Buzz by Hallie Lieberman

Author:Hallie Lieberman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

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Meanwhile, more than a thousand miles away, Joani Blank had spent years teaching women to masturbate. Born on July 4, 1937, in a Boston suburb, Blank was born to a mother who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family from Lithuania and a father of German descent whose paternal grandfather was a Torah scribe. Although both parents were raised religiously, they chose not to raise Blank that way.540 After Blank graduated from college, she trained as a public health educator. She bounced around the country working in Michigan, New Hampshire, and West Virginia, before moving to San Francisco in 1971.

By the time she moved to San Francisco, the sexual revolution was well under way, and Blank began working at Planned Parenthood.541 One of the first women she met in the city was Maggi Rubenstein, a professor, sex therapist, and bisexual activist who urged her to join the new consciousness-raising group she had started. At the time, Rubenstein was working as a nurse and medical school instructor at the University of California–San Francisco, but within the next five years Rubenstein transformed the Bay Area into a sex-positive mecca, cofounding three seminal groups in rapid succession: San Francisco’s Sex Information Hotline (1973), the San Francisco Bisexual Center (1976), and the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (1976).542 Her influence on Blank was profound, as she inspired Blank to begin her sexual advocacy, installing Blank as one of the first volunteers at SFSIH, where she dispensed sexual advice to local callers.

Like Williams had, Blank also attended one of Dodson’s workshops and became inspired—so inspired, in fact, that she even let Dodson draw her labia for her book Liberating Masturbation.543 Blank began working as a sex therapist with Dr. Lonnie Barbach at UCSF, who was a codirector of the Human Sexuality Program. Barbach had created a series of sex workshops for inorgasmic women, and she went on to publish a successful book based on her workshops in 1975.544 In the ten-week courses that Blank cotaught with Barbach, the two would teach women to orgasm through masturbation. Although they were similar to Dodson’s workshops, these courses had one main difference: Participants did not masturbate in front of one another; masturbation was their homework. After completing their homework, they would return to the group and discourse on whether or not they had orgasms and describe what their orgasms had felt like.545

For women who struggled with having orgasms, vibrators were not the first recourse. “Now we didn’t start out with vibrators for very good reason. We did not want people to use the vibrator as a way to avoid touching themselves. We wanted them to practice with their hands first,” Blank said. Only if other methods did not work did Barbach and Blank recommend vibrators.546 Although they did not suggest vibrators as a first step, Barbach and Blank were both strong advocates of vibrators. Barbach overcame women’s objections to vibrators by using a transportation metaphor: “A vibrator may be equivalent to using training wheels to learn to ride a bicycle.

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