Christine from the Netherlands 

 

One of the first memories I have is when I started masturbating.

I think I started kind of early. I have heard from a few people that they also started around five but I think overall there aren’t so many.

One night, I woke up in the middle of the night and by coincidence, my teddy bear had ended up at my crotch. I realized, oh.. that feels nice.

It’s always the fucking teddy bear.

I had the pressure there and I started rubbing against it basically. I liked the rubbing much more, even now when I masturbate, it’s always rubbing externally. Shortly after I started doing this, my mom came in my room one night and she found the teddy bear “down there.” I wasn’t even masturbating but she got really upset. I don’t know if she knew what was going on or not, I wasn’t about to ask. Maybe it was just some kind of precaution.

She said “no, the bear needs to be there,” and put it next to my face. I thought, I am not hurting anyone with this so I am going to continue to have it here. I had no idea where this came from but I thought as long as I wasn’t hurting anyone, then it’s ok. Next time I will just make sure not to get caught. 

I actually still have the teddy bear. It’s one of the things that I have had since I was born.

Funny enough, when I was sixteen or seventeen, I was babysitting one of the girls from the neighborhood who was about five and we were watching TV. All of the sudden, I looked at her and I am like fuck, she’s masturbating right next to me. She was lying under the blankets and she had this sweaty face.

I was worried what people would think if they found out. I also didn’t want to shame her and tell her that she shouldn’t do it. I didn’t feel comfortable telling her anything like this is ok but don’t do it when people are around or anything. It was too much. Instead, I said I had to go to the toilet and I got up and ran to the bathroom and waited for her to finish. At least I knew I shouldn’t say that this isn’t ok because that’s the last thing that I want to do; to accidentally give her the wrong idea.

I continued using the teddy bear into my teens but eventually he developed a hole and had to be re-stuffed. I realized I was really ruining him so I switched to using my hands.

I think that the progression of just feeling nice to being sexual was so slow that there was not really one point where it happened or where I noticed it. The realization of what I was doing came long after. At some point I think I was even able to orgasm. I had it going more frantically until a moment where there was this wave of relaxation.

I have different sorts of orgasms. There are the real mind blowing ones, which are not so easy, it needs really good stimulation but I can also have smaller ones just by thinking myself through it.

I had one stupid moment when I was starting to feel better again and a bit more sexual after being depressed and I wondered if I could still think my way to an easy orgasm.

 I was walking down the stairs and did this and I almost fell down the stairs. This was not the smartest place to start trying but yes I can still do it. I am really lucky I guess.

The Netherlands is generally quite open compared to a lot of places but my mom in particular is quite old fashioned. She did get us a book from the library that had all of the stuff about sexual education but I still didn’t feel comfortable asking her certain things. I did have a really good friend growing up, his mom was basically a surrogate mother for me. When we were around twelve, my friend and I went together and asked her a few questions.

I got most of the information from the books from the library and some teen magazines that explained a few things. In general, it was more about reproduction or taking care that that doesn’t happen but nothing about actual pleasure. I think the magazines helped in that as long as you like it it’s fine kind of thing but I already thought that at age five. As long as it’s not hurting anyone, why not?

I didn’t date much in high school either, I would have rather been a virgin than lose my virginity just because every one else was losing theirs. I think I just grew up with a romantic idea, I didn’t want to regret it or anything. Funny enough, all of my girlfriends would always come to me for advice about their sex lives, even though I was the one with the least amount of experience. I think maybe just because I was quite strong and would say,

“Well if he’s not nice to you then fuck him. He’s not good for you, he can go.”

I talked pretty openly about sex with my best friend, the one whose mother we talked to about sex. His way of dealing with puberty though was making a lot of sexualized jokes and at some point it started bothering me. It got to a point where he was sexualizing every sentence he said.

It started bothering me a lot.

Growing up it often happened that when I stated a boundary, it was acknowledged but not really listened to. I got used to expressing my boundaries but not having them be respected. Eventually I learned say this is still not ok and get myself out of a situation. A couple of these kinds of things kept happening with this friend and at some point, it caused me to drift apart from the friendship. I didn’t like what happened but it’s like ok, that sucks and I will continue. After a while, I realized I don’t have to continue like this and I don’t have to keep on giving chances to people who don’t deserve them.