How Often Do Women Masturbate? What the Research Really Says

Let me give you a number that should loosen something in your chest.

Roughly one in five women masturbated in the past month. Not in some daring subculture. Across the whole adult lifespan, ordinary women, in a national survey of nearly three thousand of them. Climb into the twenties and that figure passes forty in every hundred. Go all the way out past seventy, into the decade nobody thinks to ask about, and it is still around twelve. The behaviour eases as the years pass. It never switches off.

Here is what that number is really telling you. The question you have probably typed into a search bar late at night, the one with your own quiet worry folded inside it, has a settled answer. You wanted to know whether your amount is normal. Whether you do it too much, or strangely little, or whether the fact that you still want to in midlife means something has gone wrong. The data says: you are inside the count. You always were.

This is where I should be honest about what I brought to this. I spent years assuming the second sexual life, the curious one, the one that still reaches for itself in the dark, belonged to younger women. The research taught me otherwise, and so did living it. So we are going to walk through the actual numbers together, the ones from the surveys that knock on real doors, and we are going to take down three quiet myths in order. That women barely do it. That partnered and married women stop. That menopause closes the door. None of the three survives contact with the data.

Pour something. Sit down.

So. Do women masturbate. The honest, evidence-anchored answer is yes, most of them, and more of them every year.

Start with the cleanest probability surveys, the kind that draw a representative national sample rather than asking whoever happens to be online. In Britain, the long-running national sex survey known as Natsal asked women across two waves, a decade apart, whether they had ever masturbated. By the most recent wave, roughly three in four said yes, up measurably from the wave before it. Look at the recent month rather than a whole lifetime and about four in ten British women reported it.

The American picture, drawn from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior out of Indiana University, lands in the same territory. More than forty in every hundred women reported solo masturbation in the past year. More than twenty in every hundred in the past month. A more recent American study, weighted toward midlife, found about thirty-seven in a hundred had masturbated in the prior month.

Now the honest counterweight, because the brand you are reading does not flinch from the unflattering number. About a quarter of women report never having masturbated at all, compared with roughly one in ten men. That gap is real, and pretending it away would insult you. The trend underneath it, though, runs one direction across every survey wave and every country measured. In Britain the share of women who had never masturbated fell over a decade while the share doing it in the past month rose. In Finland, women's past-month masturbation more than doubled across three decades of national surveys. The line goes up.

So the first myth, the one that whispers that women barely do this, that you are unusual for reaching for yourself, does not survive the count. Most women have. A growing share do, this month, this week. You are not the strange one. You are the ordinary one, sitting inside a number you were simply never shown.

For the wider context, see how women's pleasure works across the broader pleasure silo, and for the practical companion to this piece, our full guide to female masturbation.

Now the question that brought you here in its plainest form: how often do women masturbate, and does it really fall off a cliff with each passing decade.

The cleanest age curve comes from that American national survey of nearly three thousand women, which sorted past-month masturbation by decade of life. The peak sits in the twenties, where more than forty in every hundred women reported it in the past month. From there the line descends, gently, decade by decade, toward the lifespan average of about one in five. And in the oldest band the survey measured, women past seventy, twelve in every hundred still reported it within the past month.

Read that curve slowly, because it is the opposite of the story you were handed. The decline is real. It is also gradual, and it never reaches the floor. There is no age at which the survey returns a zero. The body that wants is not on a timer that runs out.

What the probability surveys are quieter about is raw frequency, the literal how-many-times-a-week of it, because they tend to measure whether you did it recently rather than tallying every occasion. The honest summary is that most women who masturbate do so less than weekly, and the rhythm is wide. Some women want it most days. Some go long stretches and return. Both of those women are inside the same data, and neither of them is doing it wrong. What varies even more than the frequency is the appetite underneath it, the specific thing each woman is after, whether that is a quick release or the slower territory we cover in how to squirt.

The age curve measures desire moving through a life: the crowded twenties, the depleted years of small children and large fatigue, the spaciousness that often arrives later. Frequency follows the life. The capacity stays.

Because the searches cluster here too, it is worth being precise about the younger end: how often do girls and younger women masturbate, and is the modern number higher than it used to be.

Among adult women, the twenties are the high-water mark on every probability curve. More than forty in every hundred women in that decade reported masturbating in the past month, the busiest band the surveys record. That is the peak the rest of the lifespan descends from, gently.

The more striking finding is historical. In mid-century Kinsey-era data, only about forty in every hundred girls had masturbated by late adolescence, and only about half of those continued with any regularity. Set that beside today's numbers, where roughly three in four adult women report having ever done it, and you can see the size of the shift. The change lives in permission. Each cohort has grown up with a little less shame and a little more language, and the count has climbed to meet the truth that was always there underneath the silence.

If you came of age before every feeling had a name, you likely learned to translate your own body in private, with no vocabulary handed to you and no number to measure yourself against. The rising curve is partly a story about younger women starting earlier and more openly. It is also a story about the rest of us catching up to a permission we were never offered the first time around.

Here is where I have to wave a small flag, because the most-repeated answer to how often does the average woman masturbate is built on the weakest foundation, and you deserve to know which number you are standing on.

You have almost certainly seen "about once a week" presented as the average. That figure traces to a survey commissioned by a sex-toy company, Womanizer, across twelve countries. It is a survey, not a national probability sample, which means it captures the people willing to answer a brand's questionnaire rather than a representative cross-section of all women. As a piece of color it is interesting. As a fact about the average woman, it carries far less weight than it is usually given.

When you turn instead to probability data, the weekly picture looks different. In the recent American midlife-weighted study, fewer than nine in every hundred women masturbated at least once a week over the prior year. Most women who masturbate at all do so less often than weekly. The "once a week average" is the figure that has filled the public silence where the careful surveys stayed quiet about raw frequency, and it has quietly set a bar that the steadier data does not support.

Why does this matter for you, specifically. Because that inflated, repeated "average" is exactly the kind of number that makes a woman feel behind. If you measured yourself against once a week and came up short, you were measuring against marketing. The honest probability answer is that there is an enormous range, that less-than-weekly is the common reality, and that "average" is a much roomier place than the headline ever let on.

This is the myth I most want to take apart, because it does the most damage, and because the data demolishes it so cleanly. The myth says that a woman with a partner, a wife in particular, has no reason left to touch herself, that solo pleasure is what you do in the absence of sex. The truth runs the other way.

In the British national surveys, past-month masturbation was higher among women with partners, both steady and casual, than among women with none. Higher, not lower. And the more active the partnered sex life, the more likely the solo one: British women who had intercourse five or more times in the past month were more than twice as likely to also masturbate as women who had none. The American midlife study found the same engine underneath it. Women who wanted partnered sex much more often were close to four times as likely to report frequent masturbation. Masturbation rose with desire, not with deprivation.

So if you are married and you still reach for yourself, you are not compensating for a lack. You are running a higher-desire state, the kind that wants in more than one direction at once. Solo pleasure and a live partnered sex life travel together. They feed each other.

There is something worth naming here for the long-married woman in particular. The hand that knows exactly what it wants, that gets there reliably and without negotiation, is not a rival to your partner. It is a fluency. It is you keeping the channel open, knowing your own body well enough to one day say out loud, with a partner's hand on you, slower, or there, or like that, do not change anything. The women who keep that line warm tend to be the ones still asking for what they want at a stage of life when they were told to stop wanting it at all.

Now the door the third myth tries to close, the one that says menopause ends it. This is the brand's whole thesis, so let me set the load-bearing number down plainly, in the middle of the room, where you cannot miss it.

In a 2025 study from the Kinsey Institute of fifteen hundred American women between forty and sixty-five, masturbation episodes ended in orgasm about eighty-one percent of the time. Eighty-one. And there was no meaningful difference across the stages of menopause: premenopausal, perimenopausal, postmenopausal, the reliability held. The thing your own hand can do for you does not get less dependable as you cross into the second half. Of all the parts of your sexual life that the transition unsettles, this is the one that stays loyal.

Be honest about the rest of the picture, because honesty is the whole point. In that same study, masturbation frequency did ease at the far postmenopausal end. Postmenopausal women reported doing it somewhat less often than premenopausal and perimenopausal women. Menopause is not nothing. The raw rhythm can soften.

But soften is the right word, and cliff is the wrong one. The frequency eases. The act continues. The orgasm stays. Hold those three findings together and you have the truth the silence kept from you: menopause is a re-aim, not an ending. The same study found sex toys in play in about forty-four of every hundred midlife episodes, steadily across every menopause stage, which tells you that midlife solo pleasure is a practised one, steady across the whole transition.

There is a further finding that reframes the whole question, and I want to hand it to you with the caveat attached, because you are owed the difference between strong evidence and suggestive evidence. In a survey of menopausal women run by Womanizer with the Kinsey Institute, about thirty-six in every hundred reported that masturbation eased some of their menopausal symptoms, and roughly one in ten leaned on it as a primary form of relief. That was a survey rather than a national probability sample, so hold it lightly as a population figure. Held lightly, it still points somewhere true: for a meaningful share of women, self-pleasure in midlife is care.

This is the woman the research keeps describing, and I want you to be able to picture her as you. You have buried the question of whether you are too old for this, because the data already buried it on your behalf. On an unhurried evening you reach for yourself the way you have for years, with a toy you chose on purpose, and your body answers, four times out of five, the way the numbers say it does. You are not staging a comeback. You never left.

Which brings us, finally, to the question underneath all the others: how often should a woman masturbate, and is it normal to masturbate everyday, and where exactly is the line you keep worrying you have crossed.

I am going to give you the most honest answer the research allows, and it is not a prescription, because there isn't one. There is no correct number. The probability data does not describe a right amount you should be hitting. It describes a range so wide it can hold a woman who does it most days and a woman who goes a month between, and call both of them entirely ordinary. How often you should masturbate is, genuinely, however often you want to, in a rhythm that belongs to you.

So if you are asking how often should I masturbate, hoping for a target to aim at, the kinder truth is that you can put the target down. Daily is normal. Rarely is normal. The number itself is not where normal lives.

There is exactly one amount that the research, and plain decency, would ask you to look at more closely. Not a high number and not a low one. A driven one. If the reaching for yourself is powered by shame, a thing you do and then hate yourself for, or by compulsion, a thing that has stopped feeling like a choice and started crowding out the rest of your life, that is worth gentle attention, the way any compulsion is. That is not about the frequency on the page. It is about whether the act still belongs to you, or whether something else is holding the wheel.

Short of that, the number is yours. You do not owe anyone an explanation for it, an average to match, or a stage of life by which you are supposed to have quietly stopped. Roughly three in four women have done this. It rises with desire, it rises with having a partner, and it keeps its reliability straight through menopause. The shame you may have carried about it was handed to you by a culture, not measured by the data. You are allowed to set it down. The door was always yours.