An excerpt from The Dry Season by Melissa Febos

My first orgasm was to the movie Valley Girl, starring Nicolas Cage, during which my grandmother lay asleep behind me on the sofa, but my first lover was the bathtub faucet. How did I even think to position myself under it, feet flat against the wall on either side of the hot and cold knobs? It wasn’t a natural position; it was a natural inclination. After that, I experimented with all sorts of household objects and reading materials from Valley of the Dolls to Rubyfruit Jungle.

How comforting it was to learn, years later, of the “hydrotherapy” craze that took hold of European and North American bathhouses, beginning in the late eighteenth century. From Bath, England, to Saratoga Springs, doctors touted the water cure for the disease of hysteria, which had been literally plaguing women for centuries.

The word hysteria is derived from the Greek word for uterus, which Plato famously described as “the animal within the animal” and was believed to set out wandering around the body if it was deprived of a baby, drawn by powerful smells like a raccoon to garbage cans. Many men, from ancient Greeks to doctors who specialized in gynecology hundreds of years later, postulated that a bad case of Wandering Womb led to hysteria, that better-known affliction about which much has been written as far back as the fifth century BC.

Symptoms might include headaches, fatigue; any sort of melancholy, frustration, or anxiety; an excess or deficit of sexual interest with “an approved male partner”—basically, the expression of any response other than total contentment to the patriarchal structures that governed their lives or a failure to reinforce the androcentric model of sex that reigned (and still does).

Hydrotherapy most popularly featured a high-pressure shower or “douche” that massaged the pelvic region—sometimes in the exact configuration I discovered at eleven. According to an 1851 essay about an English spa by R. J. Lane, after treatment the patients often claimed to feel “as much elation and buoyancy of spirits, as if they had been drinking champagne.” Common prescriptions suggested application of the water douche for four to five minutes, the same length of time in which researchers like Alfred Kinsey and Shere Hite later found most people able to achieve orgasm via manual masturbation.

Doctors of the nineteenth century claimed that more than 70 percent of women suffered from hysteria, thereby making it the pandemic of their time.

Despite my lack of neurosis around masturbation, I didn’t get my first vibrator until my junior year of college, when a friend gifted me a pink Pocket Rocket. A bestseller for some forty years, it’s the Toyota of vibrators: unglamorous, reliable, longitudinal. I used it for a decade, until its buzz grew so loud that it sounded like an actual Toyota in need of a new muffler, before sputtering out forever.

In my early twenties, my best friend and I lived in a series of Brooklyn apartments and shared a gargantuan vibrator that we christened “the Hammer of the Gods.” It was roughly the size and shape of a human arm, hinged at the “elbow,” with a blunt end where its hand would be. Whenever we felt moved, we shuffled into the other’s room, unplugged it, and carried it to our own bedroom. We practically had to wear jeans when using it because the force of its vibration even on the lowest setting would otherwise render our genitals insensate.

When desire becomes a perfunctory part of one’s job, it’s quickly shorn of whatever previous aura it carried.

The Hammer wasn’t what either of us would’ve chosen (most likely a Hitachi Magic Wand, that more elegant powerhouse vibrator) but it had been a gift from a client at the dungeon where we both worked as professional dominatrices. That’s where we met and where I learned how to talk freely about my own pleasure. When desire (or anything, really) becomes a perfunctory part of one’s job, it’s quickly shorn of whatever previous aura it carried. There’s no room for the sacred or profane in shoptalk.

The gifting client would come in weekly for a session with his current favorite, moving on every month or so to a newer hire. His requests were predictable: he basically just wanted to get you off with a giant vibrator or to watch you do it yourself. It seemed like a good deal, getting paid seventy-five dollars an hour to be brought to orgasm, or to masturbate for a one-man audience whose opinion meant next to nothing.

Nonetheless, I only saw him once. I found it unbearable to be watched.

It makes sense that nineteenth-century men wanted the hysteria “solution” to be applicable only by them. They got to have it all: a model of ideal sex that served them alone in terms of pleasure and procreation, to medicalize women’s pleasure, and to encourage women’s dependence on them. This way, they could deprive women of the legitimate satisfactions of both social freedom and sexual pleasure, pathologize their reasonable response, and then charge them money for a modicum of temporary relief. What a coup, for men to convince us that being masturbated to orgasm in a clinical setting by them was a “cure” for the imaginary illness whose symptoms were our humanity, and that to masturbate ourselves (along with drinking coffee or alcohol, and a slew of other ordinary behaviors) was yet another cause of the illness.

How appropriate that George Taylor, who patented his steampowered table vibrator in the late nineteenth century, called the cumbersome and expensive apparatus the “Manipulator.”

Locked inside the bathroom as a teenager, hazy with steam and the sough of rushing water, I felt most alone. In the trance of orgasm, I forgot myself completely. I forgot the bath, the room, the house, the town—every context in which I understood myself. Without a self, a body is everywhere and nowhere at once. Pleasure becomes synesthetic, exploding like splattered paint across the sky of consciousness. It’s a big bang of deafening thunder, the smell of lavender and salt.

“In this vision my soul, as God would have it, rises up high into the vault of heaven and into the changing sky and spreads itself out,” wrote Hildegard von Bingen, the Benedictine abbess and mystic saint who had held my interest since those years when I first discovered erotic pleasure. All these years later, my decision to spend three months celibate led me back to her, and I remembered what had so enraptured me back then. I had no idea yet how important she would become to me.

Before Hildegard, my only impressions of nuns were gleaned from The Sound of Music and my father’s frightening tales of Catholic school. While Hildegard may have embodied elements of both of these—her musical genius is still widely appreciated today and a cruel streak would have served her well—nowhere had I encountered an image of a nun so powerful as she. Hildegard was empowered in ways people recognized as masculine: politically, intellectually, scientifically, linguistically, and artistically, but she embodied these in a wholly feminine way. That is, her powers served only God, nature, and her community. She seemed to lack the colonizing impulse that accompanied such power in men. Above all, she was a visionary.

In her seventies, Hildegard described her lifelong visions in a letter: “The light which I see . . . is far, far brighter than a cloud which carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it ‘the reflection of the living Light.’ And as the sun, the moon, and the stars appear in water, so writings, sermons, virtues, and certain human actions take form for me and gleam.”

The aloneness of orgasm, the unbeingness of it, is similar in many ways to that of creation. When I am in the trance of creation, my self and its external contexts disappear, though sensation persists. The work becomes a mirror that reflects something other than the story of the self, something that disperses it to make room for a different kind of story.

Like that of most nuns, the goal of Hildegard von Bingen’s celibacy was to relate to God. But God didn’t assume human form. The only human forms in her abbey were other women, and she worked her whole life to make it so. At their inductions, she dressed them as brides in extravagant white silk, their hair flowing long and wild. She had passionate relationships with some, though allegedly she never had sex with anyone.

How then, did she write the first description of a female orgasm? How did she know the “sense of heat in her brain,” or how “the woman’s sexual organs contract, and all the parts that are ready to open up during the time of menstruation now close, in the same way as a strong man can hold something enclosed in his fist”?

It was hard for me to imagine that nuns like her did not give themselves pleasure. I had given myself orgasms without even touching myself, aided by only a pillow, or the force of my own mind. Perhaps they did not connect that phenomena with the misogynistic rhetoric of the church around women’s sexuality that called it tantamount to evil. I liked to imagine they interpreted it as a holy gift, a vision, a fruit of devotion, the hand of God himself.

At the summer camp I attended as an adolescent, we played a game called Fishbowl, during which all of the girls would sit in a circle while the boys sat silently outside of it (in a following round, we would reverse positions). A female counselor would ask questions that the boys had submitted anonymously ahead of time. One of the questions the boys always asked was What does a female orgasm feel like?

Convulsion, we said.

A bright light flashing. A ripe persimmon, squeezed in a fist.

The mystics’ writings supported my hope. Beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg writes of eating and drinking Christ in sensuous rapture, while beguine Agnes Blannbekin tells a bizarre story of conjuring the foreskin of Christ on her tongue and swallowing it, an act which wracks her whole body with orgasmic pleasure. She repeats it one hundred times. Catherine of Siena used Christ’s foreskin as a ring when she wed him. Teresa of Ávila writes of an angel who “plunged [his] dart several times into my heart and that it reached deep within me. When he drew it out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deepest part of me; and he left me all on fire with great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan, and the sweetness this greatest pain caused me was so superabundant that there is no desire capable of taking it away.”

Some of these descriptions read like straightforward erotica, Jesus fanfiction that is sometimes quite kinky and seemingly stripped of coy metaphors. Others, like those of von Bingen, seemed more like oneness with the world, a spiritual experience achieved through the body (as so many are).

The female mystics claimed a desire to yield to the divine, to disperse their selfhood into the universe. Superficially, these expressions appeared to reinforce a familiar edict for the feminine: to submit. But the mystic saints’ descriptions of yielding often sounded nothing like submission. When the divine wrote through a person, her voice might more resemble that of a god than a supplicant. Artists find imaginative means of articulating our most stigmatized desires. “I am the flame above the beauty in the fields,” wrote von Bingen. “I shine in the waters; I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And with the airy wind, I quicken all things vitally by an unseen, all-sustaining life.”

The more I read about Hildegard and other women who lived in devotion to God and seclusion from men, the more I saw it as a harbor for ambition. Imagine a woman rich in talent, in possession of an exceptional mind, a woman who hungers for power and craves challenge. What hell for her to live in a society where nothing is expected of her, nor indeed allowed, but to breed and cook and clean and otherwise care for men who are her inferiors.

Hildegard claimed visions from early childhood, but no one particularly cared until she was forty. As soon as her direct line to God was recognized by men, she claimed that God had commanded her: “Make known the wonders you live, put them in writing, and speak.”

In the High Middle Ages, women weren’t allowed to write music in the church and certainly no one was interested in their ideas or stories, but Hildegard became one of the most powerful and prolific thinkers in history. She wrote copious religious and scientific texts, was an unparalleled composer and lyricist, and invented a secret language for her nuns to speak to one another. Her understanding of physical pleasure seems not to have hindered this, though entanglement with another person might have.

Perhaps the mystic nuns simply wanted to live freely among other women, to compose music and write and wear luxurious silks and let their hair flow freely. Proving an exceptional relationship to God was the single route to such freedoms. Yielding to the divine was the only way to avoid yielding to men.

I did not think a desire to be free precluded a relationship to the divine, or that either precluded erotic pleasure. The body was an instrument for all of these, but in every case, its retrieval from the possession of others seemed a first step.

As an adult, I had never been a light-candles-around-the-bathtub type of masturbator. I was more of an eat-a-bag-of-chips kind of masturbator. A procrasturbator. The most reliable time that I masturbated was in the early stages of writing something. It was a useful way to burn off the nervous energy of breaking ground on a new project, so that I could focus when I approached the page.

One definition of compulsion is an act meant to relieve a mental obsession, or some kind of distress. In that sense, my masturbatory practices qualified as compulsive. I was compelled by the anxiety of writing to watch a round of porn and have a handful of orgasms.

Despite my inclination to please, when lovers asked me to touch myself so they could watch, I always refused. I was shy, but that wasn’t it. The prospect repelled me the way that client with the vibrator had. There was no performance to my self-pleasure and there was so much performance with lovers. Self-pleasure was the sole realm of true pleasure, unmediated or degraded by performance. To allow the gaze of a spectator to intrude upon that realm would have polluted it. It would have activated my internal spectator. Masturbating for a lover had more in common with sex work than with my private pleasure.

Unlike most other sex acts, I had never masturbated when I didn’t want to. I had never followed a vibrator into a hotel room I did not want to visit. As a young person, self-pleasure seemed in direct opposition to my partnered experiences. Though I’d had plenty of orgasms with other people in my twenties and thirties, there was always an element of performance, of body consciousness, of other-orientation. The pleasure of a solitary orgasm did often feel like sunlight or thunder—elemental.

I’d had no internalized male gaze that directed my masturbation, and not because the activity was exempt from it; self-pleasure is a whole genre of porn, with copious subgenres. My masturbatory fantasies abounded with all sorts of hyper-patriarchal shit, but those images didn’t dominate my consciousness or govern what I did with my body. This exemption was likely due to the fact that my practice of self-pleasure predated that of performance. It was a relationship I formed with myself before I ever formed a sexual relationship with another person. While I had built an image of myself out of others’ esteem and others’ desires, one that I monitored during sex with partners, I had another, truer self, that I could sense but not see, because I had not objectified her. I felt her in that private space, where there was no distance between the act and the self, the self and its image.

My need for celibacy had more to do with performance than it did with pleasure, I realized. I wanted to close the distance between that private self and the self I created in relationships, who was created by them. It was not physical lust that had compelled me from monogamous relationship to monogamous relationship. If my ceaseless entanglements were a result of the ways that I related to other people, then the goal of my celibacy was to relate to myself. The masturbatory me might serve as a kind of teacher, then. A reference point for pleasure without performance, for a self without a story.

I decided that my celibacy would allow masturbation. My abstinence was about my relations with other people, not the expulsion or containment of desire. It was a space in which to tease apart the compulsive pursuit of “love” from real, sustaining forms of love. Sex with other people complicated that task. Sex with myself did not. Solitude could be sexy. In solitude, as in self-pleasure, the body opened. But if not to another, then to what? That night I ran a bath. I dipped my body in the steaming water.

As I lay submerged, the grit of salt beneath my thighs, breasts bobbing toward the surface, I listened to the hum of the refrigerator and the hiss of traffic in the distance. I watched my chest rise and fall with breath. I saw that most familiar hand, calling me home.

Excerpted from THE DRY SEASON by Melissa Febos. Copyright © 2025 by Melissa Febos. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

An earlier version of these pages was first published in Sex and the Single Woman: 25 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic, eds. Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson.