Betty Dodson

On Saturday, October 31st, 2020, legendary sex-positive feminist, sex educator, fine artist, and author Betty Dodson died at the age of 91 in New York City. Gloria Steinem wrote in an email, “Betty Dodson was a brave and daring advocate for women’s right to sexual knowledge and pleasure. Her workshops turned women on to the beauty of our own bodies, and her outrageous honesty allowed more women to speak our truths.” SOVO// had the pleasure of featuring Betty Dodson in our fourth issue, titled Sex. Rest in power Betty, we love you.

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text + title image LAWRENCE LANOFF

archival images courtesy of BETTY DODSON + CARLIN ROSS

“My mom’s famous words to me were, ‘Betty Anne, you always go too far,’” says Dr. Betty Dodson as she sips her vodka and orange juice, leans back in her burgundy office chair, and ponders. 

In New York apartment fashion, Betty’s office space is in her bedroom, which is sparse, organized, monastic. A box of vibrators sits behind me. The bed across from us is covered in a black duvet. She’s just gotten up, but her bed is already made. Betty shuts her eyes, remembering a private moment when she went too far. Spontaneously, she laughs out loud. “I mean, how do you know what too far is unless you go there? And even then, when I’ve realized I’ve gone too far, I’ve had to push further.” 

In fact, some people would say Betty Dodson has gone way too far with her women’s “consciousness raising” masturbation circles, which she started in the 1970s. And at 89 years old, going “too far” has given Betty the extreme level of experiences that has set her life free. 

Freedom is there, in the sparkle in her eyes. They are direct, open, mischievous—unlike any 89-year-old I’ve met before. She knows a secret. Or many secrets about life, sex, and the simple realities of an aging body. “I get to spend most of my time now doing things that I love. That’s freedom. And everybody could do that,” Betty says. “But they feel like they have to suffer in life. You can thank religion for that one.” 

And we can thank Betty for teaching women about the pleasures of sex. As an artist, she’s been making her life up all along, one stroke at a time. “Or many strokes,” she laughs. “I never thought about a movement of sexual freedom. I was just being, living an artist’s life. This was my coming of age in the 1960s as an adult woman–everyone was having sex. It was wide open. It was the times. No one gave me permission. We were having sex parties right and left.” 

Betty loved the freedom of watching people having sex. She loved naked bodies. She loved her experiences as an artist, participating and drawing people while they were having sex. “The 60s blew the walls off the social structures. We did it all, no holds barred. The 1960s were for real.”  

That’s when she had her first art exhibition of people fucking. Her drawings were a big hit. Talking to the public was an eye-opening education for her. Betty was becoming an established erotic artist on the New York art scene. And that reputation was attracting the kind of open-minded, freedom-seeking people she wanted around her. 

When I ask her how she felt being the first woman to have a solo erotic art show in New York City, she says blissfully, “Oh… it was wonderful. I got invited to the most interesting sex parties. I had access to people who liked to have group sex.” For Betty, her gallery shows separated the talkers from the doers. “My art was a calling card for a woman who loves sex,” she explains.

Her next show was about masturbation. “I took it on,” Betty says, in a gravelly tone: “Everybody said, ‘Betty, don’t do this.’” Her friends begged her to go back to the simple drawings of couples having sex. “It’s career suicide,” they admonished.  

But of course, Betty went too far, again. Her masturbation erotic art show got her thinking about self-pleasure. “Most human sex is solo sex. Partner sex is complicated and more often than not, we don’t get it right. We don’t know how to talk about it, much less practice it.” Because of her masturbation show, the seeds of the power of self-pleasure were planted. 

At Betty’s parties, she noticed that the men were pounding, grunting, thrusting—as they had learned through porn—and the women were squirming, moaning, begging—just like they had learned in porn. “It didn’t make sense to me. Looking around the room, I knew men were getting off, but I began to wonder about the women. The men were all cumming and I realized the women were all faking.”  

She felt that women not having orgasms was a tragedy. “My heart was burning with a white-hot flame over this. So I went from having group sex parties to leading consciousness-raising workshops for women. It was an easy segue.” That was the real revolution: teaching women to take pleasure into their own fingers and vibrators.

After several name changes to her workshops, finally they were called BodySex. In the early feminist days, the idea of consciousness-raising was to point out that women had been treated like second-class citizens for centuries. “The problem with the movement,” Betty pointed out, “was that women were focused on what was wrong with men and not focused on what was wrong with themselves. Women were allowing men to hold the power over their orgasms.”

And again, everyone told Betty that BodySex workshops for women wouldn’t be successful, that you can’t have strange women come together and take off all their clothes, that people on the East Coast would not be open to nudity, and that Betty was out of her mind. “But, it turns out, women loved it. They still love it. It’s so wonderful for me to sit in a circle. We are all women; we are all in our bodies.”

Nowadays, women in the BodySex circles think Betty is magical. Because she is. It’s the magic of telling women the basic simple truths about their bodies and their pleasures. In this day and age of a topsy-turvy reality, simple truths are magic. 

“That’s what solo sex is all about.” Betty pounds her hand on the desk. “The power is within you—not out there in other people’s hands. It’s here.”  She puts her hand to her belly. From Betty’s perspective, we’ve been taught to live in restriction and containment—and that’s not our natural state. Between governments and religions, everybody is concerned about what we do with our genitals. “We have to cast aside the chains of our beliefs and learn to live freely. That’s the power of sex. It belongs to you and who you choose to share it with.” Her courage inspires people every day. And even in this interview, Betty inspires me. Over the years, she’s encouraged me to lead my own body-positive workshops and trainings. “If you do them once,” Betty says, “you’ll do them forever.” And that’s been my experience. Once you have the sex education bug, there’s no turning back. 

Betty traveled too. She visited places where people weren’t afraid of being nude. “I just love being naked. I visited an island in France where the entire island was naked. That blew my mind.”

I asked Betty if she had any regrets along the way. “Absolutely not. I have everything I want. I feel fulfilled. And I’m teaching every day. Now I have the internet and I can get my message out to the world.” Betty Dodson and her business partner, Carlin Ross, have taken BodySex Workshops worldwide. Women are teaching other women how to self-pleasure all over the world.

Currently, ten women have been certified, with another forty-five on the way.  They reside in twelve countries and twenty-one states. Betty and Carlin have six circles going during their November workshop. Former participants can join in during erotic recess, which always happens on Sunday afternoons.  

Her friends say she’s suffered a lot as an artist. But she doesn’t see it that way. Betty leans back in her chair. “What a great time to be alive. Life is wondrous and filled with love. Of course, it’s all about sex. Most people live restricted lives according to the rules. We have cast aside our chains. Nobody can tell us how we are supposed to live.”

“In my life, I have taken on the most difficult topics,” she says with a fierceness. “But it’s all been a challenge, and I love a challenge. Let me at it. You have to be relaxed with all of it. It’s that basic. I keep it all relaxed down here.” She pats her pussy.

I ask Betty how she feels about being almost 90. “I have no problem with death. If you’ve really lived, then death is not a problem. My sadness is for people who haven’t done anything. But I have definitely lived. I’ve been doing it for almost a hundred years now. As long as I can get up and walk into a living room full of women, I’ll never stop.”

“The end result?” Betty yells. “Happiness! I’m doing what I want to do. I’m calling the shots. All you have to do is break all the rules, stand by them and do anything you want to. That’s the reality. As an artist, you have to explore. You have to look into the abyss. You have to go too far. And soon you’ll discover you can do anything you want—but you must claim it. That’s my secret to success.”