“Woke up alone in this hotel room / Played with myself.”
Harry Styles sings those words in “From the Dining Table,” the last song on his self-titled solo debut album.
The singer’s reference to self-love caught the attention of Joe Coscarelli of The New York Times, who suggested the line is “pretty raw.”
“Is it? Is it?,” Styles asked.
He went on. “I think it's up to everyone’s interpretation, which is obviously an incredibly diplomatic answer. The line in particular, in context of the verse, paints the picture of the feeling that I was going at.
"It’s much more powerful when not taken simply as what it is.”
Of course, dozens of artists have referenced masturbation in their songs — sometimes directly and sometimes discreetly.
Self-pleasure has been mentioned by bands like Green Day (“Longview”) and Blink-182 (“M&Ms”) as well as by pop stars like Britney Spears (“Touch of my Hand”) and Pink (“Fingers”).
Some of the songs people danced to in the '80s were about self-pleasure, including Billy Idol's 1980 hit "Dancing With Myself" (“When there's no one else in sight / In the crowded lonely night / Well I wait so long / For my love vibration / And I'm dancing with myself") and Cyndi Lauper's 1984 single "She Bop" (“They say I better stop or I'll go blind,” she says. “They say I better get a chaperone / Because I can't stop messin' with the danger zone / Hey, I won't worry, and I won't fret / Ain’t no law against it yet").
In 1990, Divinyls just went for it with the not-so-subtle love song "I Touch Myself."