Grace from The United States
When I was ten or eleven, I started playing a game that a lot of young kids play- doctor.
But it was more than just “I show you mine and you show me yours.” I became the absolute fucking puppet master of doctor. I was living in a neighborhood with a lot of kids around the same age that I was. Our houses were backed up to a sort of nature preserve area so our backyard was this huge labyrinth of trails and woods that went for acres and acres behind us.
On one side of my house there were two sisters that I played doctor with, one was a year younger than me and the other was two years older than me. Then on the other side of my house, there was a group of five brothers and a sister. The sister was very young so there was nothing happening with her but the boys were around the same age and occasionally we would engage as well.
Doctor was almost like a key word or a trigger. If you said, “do you want to play doctor?” it meant something, it meant these sexual things were going to happen. Once this game was taught to other people it was incorporated I think into a lot of different situations and to a lot of other friendships. It was easy to bring the game to other people because it was never about relationships. At this young age there wasn’t any jealously. Those concepts of love and commitment were completely thrown to the wind.
It’s interesting when you are ten or eleven because guys are not at the same level of sexual maturity as women are, but they are still curious about female bodies and about their own bodies. So playing doctor became an initial step in the direction of sexual exploration with initially showing body parts and then eventually touching body parts and then even later on engaging body parts. It was a really happy and also very consensual thing. Kids want to understand what is happening within themselves and they want to almost do reality checks to see if things are the same with other people. Is the anatomy the same, does it all function the same way? All of this sounds technical but at the time it was incredibly fun.
We would go out into the woods behind our houses and play doctor and it would be everything from taking your clothes off to taking your clothes off and perhaps putting your mouth on someone whether it was an erogenous zone of whether it was just kissing. I mean we are also kids so the idea of two girls kissing each other almost was just as giggly even if you know what you are doing. It was just as exciting, just as tantalizing as actually playing with someone. I don’t know if anyone was ever brought to orgasm, I highly doubt it but it was just the idea that we were touching each other and that we were very free in this sense.
Things were incredibly tantalizing to a degree because they happened so slow. As liberated women, we can go to a club and find a guy we want to fuck and fuck him that night and no one will judge us differently. But when you are first starting out in sexual exploration, it starts out with a kiss on the cheek and then it moves to the lips and then it moves to a little bit of touching and then it moves to something else. At some point playing doctor involved fucking each other with beer bottles but it took us a long time to progress to that stage. It wasn’t like it was all debauchery, especially at that age. It’s a slow progression.
I also really liked to keep my doctor playing business separate. Sometimes a few of us would play together but generally I liked to keep it separate between everyone. The sisters obviously never knew that I was playing with the other one. I don’t know if they do to this day, I hope not. But you know it was very much my little game that I really enjoyed playing and introducing to people. I am sure there were times that I tested the waters with friends and it didn’t sort of resonate and therefore it never materialized into anything but for a lot of kids, that idea is incredibly interesting. I got to the point where I had my neighbors on one side and the two sisters on the other side and a neighbor down the street all wanted to play doctor.
Sometimes I really loved it and sometimes I had no interest in it. Sometimes I just wanted to play, sometimes I just wanted to have fun with my friends and have a mud fight or climb trees or whatever, I wasn’t always interested in the sexual stuff.
It is interesting now because I can see in my current relationships that I view my cherished intimate connections with friends and lovers there are sometimes that I just want to play and I am not really interested in sex. And I don’t feel like I have to cross that line with a lot of friends who I do have sex with because we can just go out and have beers and go dancing and there is nothing sexual and we can be with our own partners but sometimes it turns into a situation where we are both horny and we both want to fuck and it’s ok. We are going to find out new things about each other were going to have that level of exploration that is super positive but also doesn’t translate into any of these needy qualities of jealousy or being wanted it just sort of manifests itself as something beautiful and something in the moment.
I continued playing doctor until I was fourteen or so and we were starting to understand a bit more about the concepts of relationships and sex. We no longer called it doctor, we called it something else. I really wish I could remember the name, it was something like “do you want to play,” but it was still that same trigger.
The last girl that I had a really strong connection of playing doctor with evolved into something else over time. It wasn’t any longer just a kids’ game where we were giggling the entire way through. It became something that was much more about sex and much more about the pleasure. The concept of it being silly sort of melted away and became more of this concept of something that you want to feel that you can rely on.
Rejection also became a lot more serious, especially with this friend of mine. There were issues of jealously and there became issues of rejection through out our growth together. Almost every time we spent the night together, we would be engaging somehow sexually and exploring our bodies and even tasting each other. I can still remember the way she tastes today, it is unlike any woman I have tasted to this day, but then again, we were fourteen at the time so things are probably a little different. But it became a little bit more needy and a little bit more independent and that also sort of stopped my relationship with women.
Since that point in time, I had one girlfriend. I’ve had a number of sexual encounters with women, I am very attracted to women, but I stopped being able to talk to them or to attract women and hit on women even though all of my previous experiences for the most part were with women. I sort of lost touch with that connection, I didn’t have the confidence anymore because women sort of became more demanding and men much less so.
I very much cherished that game, cherished to a degree the sexual freedom that it gave me and the ability to very safely explore my sexuality. At the same time, I really enjoyed the power of it as well, the idea that I had this connection with multiple people and they didn’t know about it. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had found out, perhaps they were spreading this idea between their own friends and being able to explore their own sexuality in new ways with new partners.
I think it is amazing, thank you!