Jane from Canada
When I was in first or second grade, I was really good friends with a girl whose mom let her watch a lot of movies that my parents didn’t let me watch. She was exposed to this whole world of adult scenes that I knew nothing about. When we would have sleepovers, she would often want us to act like the men and women did in the movies; like they loved each other. We would practice making out and touching each other, then it progressed to humping each other’s legs and stuff like that. She would say things like
“You be the boy now,” or
“You be the girl and you have to touch me on my chest and my hair because that’s where boys like to be touched.”
Since she got to see all of these movies I wasn’t allowed to, I felt she was in the know about that kind of stuff and happily followed her lead. After a while of doing this, we had a sleepover at her place; there were maybe six girls in a tent in the back yard. We were all pretending to be men and women and touching each other. It was like an orgy of second grade girls in a tent; we kept our clothes on but it was not PG.
Even though she was usually the one who suggesting this kind of game, I kind of got excited about it too. I wanted to do these things and I think some of the other girls wanted to do it as well. I don’t remember anyone being hesitant. We didn’t put our hands on each other’s clits or vaginas or anything, just rubbing against each other, making out and touching each other’s bodies like adults do. It was just fun and interesting; a kind of exploration.
I don’t think I even had a sense of what was erotic at the time.
Our sleepovers kept going on until we switched schools and I didn’t see her much after that. We ended up going to the same high school but we weren’t really friends anymore. I would see her in the halls sometimes and just be like yeah, we went to elementary school together, but it never really occurred to me to think oh, we made out and stuff like that. I never talked to her, I never brought it up.
At some point, I discovered that I could get the same feelings from humping my friend’s leg as I could with this big blue teddy bear I had. Sometimes when I was in bed I would pull my pants down and put the bears face against my clit and start wiggling around a bit. I don’t know if I would call it masturbating, there was no building to anything but it felt good, which is what I was looking for. At night my mom would tuck me into bed with my big blue teddy bear and I would pull down my pants and just lie there with the teddy bear in my crotch and the covers on top of me, hoping my mom wouldn’t come in.
I could usually hear her walking down the hall so I could move the teddy bear but one time I didn’t hear her and she came in; I couldn’t move it in time. She asked me what I was doing and I couldn’t say anything. I was scared. I didn’t know what she would say or what she was thinking. She got a bit emotional and she asked me if what I was doing felt good. I just said I don’t know and started crying. She held me and didn’t say anything more about it. Nothing was said about it after that either. I just couldn’t understand her reaction and I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel.
It wasn’t until a few years later that I started to figure out what I was doing when I was rubbing on things. When I was twelve a friend of mine was telling us about a guy in her class who people were said was masturbating. I asked what masturbating was and she told me it was when someone has sex but with themselves by touching themselves. I just remember thinking… well so?? I couldn’t understand why she was saying it was so disgusting and he should be ashamed of it. Who cares? He is touching himself, what’s the problem? I just didn’t get it. That’s how I found out what the word was for what I was doing and so I started to Google “how to masturbate” and “masturbating tips.” It was all just harmless material to get myself aroused.
By the time I was a teenager I started reading the website FML (Fuck My Life) where people just post stupid things that happen to them. It was basically like ‘Today I Fucked Up,” on Reddit. It didn’t take me long before I started reading the sex section; basically stories of people messing up somehow in sex. The stories aren’t really sexy but I didn’t have any exposure to sex, so it was enough to turn me on.
We only had a family computer so when my parents weren’t home I would read stuff and I would wiggle in my chair a bit and that felt good. Then, I progressed to moving to the couch and humping the armrest on the couch and realizing oh that feels good. Then lying face down on the couch and humping the corning of it and realizing that feels good too. I would occasionally put a finger in my vagina but not much. Eventually I started exploring with my hands a bit and I would use my fingers mostly on my clit.
For a while FML was my go to website, then later I found the website Scarlet Teen; it’s a sex education website for teenagers. I would read articles on there and I would get turned on just by reading informative articles because it was just something about sex and it was my only exposure to sex. There was also a website called My First Time where people submit their stories of losing their virginities. I would read that all of the time just because they were simple and interesting and it was something to get me in the mood.
I didn’t really look for porn or anything like that. For a while I also just didn’t know it existed. I just really liked reading stories; even today I don’t watch porn a lot because visual stimulation doesn’t do a lot for me. I prefer reading stories because I can put myself in the place of the character and I can use my imagination to add what I want to be there, while if I am watching something, it is just two people there having sex.
Pretty much everything that I learned about sex I learned online. There were only two times that my mom tried to talk to me about sex and neither went well.
The first time she ever mentioned sex to me I was eleven years old and in the bathtub. My mom came in and randomly told me,
“Just so you know, if a man wants to put his penis in your mouth and he says it’s not sex, it is sex.”
She didn’t say don’t do it but rather don’t let a man try to tell you it’s not sex if it’s in your mouth because it is and don’t let someone pressure you into doing that.
The other time she ever mentioned anything was after I would see the commercials for Viagra and Cialis on TV. I asked my mom why don’t they ever say what it’s for, I don’t understand, they are doing this advertisement but how are people supposed to know what it’s for? Then one day I was talking about it in the car and she turns and says to me,
“Honey, when two people love each other, a man will put his penis in the vagina. But the penis needs to be hard and sometimes when men get older, they have trouble making their penis hard so they take Cialis or Viagra to help.”
I didn’t understand why it needed to be hard but I didn’t want to ask any other questions. I was silent for the rest of the car ride. That was literally the only sex talk from my parents. I also never had any sex education in school because I went to a private school for a while and then was homeschooled. I got so much from reading Scarlet Teen and the other websites that I in the end I was all right with it.
