She's taught thousands of women how to come and spent the past 30 years demystifying women's sexuality - and getting on the wrong side of Germaine Greer. Katrina Fox talks to the original sex-positive feminist, Betty Dodson.

"Masturbation is our first and natural form of sexual activity and if that's inhibited or damaged, then we suffer for the rest of our lives," Betty Dodson explains matter-of-factly from her home in New York. The 76-year-old's lifelong passion for the subject began in the early 1970s with her Bodysex workshops, in which she taught groups of women how to masturbate to orgasm. Her book, Sex for One: The Joy of Self-Loving was a feminist classic in the 1980s and became a best-seller in the 1990s, by which time Dodson had been declared "the mother of masturbation" by the media.

Nowadays she offers private sex-coaching sessions and manages her own website www.bettydodson.com offering advice and selling selected sex aids. Her latest offering is a DVD Orgasmic Women: 13 Self-Loving Divas, which features a variety of women of all sexual orientations pleasuring themselves. Dodson admits it's both educational and porn. "Oh it's definitely porn - I want it to be considered as that - this is feminist porn, honey," she laughs. "This is what I've wanted to do forever!"

Dodson, who grew up in Kansas with a mother who believed masturbation was a natural activity for women, thinks porn is "wonderful" in concept but wants to see improvements. "I want better images, better sexual information, more clitoral stimulation, more authenticity," she explains. Her unabashed pro-sex stance set her apart from the anti-porn radical lesbian feminists in the 70s and 80s who labelled her among other things "crazy" and "vulgar".
"The sad part is that the media only wants to get the view of the flaming radicals because they make better copy than those of us who are more sensible," Dodson says. "I'm a feminist and I think I've done a lot of good. We've always had a handful of feminism poster girls that get a lot of press and they may be sex negative. I know your Germaine Greer doesn't like me at all. I wish she'd write more about me because the last article she wrote, she had my name in it six times and called me a 'misguided career masturbator'. I love it! I just dropped the 'misguided' - I'm a career masturbator - I mean, how many people have taken that on?"

What was once the domain of the radical lesbian feminists has been taken over by the Christian right with their prohibitive views on sex, so you'd expect Dodson to have been on the receiving end of their criticisms, but this hasn't been the case so far. "It's fascinating - you'd think I'd get a lot of hate mail, but they don't hate me enough to write to me," she says. "People worry about being loved enough, I'm sitting here worrying about not being hated enough!"

That's not to say she's escaped censorship though. "My entire career has been confronted with censorship," she laments. "You can't talk about masturbation in America without confronting censorship. Someone does an interview with me for a big magazine and then I get a call saying 'I've spoken to my editor and we're not going to run it, it's too controversial'. When I do documentaries, my best information ends up on the cutting-room floor. People have trouble dealing with sexual honesty. We all have our individual romantic or idealistic ideas and to get straight information that masturbation is our basic form of sex - more people are having sex from masturbation than any other way - is hard because who wants to admit they're masturbating more than fucking?"

While the raunch culture has led to women's sexuality being much more prominent in the media, with TV shows such as Sex and the City, and reality TV stars masturbating on camera, Dodson argues this is, in fact, "backward". "The characters in Sex and the City were all scrambling for a man - I don't call that a good message for women," she says. "Couldn't just one of them say 'look, I prefer to masturbate than go out with another one of these jerks'?"

Honesty is the only thing that will help people become more comfortable with their sexual selves, Dodson says. "If we all talked honestly about what's really happening in our sex lives, we'd realise that we're all normal because it's going to be about diversity. We make choices - we show what we like in fashion, if you go out to dinner with someone, you find out what they prefer in food, and we ought to be able to have a conversation to find out what people prefer when it comes to sex, but we keep that completely private and as long as it's private we're all available for governmental manipulation."

Some dykes may argue she's got the ideal job, literally taking a hands-on approach to helping women achieve orgasm, so where does Dodson's own sexuality sit in the spectrum? "I consider myself a lesbian, but I'm a bisexual lesbian," she says. "I went through the 70s and 80s saying 'I'm a heterosexual bisexual lesbian', and I found it was fascinating - whenever I said that, no one asked me another thing - the whole subject was dropped."

No one could accuse Dodson of not practising what she preaches, and old age is not slowing down the mother of masturbation. "I've spent the past six years with a young man, which was a nice break, dipping back into heterosexuality again from all my time with women. Now I'm ready to have a phase where partner sex becomes secondary and masturbation becomes primary. I need to get back in touch with who I am sexually - and I have a feeling that an affair with a woman is coming up. I consider the 70s to be the youth of old age. So all you women out there who are afraid of getting older - just keep your orgasms in place, eat a lot of vegetables, take exercise, and you'll be fine."

Orgasmic Women and lots of other stuff can be ordered from Betty's website www.bettydodson.com

LOTL is Australia's national lesbian magazine. For more information visit the magazine's website at www.lotl.com