SEXUAL HEALING
After Neflix’s flirtation with ‘I Touch Myself’, Helen Brown explores how the hit took the shame out of female self-love
Sex Education, one of the best and most popular shows on Netflix last year, returned for a second series early this year. The opening scenes celebrated the show’s smart and loveable 16-year-old hero, Otis, finally overcoming his neuroses and learning to masturbate. The comic montage had the perfect soundtrack: Scala & Kolacny Brothers’ euphoric choral cover of Divinyls’ 1990 hit “I Touch Myself”.
The Australian rock band were formed in 1980 by singer Chrissy Amphlett and guitarist Mark McEntee. Born in the industrial port city of Geelong, Victoria (also the birthplace of Neighbours theme tune crooner Barry Crocker), Amphlett was a pioneering punk provocateur who said: “My idols had always been the unsafe, the dangerous, the edgy, like the punks, Iggy Pop, Keith Richards, Debbie Harry and Jerry Lee
Lewis.” She busked her way around France and Spain in her early teens, sleeping on the streets when her options ran out.
Back on the Australian pub-rock circuit, she performed in fishnets and a schoolgirl’s outfit, using the stage to express both her volatile sexuality and her “ugly side”. Her habit of squatting to sing gave rise to the urban myth that she urinated on stage. Off stage, she “spat out friends, lovers and associates like stale chewing gum”, according to Melbourne newspaper The Age. Her stormy romance with McEntee was the key to Divinyls’ electricity.
The band got their first break on the soundtrack to the 1982 film Monkey Grip, based on Helen Garner’s sexually frank and feminist debut novel. But by the end of the 1980s, second-wave feminism had migrated from punk to pop culture. Cyndi Lauper sang – albeit obliquely – about female masturbation on 1984’s “She Bop”. In May 1990, Madonna defied the Toronto police and kept the auto-erotic dance section accompanying “Like a Virgin” in her Blond Ambition show.
Around this time, Amphlett and McEntee hooked up with American songwriting duo Billy Steinberg (mostly lyrics) and Tom Kelly (mostly music), who had written “Like a Virgin”, “True Colours” for Lauper and “Eternal Flame” for The Bangles. They liked to say the reason they wrote for women was because Kelly’s voice was high, so his melodies came pitched in keys better suited to the female range. But the emotional directness of Steinberg’s lyrics appealed to women seeking to speak truth to a culture in denial.
Although the title line is directly sexual, the verses clearly link the physical to an emotional connection between lovers
Steinberg met Amphlett in a Hollywood club where, he says, “I nervously pulled out my notebook and allowed her to look through the lyrics.” One of the songs in there was “I Touch Myself”. “I had written the first verse and the chorus lyric and that’s the one she liked best.”
Although the title line is directly sexual, the verses clearly link the physical to an emotional connection between lovers: “I love myself, I want you to love me/ When I feel down I want you above me/ I search myself, I want you to find me/ I forget myself, I want you to remind me.”
The sexual tension is ramped up to 11 by McEntee’s raunchy riffing and Amphlett’s vocal, which crescendos from a series of questioning “oohs” to an orgasmic “Ahhh-ah-ah-ah!” with each abandoned syllable still hitting the beat.
The video – shot in a convent – was banned in Australia but proved an MTV smash. The song paved the way for musicians such as Tori Amos, Pink, Pussycat Dolls, Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé and Carly Rae Jepsen to sing about female masturbation without shame.
Amos and Pink are among the many artists to deliver slower and more sultry covers of the song. There was also a horrifying cover by convicted paedophile Rolf Harris, which nobody should have to hear ever again. The best reworking is definitely the Scala & Kolacny Brothers’ version recorded in 2003.
Tackling the topic happily together as a young and unbefishnetted collective, the fresh-faced Belgian choir remove the lingering sense that self-love is an act of rock’n’roll rebellion only available to the gorgeous, reckless Amphletts of this world.
When Amphlett was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, she repurposed the song to encourage other women to examine their bodies for lumps. She died in 2013, aged just 53. The following year, the Cancer Council NSW launched the breast cancer awareness project “I Touch Myself”, with a sobering video and
emotive acoustic cover featuring 10 leading female Australian artists, including Olivia Newton-John and Sarah Blasko. The line “Think I would die if you were to ignore me,” is revised as: “Think I would die if I were to ignore you.”
In 2020, there are women who owe Amphlett not just for kicking her stilettos through centuries of sexual taboos, but for their lives.