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Masturbation can be a wondrous component of the human experience. It is a pure expression of both self-love and self-care with the unique ability to give us a deeper understanding of ourselves. It can reduce stress, alleviate menstrual cramps, lead to a better night's sleep, and help us better understand our wants and needs as a sexual partner.
But like anything worth talking about in this thing called life, masturbation is complex and everyone has their own personal relationship with it. To understand your relationship with it is to understand yourself. With that in mind, it only makes sense why our favourite musicians tend to have at least one great song that refers to touching themselves. The People at SMACK celebrate The 6.9 Best Songs About Masturbation. Enjoy seven healthy, positive, loving, and selfish songs each dealing with masturbation in their own special way broken down by our three owners: Jared Marshall, Kayla Vickers, and the king of masturbation himself, Aaron Chan.
Then, enjoy the three of them on Facts, Fibs, and Fairytales, the legendary sex podcast starring and produced by Kayla. So take your time and wipe your hands.
In the mid-aughts The Queen of Pop continued to shed her “innocent” image she had cultivated with her debut. Through high-pitched and breathy vocals, Spears sings about “exploring” herself with the touch of her hand, expressing her self-love and sexuality in the process. In The Zone completed a much needed career transition gracefully with “Touch My Hand” acting as a telling thesis. Brit-Brit even went as far as to discuss the song in an interview saying: “I think it’s an empowering thing for girls… you know..”
-Kayla Vickers
If “Add It Up” was the angry rallying cry for adolescents everywhere, “Blister in the Sun” was the reward at the end of the shower. It’s about being young and aimless and pissed off; stoned out of your mind and staining your sheets without a clue about either. By now the song has pretty much been bought and sold to the point of mass exposure with placement in every film trailer featuring a teenager and it’s easy to see why. “Blister in the Sun” is a bullseye in its examination of self-esteem and how we try to carve out our personalities. It’s more about a time in your life than an ode to masturbation in general, but to be frank, this self-exploration process normally features a ton of masturbation. May we suggest Vaseline.
-Aaron Chan
Orgasms are a recurring motif in Mitski's songwriting, but where she often articulates her sexual themes with the presence of a partner, "Lonesome Love" talks about the kinds of orgasms we can only give ourselves. "Nobody fucks me like me," is a pretty funny line on first listen, but on repeat it starts to ring with melancholic ubiquity. It can be hard to find someone who you can truly be open with and it's always easier to come back to yourself both sexually and emotionally. There's comfort in this but also a deep sadness.
-Jared Marshall
Like anything, sometimes we just rub one out because we're bored. On one of Green Day's snarlingest early recordings, we find Billie Joe Armstrong trapped in his room; his boredom verges on delirium and he probably hasn't showered in a couple of days. He finally decides to touch himself to find some temporary plain of existence, you know? ...just something to do. You could peel "Longview" off someone's sticky, unbathed chest. It's messy and it's gross, but we all know the torment of being trapped inside.
-Jared Marshall
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Known to my generation as the song Jim runs to in order to catch Nadia undressing in AP1.
Perhaps the most poetic song ever written about choking the bishop, it would be dismissive to call “Flagpole Sitta'' a song about masturbation exclusively. The band take down the stigma of mental illness, the mainstreaming of Seattle, tongue piercings, the hopelessness of adolescent relationships, alienation, zines… scenes… machines; it’s pretty much Catcher In the Rye if Holden Caulfield opted for Big Star #2 instead of “Little Shirley Beans.”
A song so unashamed in its thesis that its title literally contains a metaphor for a dick, “Flagpole Sitta” is power pop perfection relegated to the 5 dollar CD bin. Its promise as an instant American classic is predicated on how it predicted the Grand Incel Moment of 2016. Modern. American. Classic.
-Aaron Chan
When I think of “She-Bop” I think of the ultimate female masturbation anthem. "They say that if I do it I'm going to go blind... I can't stop messin' with the danger zone?” Introducing this song at a Paris concert in 1987, Lauper said, "A bop a day keeps the doctor away. I recommend it."
It’s been speculated that Lauper wanted kids to think this was about dancing though its iconic video presents an upright bottle shooting mayonnaise into the air and Lauper walking around with a cane. The sign at the gas station? …“GIT OFF HERE” Choice of fuel grade? 'good x,’ 'better xx,' 'nirvana xxx,' 'single,' and ‘mutual’ woops I mean 'multiple.' Self Service is right.
-Kayla Vickers
Elvis Costello is too busy to be over it... the album, the tour, drugs everywhere, fights breaking out in the vicious London pub tour circuit, the publicity, the pharma, management won’t shut up, and the office phone hasn’t stopped ringing since “Alison.”
It’s non-stop. The consistent turnover of fashion fads that British pop stars are expected to keep up with is breakneck, his relationships are chaos, dirty looks are commonplace as is the mental torture of overthinking. So he does what any nominally sane 25 year old man without a girlfriend would do to handle the desensitization and emotional costs of a high stress lifestyle...he wrote a song.
The Picasso of sexual frustration, Costello’s opuses My Aim is True and This Year’s Model when placed side-by-side could blind someone with a blue light. “Pump it Up,” the crowning achievement of them all (an impressive repertoire which also features “Welcome to the Working Week,” “This Year’s Girl” and “Little Triggers”) is supposed to be invasive and itching, surmounting like a purple Hindenburg on its way to splash out the Atlantic Ocean. The 1-2 pattern of the kick and snare literally sound like the band is jerking off or a tribal rhythm Matthew McConaughey’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street would blast in his office in between his second and third sessions of rubbing one out (assumingly in the bathroom stall).
While “Pump It Up” probably refers to enhancing the pace of your life… for years now many fans have deciphered Costello’s often cryptic verse as literal rather than metaphor… and I get it. C’mon man.. “Pump It Up? Until you can feel it?” Clearly to Costello, ‘meta,’ ‘macguffin,’ and ‘masturbation as procurement’ are synonymous ideals. The gold standard.
-Aaron Chan
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