Momo from former East Germany

There was always nudity when I was a kid, my parents were always naked and it was never a sexual thing. While most kids wonder what boobs or a penis look like, I grew up around naked people both at home and when my dad and I would go to the sauna together. I didn’t have to wonder. During lunch my father often said that he wanted to have sex and asked my mom if she wanted to. Then they would go and have a mid day “nap” and I would go and turn on the radio loud. After my parents had sex my mom would get up and go to the bathroom naked. I always noticed that they had sex, it wasn’t hidden. Maybe that was why I was so curious about it, because I realized there is something happening and thought it must be something interesting. My father was always very open with all of that stuff. He was very open that he needs a lot of sex and that when my mom didn’t want to have sex, he would go to someone else. He used prostitutes and he spoke about it openly. There were always condoms in the glove box of his car and sometimes I would try to take a couple. 

My mom tried to have a talk with me when I was in the fifth grade but at that point I was too old. I already knew a lot from reading Bravo, a German teen magazine. There was a column called Dr. Sommer where teens could write in and ask questions and I learned a lot for reading these. My explanation from my mom was very cute though. I think she started off with staying, 

“You should know that men and women can have sex and some men say “vögeln” or “ficken” or “bumsen” (all rather derogatory terms for sex like fuck, bang or screw) but I don’t like that at all, you should only say “miteinander schlafen” (to sleep together).” 

That was very important for her. When she tried to talk more about sex, I told her I already knew everything and didn’t have any questions. I think she was just as happy as I was to
stop talking about it.

As a pre-teen I was very curious to play and learn about sex. I played “doctor” with a girl who lived next door to my grandma a few times. She asked me if she could examine my vagina then took cotton swabs and was very softly cleaning and touching it, which was very nice. We did that two or three times but we never had contact in other ways as friends, we just met for this. I thought it was a fun game and wanted to play with my other girlfriends at home, so I invited my best friend that I had grown up with over to my house to play when I got home. We built a blanket fort and I played doctor with her. Afterwards she felt really ashamed, she told me she didn’t want anybody to know what we did. That was the moment when I saw her reaction. It felt like maybe this isn’t a good thing, maybe what I am doing is wrong and I never did it again. It was a big secret between us for many years and anytime I said something about it, even years later, she would freak out and say nooo don’t say it. For her it was really too much.

Around nine or ten my friends and I started having boyfriends. We had a game we played once where the boys would sit and the girls would straddle and rub and hump them until they got an erection. Then we waited until the erection went down and then do it again and again. We used matches to keep score and the girl who obtained the most erections won. That was the game. That was the first time I saw an erect penis, I think I asked to see it or to touch it as well. The guy and I never had contact after that either so I think it was too much for him too.

Around the same time the Berlin Wall came down. Before that, there was never anything sexual on TV or anywhere else; nobody talked to us about sex in school or anywhere else. Our culture was very open about nudity but very closed about sex. We only had two TV channels and they were really clean, I don’t think there was anything about sex. Even things in the news were censored, things about men having sexual interactions with children, you wouldn’t hear anything about it. There was only the information that they wanted us to hear. After the wall came down though, we started having a lot more TV channels. There was one channel that had soft pornos on Friday night. Sometimes my friends and I would have sleepovers and watch them together.

Once the wall fell, phone sex also became really popular. After ten p.m. you would see a lot of advertisements for sexual things including phone sex hotlines that were free for women. My friends and I had nights when the parents went out and we would call these numbers and have telephone sex with men. We were four girls on speaker phone in some sort of fort that we build with blankets and pillow. There was one girl in particular, the one I tried to play doctor with, who was really good at this. She would say things to get the guys excited and could even bring them to orgasm and we would all be in the background trying not to giggle too much. We did this for a few weeks or months every time we had a sleepover. We mostly said things about sucking and licking and whatever and now I will fuck you. When it became too much, we would just hang up the phone.

It was fun but it was I would say it was on the border. We were curious and it was fun at the time but now that I think about it as an adult, there were some really ugly situations that I sometimes found disgusting. We were eleven or twelve and they were adult men. One guy we talked to said he wanted to wear diapers, I hadn’t realized before that some adults could want to do that.

After thirteen or so I started to become a lot more careful or conservative with my sexuality. I started going to the disco and always wore the same hot pants and tights. The teenaged boys at the disco weren’t very concerned about consent and would do things that would make me uncomfortable. I started to be careful about not showing so much skin. It felt like I lost out on something a little bit because I really liked to be a woman and dress like a woman, to dress nice, but then I really started to hide it a bit.

When I had my Jugendfeier, a tradition here in Germany where you celebrate that you are now going to be an adult, we had a party with boys. That evening I had a really bad experience with someone who kissed me and tried to touch me. He closed the door and locked it and I was really afraid. The boys were just making jokes about it. I stopped being so free after all of these things, my puberty changed everything and made me much more careful and much more reserved.

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