"You don't expect it and then suddenly, it takes hold of you! My sexual eruption took place around the age of 11." That's how 45-year-old Julie described her discovery of masturbation. Julie has a very full life. She's an entrepreneur as well as a cognitive science researcher and has taught at Harvard. She's currently studying psychoanalysis, which comes through in her story. "At the time, the urge came at night," she said. "I masturbated, knowing full well what I was doing. One day, my mother put me and my sister in separate rooms, and I couldn't help wondering if that was the reason. I've never talked about it with them. At home, sexuality was more than taboo. Even today, my sister and I wouldn't talk about it. I think it's a shame not to have had support at that time." A strong, embarrassing feeling, bordering on the forbidden. A "secret garden," as it's sometimes called.

So much so that we continue to associate it with boys. The pie scene in American Pie will certainly be familiar. But does a female equivalent come to mind so quickly? Male masturbation techniques, too, are much better visualized than female ones. We imagine – wrongly – that women stick their fingers in their vaginas and that in a few moments, almost miraculously, they come.

From childhood, the discovery of female sexuality has been taboo. "The concept of the sweet, clean little girl, completely under control – from the playground to the sexual sphere – has always existed and still does," said Miriam Félix, co-founder of the French Institute for the Support of Childhood Sexual Health.

However, it would seem that things are changing. According to the vast 2023 Context of Sexuality in France survey by the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM), the initial results of which were published on November 13, female masturbation is on the rise. In the previous editions of the survey, 42.2% of women claimed to have masturbated once in 1992 and 56.5% in 2006. Today that figure is at 72.9%. Without catching up with men (92.6%), this surge is big enough to be presented as a "major change" by Armelle Andro, demographer at Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne university who co-coordinated the survey. "Today, women have a masturbation trajectory identical to that of men," she said. "Up until 2006, women who said they masturbated did so after entering sexuality, as a form of secondary or conjugal sexuality. This is no longer the case. Young girls are learning to master their sexual pleasure on their own, in a way that's disconnected from their first adventure with a girl or a boy."

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