Guest blogger and writer of Female Masturbation piece Carina Kolodny with a brand ’spanking’ new blog on The International Masturbation Month Of May.

How will you be celebrating?

One can learn a great deal of things from twitter… That Osama Bin Laden is dead, for example, or that your best friend has a new favorite song or that (spoiler alert) your all-time favorite blogger has written a new article for MTV’s Staying Alive…

We use twitter to stay in touch with our friends, to stay on top of the news or to stay in the loop on the things, people and places we care about.

Just this past week, for instance, a tweet delivered a very important and interesting piece of information to me: “May is International Masturbation Month!” The tweet-er informed me and those 37 characters packed a whole lot of punch.

“International Masturbation Month!” I cried, joyously. “How did I not know? Why wasn’t I informed? Surely Google should have changed their icon to commemorate this glorious occasion.”

But my parade was quickly rained upon when I realized that nobody else was celebrating this now sad and kind of lonely holiday. In fact, very few people even knew about it!

I quickly set to rectify this terrible situation. “IT’S INTERNATIONAL MASTURBATION MONTH!” I enthusiastically tweeted and tumbld and facebooked. Imagining that, surely, the whole world would join my party if only they were informed that it was happening.

To my horror, I got just one lonely response from my call to ‘action:’

DannybOyUK: @carinakolodny How are you supposed to celebrate that? ‘Go’ more than usual? More vigorously?

DannybOyUK was right! How do you even go about celebrating? It’s not as if my local party store will have a section for this holiday. It’s not as if ‘International Masturbation Month’ has it’s own party pack equipped with themed streamers and matching party favors.

Even if people were celebrating, it’s not as if many of them would inform the tweet-osphere. (In my fantasy land, where everything is as it should be, #masturbationmonth would be trending and everybody would be sharing how enthusiastically they loved their bodies and themselves.)

Feeling an incredible buzz-kill and serious disappointment, I acquiescently accepted that this holiday would have to pass largely uncelebrated.

But just then, one of my real life friends swooped in to save the day. Ben, the wonderful editor of the Staying Alive blog, pointed out that I have an article to go with every occasion. I’ve already written a blog about why girls should feel more comfortable masturbating… kind of pre-emptively shot my wad on that one…

But writing about this holiday, acknowledging this holiday and getting your input on how to celebrate it seems like the making of a brand-SPANKING-new-blog. (Terrible pun intended.) So this is it, or this has been it… the blog I decided to write… The blog that poses an all too important question: How can we, aside from the obvious, celebrate?

Carina Kolodny is a writer and expert coffee shop loiterer based out of NYC. When not writing (or loitering) she can usually be found traveling the world or jumping out of airplanes. She became interested in HIV education while working with the Red Cross in Fiji. This was an enriching though terrifying experience as she hates snakes almost as much as she hates grammar. She counts Fiji, Cuba and Tanzania as second homes and strongly believes in the power of self love and red lipstick.