Reclaiming Pleasure: Self-Touch as a Queer Joy Practice
Queer Joy Practice #24
This is How To Queer Joy, a newsletter dedicated to LGBTQ+ mental health and joy practices, written by queer psychologist Dr. Kiki Fehling.
This week’s practice: self-touch. Reconnect with or appreciate your body and sexuality by touching yourself with the sole intent of making yourself feel good.
This week, I felt inspired to write about a practice that I think brings us back to the basics: self-touch.
In therapy, whenever the idea of self-touch came up as an option for practicing pleasure and prompting pleasant emotions, clients would frequently assume “self-touch” was a euphemism for masturbation. While self-touch includes masturbation, it’s more than that. There are so many different ways to purposefully give yourself pleasure through touching your own body — many of them (maybe all of them?) can help you connect to your sexuality, yes, but most of them are not sex-/masturbation-specific. “Sensual,” “erotic,” and “pleasurable” touch is not the same as “sexual.”
I’ve talked about this conflation of sensual with sexual before in a previous post about physical intimacy with friends, but it feels worth noting explicitly again. Because self-touch for pleasure is a powerful practice for queer joy, and it’s available for everyone, including folks who aren’t interested in masturbation or folks who have trauma or dysphoria that make them disinterested in touching certain parts of their body. So, there’s no expectation or requirement here for what self-touch means. Just options, curiosity, reconnection, and (hopefully) pleasure.
Why Self-Touch Matters
Touch is a basic human need. As such, taking care of yourself by taking care of that need can be an important form of self-care and self-compassion.
Let me quote myself here:
Touch and physical proximity deeply impact our relationships and our overall wellness.
Touch can communicate emotions and strengthen relationships. It’s also associated with many physical and mental health benefits, like decreased blood pressure, decreased depression, and improved immune function.
Unfortunately, many people today are “touch hungry,” deprived of the amount of touch their bodies need.
While hugging loved ones or visiting massage therapists counts as a touch practice, you also can meet (some of) your touch needs on your own.
One study found that self-soothing touch lowered cortisol (a stress hormone) just about as much as being hugged by another person. Touch, no matter where is comes from, can evoke a sense of safety and can activate the parasympathetic nervous system — the system designed to help you relax and calm down.
Self-touch can also be a way to explore and appreciate one’s sexuality. Our culture often discusses “sexuality” like it’s a small component of life, limited and directly related to specific sexual acts or sexual identities. It’s bigger than that. I really appreciate the way that writers like Audre Lorde and Hillary McBride talk about it. Audre Lorde reframed the erotic as a powerful, creative life force. Focusing solely on sex limits its importance and power.
I think that reframe applies to self-touch. And, I think it really matters for queer people.
LGBTQ+ people often learn to disconnect from their bodies during childhood, because they are usually surrounded by messages that pathologize and demonize queer desires. As a way to self-protect, many queer people dissociate from or ignore their bodies. But that disconnection also costs us, contributing to shame, physical and mental health problems, and generally not getting as much pleasure as we could (and deserve).
Touching your body and reconnecting with it. Touching your body as a way to take care of yourself. This self-touch can help you reclaim safety and pleasure that may have been taken from you. Or, it can help you fully appreciate your body’s power to feel pleasure or its power to just, well, feel. Self-touch can also help you challenge any narratives you’ve been taught about how your body or sexuality belongs to anyone other than you. You don’t need anyone else’s permission or help to access pleasure. You just need to touch yourself.
How to Practice: Self-Touch
There’s no “right” or “wrong” way to do this, and there is absolutely no hierarchy to climb here. No form of self-touch is better than another. Pick whatever sounds appealing, or try a few:
Massage your own hands, feet, jaw, scalp, or whatever you want.
Tap, rub, or gently stroke your own chest or arm.
Masturbate.
Comb or run your fingers through your hair.
Rest your hands on your belly, chest, or somewhere on your body and notice the warmth or pulsing in your finger tips there.
Take a bath or shower at your favorite temperature, mindfully cleaning your body.
Slowly put on body moisturizer or face serums.
Whatever you choose, touch yourself intentionally and slowly enough to actually notice what you feel.
If you feel pleasure, savor it. Try the same practice again another time, or try something new.
If you don’t, thank your body for what it does for you and for (re-)teaching you how to take care of yourself. Try the same practice again another time, or try something new.
Be Kind To Yourself
I’m ending this post with the same encouragement I gave in my physical self-care post a few weeks ago…
There are so many reasons that self-touch for pleasure may be tricky or stressful for queer people. Go as “small” or “slow” with your practice as you need. Don’t judge yourself if the self-touch you practice doesn’t help you feel pleasure — it is 100% never your fault or your body’s fault when that’s the case. There is nothing wrong with you.
Be kind to yourself. This kind of queer joy practice is indeed practice, and every single practice helps you better understand yourself and get more pleasure from this life.
Kiki- thank you for this. Such an important topic that I don’t often see tailored to specific needs of queer folks. I especially appreciate the idea of self touch as a form of power, or reclaiming agency, or as an act of care. This is really special. 💜