The project When I Masturbate is an activist platform fighting for a bigger territory within which female pleasure can be explored on its own terms. Through publication and story circles women’s masturbation stories from all around the world are being collected to share with the public.

The person behind the project is Íris Stefanía Skúladóttir from Iceland. Íris is an artist and curator interested in sexual behaviour. In her practice she has been focused on women and their pleasures, taboos, shame and desires. The masturbation is a central point in Iris’s practice.  She has collected and published masturbation stories from women and held story circles where stories surrounding the topic are being told.

The band “A band called Eva” joins Iris in her open circles and the band members, Sigga and Vala, set a beautiful mood with their songs and presence.

“For as long as I can remember I have felt like I couldn’t express myself freely about my own sexual behaviour. For years, I’ve had the longing to challenge the taboos around female masturbation and pleasure. So I started to collect stories that I felt needed to be told. Stories told by ordinary women about their own experience of masturbating and self pleasure.

I had no idea what to expect in the stories but I asked the women who shared their stories to focus on their masturbation and thoughts around that topic. I felt it was important to begin with having women share in complete anonymity so they could feel completely safe to say whatever they wanted. And then the stories started to pour in.

Story by story the project grew. And eventually the stories got published in the book “When I Masturbate – thirty something masturbation stories from women”. The book received a lot of attention and became a kind of story-magnet. As people heard about the book, they wanted to share their stories too. And so the project continues as a research into female masturbation and female pleasure, exploring how stories can create a platform for confronting the sensitivity and taboo that often makes discussing these things so challenging.

Today I’m using the stories I collected for the book and the stories that are been shared afterwards as the basis for a conversation, a space, a platform… a story circle. I have chosen to use story circles as a way for women to open up and discuss masturbation and other sensitive topics. There are two kinds of story circles that I am working with. The first is a closed story circle for women only, where women get to listen to the stories of other women, as well as share their own experiences. The second is an open story circle for the public to listen to the women’s stories collected in the closed circles.

The story circle has a long tradition. There is even evidence of purposeful ritualised meetings in circles around the fire from Upper Palaeolithic societies. These circles have long since been used to summon topics, questions and concepts which are otherwise difficult for a community to spend time dealing with. In the spirit of this history, my research is exploring how the story circle can be a rich situation for spending time with questions of pleasure, sexuality, shame, desire, bodies, sexual behaviour and taboo specifically through voices of women.

The relation between the open and closed circles is very purposeful. The closed circle is a safe space that creates an all female gaze, where women can listen to the voices of other women, speaking freely about their relationship to pleasure and desire as women living in the patriarchy. The open circles are about giving everyone an opportunity to listen and learn from these stories – and this situation calls for a different kind of care and precision. In the open story circles representation of women and their real life experiences comes into contact with a more aggressively present male gaze – and how that is negotiated has to be engineered with different concerns and priorities in mind. We are more selective about which stories are told, and which are not, we think carefully about the mode of delivery, who it is told by and for whose ears. It is very important that stories still maintain their own integrity as stories told by women for other women – but at the same time become accessible for other ears and gazes.”

Long live pleasure!