Lily Allen Is Taking The Frills Out of Masturbation With Her New Vibrator
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These days, it's pretty easy to find out what lipstick or moisturizer your favorite celebrities use — but rarely is it possible to suss out their go-to vibrator for a quick and powerful orgasm. That's why, in an endless sea of celeb endorsements, Lily Allen's new gig as "Chief Liberation Officer" for German sex tech company Womanizer is so refreshing.
Along with creating her very own limited-edition version of the brand's famous clitoral vibrator, the 'Liberty' ($99; womanizer.com), Allen is also the face of the brand's #IMasturbate campaign, aimed at removing the stigma around female masturbation. (The partnership that came about after she wrote about the vibrator in her 2018 book, My Thoughts Exactly.)
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Part of the partnership, Allen says, is about women putting their own pleasure at the forefront of their sexual experiences. "Female pleasure as a whole is just like a bit of a weird subject. I feel like definitely my relationship with sex was that I felt very much like a vessel for male pleasure and I wasn't even really considering myself in that. You know, the pleasure that I got from sex was pleasing somebody else and the praise that I would get from that, rather than thinking, wow, I really enjoyed myself," she says. "I think that the patriarchy gets scared of women speaking in an empowered way about owning their own sexuality and their own pleasure because, ultimately, it takes them out of the equation, which is scary for them, because they like having access to women's bodies."
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With the campaign, Allen wants to change this — and remove the taboo around masturbation. "People tend to put masturbation under the sexual intercourse bracket in a weird way. Sort of like, well, you know, you must be masturbating because you're not getting it from a man," Allen tells InStyle. "We need to separate those two issues and think about it as something that we all deserve and we're all entitled to — and lots of people that are not even in relationships, or don't have access to a penis for having an orgasm with."
"I think it's a conversation that we don't have for some reason. I certainly was never sat down and had the masturbation talk with when I was a kid or a teenager and I wish that that had been more talked about because, quite frankly, it could have saved me a lot of time," continues.
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According to a recent Womanizer survey of 7,000 men and women from 14 countries, the "masturbation gap" between the genders is still 68%. While men masturbate about 156 times per year, the study reports, women only engage in the act around 50 times a year on average. Allen acknowledges that part of the problem is that while some men have "something hanging off of them, it's a bit more complicated for us." Luckily though, with so many high-tech vibrators available with the click of a button, it's arguably never been easier for women to achieve an orgasm — and it's never too late to start.
"I found it very difficult even in my late twenties to give myself the space and the time to explore this area... and by area, I mean my own body and, being intimate with myself," she says. "I wasn't very uncomfortable in my own skin and it wasn't easy for me to connect with myself on that level — and I'm still not very good at doing that with my hands, you know? So this toy has really taken that barrier away I think it probably enables me to have a relationship with masturbation more like how a man's relationship to it is — which is functional and not very unemotional."
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And by that, she means it gets the job done efficiently: "I don't feel that with this product in particular, that I have to, you know, draw myself a hot bath and put chilled out music on and light the candles and read an erotic novel. I just switch it on, put it on my clitoris, and I'm having an orgasm pretty quickly."
