Betty Dodson

Dodson went to New York City to train as an artist in 1950, and lived on Manhattan's Madison Avenue since 1962.[1] In 1959, Dodson married Frederick Lief, an advertising director, with the marriage ending in divorce in 1965.[1] Dodson's quest for "sexual self-discovery" began after her divorce.[1] Dodson held a first one-woman show of erotic art at the Wickersham Gallery in New York City in 1968.[2] In 1987, her Ms. magazine memoir and instructional series, Sex for One, was published. Random House later published the work broadly and it was translated to 25 languages.[3]

Dodson criticized Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, which she believed has a negative and restrictive view of sexuality and an anti-male bias.[4]

Dodson earned a degree from the unaccredited Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality for her research work on sexuality.[5]

Carlin Ross

Dodson became active in the sex-positive movement in the late 1960s.[6]

From the 1970s onwards, she organised Bodysex workshops. Bodysex is a practice developed by Betty Dodson to help women connect with their bodies and erogenous zones, heal shames, improve pleasure perception, and promote self-love. In the workshops, women were guided to explore their bodies and masturbate together to learn, with guidance, how to have an orgasm as a woman alone and with a sexual partner.[7] Her two-hour sessions featured 15 naked women, each using a Hitachi Magic Wand to aid in masturbation.[8] Dodson used the Magic Wand, a main-powered vibrator, in demonstrations and instructional classes to instruct women regarding self-pleasure techniques.[9][10] She provided a Magic Wand to each woman for these sessions.[11] She recommended women put a small towel over their vulva in order to dull the sensation of the vibrator and prolong the pleasurable experience.[12] The essence of her method was to provide vaginal and clitoral stimulation at the same time.[13] Dodson taught thousands of women to achieve orgasm using this technique.[8] Her technique became known as the Betty Dodson Method.[14]

She worked for many years with the lawyer Carlin Ross as a business partner, and the two women held their workshops mostly together.

A study conducted in 2007 tested the "Betty Dodson Method" in group therapy with 500 previously anorgasmic women. Of the 500, 465 (93%) had orgasms during therapy, 35 (7%) did not.[15] In a 2021 study, the female techniques for pleasurable vaginal intercourse taught by Dodson ("Angling, Rocking, Shallowing, Pairing") are again described by women.[16]

Dodson published a memoir, Sex by Design, in 2010.[1]

In 2014, she stated that she considered herself a fourth-wave feminist, stating that the previous waves of feminist were banal and anti-sexual, which is why she has chosen to look at a new stance of feminism, fourth wave feminism. In 2014, Dodson worked with women to discover their sexual desires through masturbation. Dodson said her work has gained a support from an audience of young, successful women who have never had an orgasm. This includes fourth-wave feminists – those rejecting the anti-pleasure stance they believe third-wave feminists stand for.[17]

Dodson died on October 31, 2020, at the age of 91, from cirrhosis in a Manhattan nursing home.[18][3]

• Dodson, Betty (1978). Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love. Dodson.
• Dodson, Betty (1996). Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving. New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks. ISBN 0-517-88607-3. OCLC 15696491.
• Dodson, Betty (2003). Orgasms for Two: The Joy of Partnersex. Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale. ISBN 978-1-4000-5203-5.
• Dodson, Betty (2016). Sex by Design: The Betty Dodson Story. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN 978-1-5308-3412-9.
• Dodson, Betty (2013). Learn to Orgasm in 4 Acts. Betty A Dodson Foundation Incorporated. ISBN 978-0-578-12140-6.

• Official website