess Cimorene hails from the kingdom of Linderwall, “where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable.” (Isn’t there always a magic number in a fairy tale?) Thoroughly bored with the schooling her parents offer her, she runs away and volunteers to be the princess of a dragon, on the grounds that such a vocation is both “perfectly respectable” and also “much more interesting than embroidery or dancing lessons.” The dragon Kazul, in the meantime, is intrigued by the prospect of a princess who can make cherries jubilee and conjugate Latin verbs. (Kazul’s library needs organizing.)
Cimorene embodies the spirit of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, which are at their heart novels about process and procedure. Much of the action of Dealing With Dragons consists of Cimorene researching a fireproofing spell, sourcing its most obscure ingredients, and then experimenting with its nuances. The result is charming rather than tedious, mostly because Cimorene takes such obvious nerdy joy in the process. Wrede’s characters are tech geeks in a magical world, obsessed with technicalities and efficiency.
In part, that’s because the characters of this world know they have to follow the tropes of their fairy tales, and as such they place great store by understanding the rules of the world they live in. One young hero is unwise enough to volunteer for a king’s quest after the two eldest princes have tried and failed but before the youngest has succeeded. He berates himself thoroughly. “Anyone with sense would have seen that the youngest son was the one who would succeed,” he laments. “It sticks out all over.”
Cimorene is a rule-breaker in a way that was still refreshingly subversive when she first appeared in 1987. (Two decades of sprightly and rule-hating YA heroines have since done a number on this trope.) Yet even rebellious Cimorene knows she has to understand the rules in order to convince them to bend. She likes the idea of working for a dragon in part because she knows it’s a respectable thing for princesses to do. She has a lawyerly flair when it comes to negotiating her way around a tricky rule. When a djinn tells her he has to kill her but he’ll allow her to choose her method of death, Cimorene convinces him that the best method would be to have her die of old age.
The other way in which Cimorene is the archetypal Wrede character is that she is unfailingly practical. She researches a fireproofing spell because of course she’ll need one if she’s living with dragons. When the djinn offers to grant her a single wish, she asks for powdered hen’s teeth, which is one of the ingredients she needs to do her spell. Wrede writes, always, in celebration of practicality, of common sense, of everyday domestic virtues like having good manners and keeping a clean house. (One particularly meddlesome villain is dispatched by being doused with soapy water spiked with lemon juice.)
Cimorene’s only competition when it comes to practicality is one of Wrede’s other most enduring characters, Morwen the witch. Morwen lives in a cottage in the woods surrounded by cats, with a sign above her door instructing visitors that she’ll have “none of this nonsense, please,” and an apple tree which she has arranged to always be in fruit. She and Cimorene become friends immediately and start swapping recipes both magical and mundane.
Since Wrede first wrote Dealing With Dragons, fairy tale spoofs have become fashionable to the point of cliché. Wrede’s successors could learn from her light touch. She handles her material delicately, always with affection and never too literally. Her magic feels magical, not like science fiction by another name.
Wrede also wrote before the standard rebuttal to 1990s girl power fantasy was to pour scorn on the Not Like Other Girls heroines of the era. Cimorene, it must be said, is assuredly Not Like Other Girls. She is constantly compared to other, lesser princesses: Cimorene is tall and black-haired where they are little and blonde, and she is smart and bold where they are timid and empty-headed.
Still, Cimorene does develop a friendship with her fellow princess Alianora, who meets the little and blonde requirements of conventional princessery but has failed at most of the others. While Alianora is accomplished at needlework and dancing, she never manages to get herself cursed in a way that will allow a prince to rescue her. Her plotline pokes sly fun at the problem of conventional femininity: Alianora fits the mold in a way Cimorene chooses not to, but her family still won’t consider her a proper woman because they don’t think she’s suffered enough.
Between the two of them, Alianora and Cimorene make the case for Dealing With Dragons as a celebration of anyone who finds themselves unwilling or unable to meet the expectations the world sets for them — which is, after all, pretty much all of us. It is certainly most characters in a Wrede book. Even Morwen, who wears long black robes because they are comfortable and practical rather than because they are expected, finds herself on the wrong side of the witch’s counsel from time to time.
The joy of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles is that they argue for us to make our own ways forward with grace and dignity and common sense, plus copious warnings to always be polite when you’re talking to dragons. There are worse stories to build your personality around.
But “juice jacking” is the decade-old cybersecurity urban legend that just won’t die.
What’s worse, your phone running out of power or someone stealing all your data?
For years now, you’ve been told that this is a choice you may face, thanks to something called “juice jacking.” Juice jacking is when someone tampers with a charging station or USB port, allowing it to leach data from your phone or install malware on it while you top off your battery. Starting in April and continuing through the summer, everyone from the FBI to the Huntley, Illinois, police department has been warning the public about juice jacking. It seems like a new, active threat.
There’s just one problem: It’s not. The chances that a phone charge will ruin your life aren’t zero, but they are exceedingly slim. There are no known instances of juice jacking happening beyond proof-of-concept demonstrations. The wave of warnings we’re getting now aren’t from actual attacks, but from previous warnings. Juice jacking is a cybersecurity ouroboros that won’t die.
“Given how many other serious and active security threats there are out there for people to legitimately worry about, it seems to me that the average user should not be worried about this at all,” Brian Krebs, the cybersecurity expert who coined the term “juice jacking,” told Vox.
The world was first introduced to juice jacking in 2011 when a demonstration at the hacking and cybersecurity conference DEF CON showed that it was possible. Brian Markus, co-founder of Aries Security, and another researcher named Robert Rowley, saw that USB charging was a potential vulnerability and built a charging station to prove it. They put the kiosk out on the floor and waited to see who would be lured in by its promises of a free and easy battery charge. More than 360 people, many of them experienced hackers and cybersecurity professionals, plugged their dying phones in without thinking twice. When they did, they were greeted with a notice on the kiosk’s screen warning them not to trust random public charging stations.
“If I can make it happen, and I can dupe hundreds and hundreds of the top professionals around the world into using it, then I think the average citizen around the block is going to fall for it,” Markus said in an interview with Vox.
Juice jacking is possible because of what Universal Serial Bus, or USB, technology was designed to do. One port serves multiple purposes: You can charge or power a device, or transfer data to and from it. If you remember the days of each peripheral needing its own proprietary cord and port, you know how much more convenient this made things. But this also introduced a new attack vector, as Markus identified: Data can be exchanged when you only intend to get power. And, back in 2011, phones automatically opened themselves up to both purposes as soon as they were connected.
Most phone manufacturers have since added a prompt asking the user if they’ll allow data to be exchanged. That’s what that “trust this device” message you get when you plug your phone into a computer is for. (If you plug your phone into something that’s just a power source, you shouldn’t get that message.) If you tap that you don’t trust the device, it can’t exchange data while the phone gets charged. This is, by the way, exactly how these things are supposed to work: Someone points out a vulnerability in technology and its manufacturers or developers figure out a way to fix it.
In the years since that DEF CON demonstration, juice jacking warnings occasionally bubble up, often worded in ways that make it seem as though these nefarious chargers aren’t just a theoretical threat but one that is out in the wild now, with a trail of hacked phones in its wake. Here are several reports from 2013, when USB “condoms” — little dongles that block data from being transferred on USB cords — went on sale. Here are a few alerts in 2016. Another crop of warnings in 2019. And here’s a wave in 2020. These scares are typically accompanied by a lot of media coverage, which rarely (with a few notable exceptions) notes that there are no known reports of these tampered charging stations being found in the world, nor of anyone’s data being stolen or malware put on their devices through them. And yet, the warnings persist.
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Su Arslanoglu/Getty Images
The latest juice jacking scare cycle began on April 6 with a tweet from the FBI Denver office’s account. “Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels or shopping centers,” it said. “Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices.”
A bunch of states, localities, and the media then put out their own warnings. When the FBI — or just one of its field offices — says something is a threat, people tend to take it seriously. Some of them even described this as a “new” thing, despite it first being identified 12 years ago. For example, the attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel, issued a warning that said “hackers will install and hide a skimming device inside the USB ports of the kiosk.” The attorney general’s office told Vox that the warning was prompted by the FBI’s tweet.
“We have not received any complaints specific to ‘juice jacking’ here in Michigan, though a victim may not know how their phone was compromised,” Danny Wimmer, spokesperson for the office, told Vox. That warning set off another flurry of media coverage from local outlets.
And what prompted the FBI Denver office’s tweet? Not a cyberattack, it turns out, but an old warning from the FCC.
“That FBI Denver tweet was a standard PSA-type post, nothing new. It stemmed from this FCC warning,” said Dana M. Plumhoff, spokesperson for the FBI’s Denver office. “This was a general reminder for the American public to stay safe and diligent, especially while traveling.”
You wouldn’t know this if you looked at the FCC’s juice jacking warning now. The agency updated it at the end of April to reflect the increased attention it indirectly caused. But with an updated 2023 timestamp and a new URL, the webpage appears to be an entirely new warning. The FCC was careful to say in this iteration that it’s not aware of any instances of juice jacking, just that it’s theoretically possible.
The FCC didn’t respond to a request for comment on what prompted the 2019 warning, but it appears to be an alert from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. That office told TechCrunch that it didn’t have any cases of juice jacking, and the warning was part of a consumer education campaign. The spokesperson did say they knew of cases of this happening on “the east coast,” but was unable to provide any more details than that when pressed.
So, why does this keep coming up? Well, it’s about something most of us have done — charged our phones in a public place — and never thought twice about. It sounds plausible because it is, especially if you’re thinking about other, similar, very real and active examples of criminals using public devices to steal from you, like credit card skimmers. It feels like something anyone could fall for, and the consequences can be devastating.
Here’s the good news: Most — though not all — phones out there have that trust warning. Phone batteries have also gotten better over the years, increasing the length of time you need between charges. But maybe you have an old phone, or your phone’s operating system doesn’t have this warning. Maybe you don’t trust yourself not to tap the “trust” button by mistake when it pops up.
Or maybe you just aren’t comfortable with even the theoretical possibility that this could happen. After all, just because it doesn’t seem to have happened yet in the 12 years since it first came to the public’s attention doesn’t mean it never will. Markus says it’s relatively simple to create a seemingly legitimate charging station and place it in a high-traffic area where a lot of people are likely to be trying to charge their phones. Then, all a hacker would have to do is sit back and wait for victims.
“It is still an active risk,” Markus said. “I personally believe that charging ports at the airports are susceptible.”
With that in mind, if you’re inclined to be extra cautious, there are a few easy things you can do to protect yourself.
- Don’t use a charging station: Obviously. But when your battery is running low and you’re not getting back to a trusted charger any time soon, that’s not a big help. So …
- Bring an external battery with you: You won’t have to plug your phone in for a charge if you’ve got your own supply.
- Don’t charge through a USB port: The USB ports are the threat here. Old-fashioned electrical sockets are secure. Bring your own cord that plugs into the wall for power without worry.
- Use a charging cord you trust: Hackers have also figured out how to steal your data through certain USB charging cables, although this threat appears to be as theoretical as juice jacking. Still, if you’ve come this far and you’re this worried about insecure USBs, you might as well go all the way.
- Buy a condom for your USB cord: Yes, these exist. They make it technologically impossible to transfer data, and they’re pretty small and easy to carry around. Just make sure you’re buying a known brand from a reputable place.