Betty Dodson

Betty Dodson (August 24, 1929October 31, 2020) was an American sex educator. An artist by training, she exhibited erotic art in New York, before pioneering the pro-sex feminist movement. Dodson's workshops and manuals encourage women to masturbate, often in groups.
Early career.
Originally from Kansas, Dodson went to New York City to train as an artist in 1950, and 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 a first one-woman show of erotic art at the Wickersham Gallery in New York City in 1968. 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.
Dodson criticized Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues", which she believed has a negative and restrictive view of sexuality and an anti-male bias.
Dodson earned a degree from the unaccredited Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality for her research work on sexuality.
Women's masturbation education.
Dodson became active in the sex-positive movement in the late 1960s. Dodson used the Hitachi Magic Wand, a powerful main-powered vibrator, in demonstrations and instructional classes to instruct women regarding self-pleasure techniques. She recommended women put a small towel over their sex organs in order to dull the sensation of the vibrator and prolong the pleasurable experience. Her technique became known as the Betty Dodson Method. Her sessions were known as Bodysex workshops and featured 15 naked women in supine position, each using a Magic Wand simultaneously to aid in masturbation. She provided a Magic Wand to each woman for these two-hour masturbation sessions. Dodson taught thousands of women to achieve orgasm using this technique.
Later career.
Dodson published a memoir, "Sex by Design", in 2010.
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.
Dodson died on October 31, 2020, from cirrhosis in a Manhattan nursing home.