If you clicked this headline and then immediately adjusted your screen brightness like you were defusing a bomb… I see you.
If you opened it and then did that little stealth maneuver — phone tucked closer to your chest, eyes darting, maybe even a quick dash to the bathroom because the word masturbation still has the power to make a grown adult blush — this article is for you.
And if you’re reading this on public transport, in the supermarket line, or anywhere a stranger might accidentally glance down and catch the topic? I want to give you a high five. Not because you’re “brave,” but because you’re doing something quietly radical: treating sexual health like the health care it actually is.
Sexual health isn’t extra credit. It’s not a bonus feature for the women who “still feel sexy.” It’s not a frivolous conversation you’re supposed to outgrow. It’s physiology, quality of life, mood, sleep, pain, confidence, relationship dynamics, and, yes, sometimes the difference between feeling like yourself and feeling like you’ve been replaced by an anxious raccoon who wakes up at 3 a.m. for no reason.
So let’s talk about the question behind the headline: Can masturbation reduce menopause symptoms? For some women, the answer is yes.
Not in a “this replaces hormone therapy” or in a “just orgasm and your hot flashes will evaporate” way. But in a quieter, more realistic way, this low-cost, accessible behavior might meaningfully improve some of the symptoms that make perimenopause and menopause feel so disruptive.
What does research tell us?
In late 2025, a study published in Menopause set out to explore something that’s been hiding in plain sight: whether masturbation plays any role in relieving symptoms associated with menopause. The researchers surveyed a demographically representative U.S. sample of 1,178 women aged 40 to 65 and asked what they were doing to manage symptoms and whether it helped.
Nearly one in five perimenopausal and postmenopausal women reported that self-pleasure relieved their symptoms, and the benefits women most often described clustered around mood changes and sleep disturbances.
Here’s the part of the paper that makes me want to gently bang my head on my clinic desk: Very few women reported ever discussing masturbation with a clinician (a whopping 4 to 7 percent) — even while many said they would consider trying it for symptom relief if their doctor recommended it. That gap between what women are experiencing and what medicine is willing to talk about matters just as much as the actual symptom data. If something is low-risk for most people, physiologically plausible, and potentially beneficial for mood, sleep, and pelvic health, it deserves to be discussed with the same normal, non-weird energy we bring to… literally everything else.
How trustworthy are these findings?
Is this good science, or just a spicy headline? It's both. And that’s exactly why it’s interesting.
The Menopause study is valuable because it’s large and designed to reflect the U.S. population, which makes its “real-world” findings harder to dismiss as niche.
But it also has limits. Much of it relies on self-report, which can’t prove cause and effect. It can tell us what women notice and what they believe helps, but it can’t fully separate “masturbation improved my sleep” from “I masturbated on nights when I was already less stressed” — or account for the placebo/expectation effect that shows up in every area of medicine.
That doesn’t make it useless. It makes it a starting point. The kind of starting point we often accept in women’s health because we’ve spent decades underfunding and under-studying the topic in the first place.
Then there’s the second layer: Follow-up work and a clinical trial framework have been discussed publicly through the Kinsey Institute’s collaboration with the sexual wellness company Womanizer. In that report, the researchers describe a two-phase clinical study in peri- and postmenopausal women with periods of masturbation abstinence, masturbation using preferred methods, and masturbation using a clitoral device. Tracking symptoms across time, that report offers findings that are very headline-friendly, with high proportions of participants reporting openness to masturbation as symptom support, and very low proportions saying a doctor has ever discussed it with them.
And we need to say the financial part out loud, calmly: Womanizer funded this research partnership and report. That doesn’t automatically invalidate findings — industry funding exists across medicine — but it does mean we should hold two truths at once: The data can be promising, and replication without commercial ties is important.
In other words, I’m interested, not gullible. That’s the sweet spot.
Why this might work: menopause is a nervous system story
Menopause is often framed like an ovary-only event. But if you spend five minutes listening to women in perimenopause, you realize it behaves more like a full-body nervous system transition.
It’s a list: sleep changes, mood volatility, anxiety spikes, hot flashes that feel like internal fireworks, and so many more. A body that suddenly reacts differently to stress, alcohol, caffeine, or heat. A brain that gets foggy, changes your temperament, and makes word-finding a thing. A libido that becomes unpredictable or, for some, non-existent. And possibly, sex with pain that arrives like an uninvited houseguest and then refuses to leave.
This is part of why the physiology behind orgasm is worth taking seriously.
Orgasm is not just a “sexual moment.” It’s a neurochemical and autonomic event. Arousal and orgasm engage blood flow, pelvic nerve signaling, muscle contraction, and the stress-regulation systems that influence sleep and mood.
The Kinsey/Womanizer work has raised questions about whether masturbation — especially when it leads to orgasm — could be linked to improved autonomic regulation (think: the balance between “revved up” and “rest and digest”). That hypothesis includes interest in vagal pathways and stress modulation, which is biologically plausible even if we’re still early in the evidence journey. And then there’s the pelvic side of the story: Arousal increases genital blood flow, and sexual response is intimately connected to vascular responsiveness — something that has been studied in menopause-related sexual physiology for years.
The orgasm gap is the elephant in the bedroom
Now let’s talk about something that makes masturbation during menopause uniquely relevant. If partnered sex reliably produced orgasm for most women, masturbation probably wouldn’t be “special.” It would just be one of many ways to get there.
But a 2024 scoping review on the gender gap in partnered orgasm shows what many women already know in their bones. In heterosexual encounters, women’s orgasm rates rise dramatically when behaviors include specific clitoral stimulation, suggesting the gap is driven heavily by social dynamics, not “women’s bodies being broken.” The review also notes that women are more likely to orgasm when masturbating (or partnered with women) than when partnered with men.
So if orgasm is part of the mechanism for mood or sleep improvement via neurochemicals and nervous system shifts, then masturbation may be more reliably effective for some women, simply because it’s more likely to result in orgasm. Not because heterosexual partnerships are terrible or because sexual intercourse is "bad" and doesn’t lead to orgasm, but because self-pleasure often offers the one thing menopause can make harder to access: control. And control matters when your body feels like it’s changing the rules without telling you.
Why aren’t we talking about this in the clinic?
I think you know the answer, but I’ll spell it out for you. Because most of medicine is still weird about women’s pleasure (that’s my very technical answer).
The fact that only a small minority of women report a clinician ever discussing masturbation is not just a trivia statistic — it’s a symptom of a larger cultural problem: We treat women’s sexual function as optional, and women’s sexual pleasure as awkward or uncomfortable.
There are organizations that can help guide you to physicians and other healthcare providers that are fluent in sexual health as healthcare. ISSWSH (the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health) explicitly frames sexual health as a fundamental right and pushes for better education, research, and care access. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists provides a list of certified educators.
That matters because menopause care gaps aren’t just about hormones. They’re also about the parts of menopause we treat as too personal to address — until women feel isolated, ashamed, or convinced they’re “just supposed to tolerate it.”
Here is my physician's perspective, plainly: if it hurts, if it disrupts sleep, if it affects mood, if it changes your relationship, if it changes your sense of self — then it belongs in health care. I promise, by bringing it up in the clinic you are not “making it weird.” Sexual health questions are health questions.
How to embrace self-pleasure without turning it into homework
Masturbation is not a mandate, but it is an option — one that can be explored or enjoyed if it feels right for you individually.
If menopause has brought dryness, irritation, or pain, the first step isn’t forcing yourself through discomfort. It’s treating the underlying tissue changes, sometimes with high-quality lubricants and moisturizers, and often with prescription vaginal estrogen.
If you haven’t masturbated in a long time — or ever — starting doesn’t have to look like a dramatic scene from a movie. It can look like learning what your body likes now, because menopause can shift sensation and response in ways that are real but not permanent or hopeless.
And yes, sex toys can be part of that. Not as a consumer trend, but as adaptive support. For some women, devices that provide consistent clitoral stimulation help bridge the gap between desire and orgasm when arousal feels less automatic than it used to.
If any of this feels uncomfortable to even read, that’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. That’s a sign we were raised in a culture that still treats women’s pleasure as optional. It’s okay to feel uncomfortable, but remind yourself why the discomfort shouldn’t limit you.
Here’s what I want to leave you with, long after the shock factor of this headline fades: If masturbation turns out to be one small tool that helps some women sleep better, feel calmer, and feel more at home in their bodies during a major life transition, we should be able to talk about it with the same clinical normalcy we bring to magnesium, therapy, yoga, or hormone therapy.
If you’re a patient, bring it up. You can literally say, “I have a sexual health question,” and stop there. A good clinician will follow your lead.
If you’re a clinician: Ask. Normalize it. Give permission. The silence is doing harm. We took a big oath about that (can’t forget about the Hippocratic).
And if you’re still reading this in the supermarket line… seriously, high five.
Sarah Berg, MD, is a board-certified OB-GYN and certified menopause practitioner who spent over a decade in clinical practice caring for women across all stages of life. She now focuses on evidence-based education and storytelling that helps women understand their bodies, prioritize preventative care, and navigate midlife health with clarity and confidence. Learn more at Selfority.
