Dear Miz Betty,

I realize you must get tons of mail on this topic, but I wanted to write anyway to thank you for your book. It gave me a totally new and liberating point of view on something I've been doing for a long time, renewed my interest in it, and gave me some terrific ideas.

I'm a 24-year-old woman now, and a semi-successful artist. It wasn't until I was twelve that I started consciously masturbating to orgasm. I had done it before, but never to the point of getting off, and when I did for the first time it was a mind-blowing discovery that my body could do that sort of thing. I started masturbating at least once a day, but it was usually right before my shower in the evening. For years I made do with my hands and fingers.

Every so often I felt like I was doing something awful and sick, and would say to myself, "Self, we gotta quit masturbating." Obviously I never did stop. In my college dorm I discovered the joy of erotic books when I ordered some academic text from a mail order service, and got The Best American Erotica 1993 by mistake. Well, I didn't send it back. During the summer I made use of the addresses in the back to have sex catalogs and dirty magazines sent to my campus P0 box. With an adventurous girlfriend I went to my local dirty bookstore and acquired my first sex toy. Not a vibrator, but a pair of brass ben-wa balls. I had my room to myself the next semester and after classes in the afternoon, I would spend an hour or two indulging in epicurean masturbation with the balls, and a growing collection of goodies I was ordering. But lately I find I have just been doing a fifteen-minute quickie to get off so I can relax, and wanking lost a lot of the fun it use to have. My husband endorses my masturbating, so I don't feel like I have to hide, but I've certainly lost my sense of play.

Reading your book, Sex for One inspired me to set time aside to do just that. I have gotten back into experimentation and goofing around with my self-time instead of singlemindedly jerking off. The addition of a new toy ("Jewel of the Nile") and the inspiration to have fun with it, watch myself in the mirror, and not feel like a freak for dressing up for masturbation has breathed new life into self-love. I find for the first time that I really feel cunt-positive.

At the same time I also got an idea from looking at your drawings of the different cunts in the chapter on genital imagery. I had recently bought a hardbound sketch book filled with almost two hundred pages of creamy white paper, and it seemed to demand something above and beyond my figure studies, landscapes, and comics. The idea hit me to put together a "Black Book" detailing in pictures and text my erotic fantasies. Instead of slopping through porno magazines (even good ones) I would create my own volume of sexy material. All the things I want to see, and fantasize about, a guidebook to my sexual world. And if I develop new interests, I can get another sketchbook. I always used to draw erotic, explicit pictures as a masturbatory aid, but I always tore them up when I finished, figuring I really and truly was a pervert. But this time, I've enjoyed it immensely, not thrown it out, and recommend it even for those who can't draw themselves. You could do it any way, maybe make a scrapbook of favorite sexy pictures from magazines and decorate it with fancy paper cut-outs and metallic ink. Unless you really wanted to, you don't have to show it to anyone, so it could contain whatever turns you on, no matter how politically incorrect and far out.

That's become one of my fantasies now, on top of everything else. The local arts-and-crafts shop has different workshops for oil painting or flower arranging, and now one on scrap booking. I imagine I set up a workshop to help women make erotic scrapbooks, and aside from making fancy paper borders and choosing archival inks and papers, I'd guide them through either finding or creating the images, or writing, or whatever turns them on most. We'd all work on making a book of fantasies, and if they wanted to, at the end of the course we'd share our -scrapbooks and admire each other's handiwork, get ideas, and feel happily sexual.

Anyway, I seriously do thank you for helping me breathe new life into my old routine. I'm going to wholeheartedly recommend to all my friends that they read your book and spread the joy around.

P.S. I just spell-checked this document and discovered that "cunt" is not in my Mac's spelling dictionary. I should alert Steve Jobs to this.

Jennifer