Betty Dodson
| Betty Dodson | |
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| Born |
August 24, 1929 Wichita, Kansas, U.S. |
| Known for | Sex-positive feminism |
Betty Dodson (born August 24, 1929) is an American sex educator. An artist by training, she exhibited erotic art in New York, before pioneering the pro-sex feminist movement, separate from mainstream feminism, which she sees as needlessly political and hostile towards males. Dodson’s workshops and manuals encourage women to masturbate, often in groups. Although bisexual herself, she repudiates the labels that define sexuality.
Originally from Kansas, Dodson went to New York City to train as an artist in 1950, and has lived on Manhattan's Madison Avenue since 1962. In 1959, Dodson married Frederick Stern, an advertising director, with the marriage ending in divorce in 1965. Dodson's quest for "sexual self-discovery" began after her divorce. Dodson held the first one-woman show of erotic art at the Wickersham Gallery in New York City in 1968. She left the art world to teach sex to women. She is widely known as a pioneer in women's liberation, and to a somewhat lesser extent in men's sexual liberation, having sold more than one million copies of her first book, Sex for One. Much of her fame has come from her work not only advocating masturbation, but conducting workshops for more than 30 years in which groups of about 10 or more women (and at least once a group of men) would talk, explore their own bodies, and masturbate together. She hosted a Public-access television cable television program in New York City in the early 1980s, and conducted her workshop – a dozen or so nude women discussing and practicing masturbation – on TV. Her Web site, called "Betty Dodson's Genital Gallery," shows many films of masturbation and intercourse, with close-up views of genitals.
She is a founder of the pro-sex feminist movement, having left behind the more traditional feminist movement, because she considered it , antisexual and over-politicized. Dodson considers too much is made of sexual labels and embraces them all by calling herself a heterosexual, bisexual lesbian. She looks forward to the day we can all be just "sexual." In recent years she has criticized Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, which she believes has a negative and restrictive view of sexuality and an anti-male bias.
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