A. from Germany
The showerhead at my parent’s house had a massage function 
where the water would pulsate and one day, the water hit my penis by accident and I realized it was really nice. I never actually masturbated with the water, it was nice, but not nice enough to keep on doing it. This experience did however, get me curious about what else I could use for this kind of sensation.
My parents had a massage device that looked a bit like an iron and it had different covers that you could use to make it feel different. The function that I liked the most felt like a hand rubbing back and forth really fast. At one point while using it, I put it on my crotch and realized it was way better than the showerhead. That primed me in a lot of ways; even today I prefer masturbating with a flat hand on my penis like the massager did. It’s super quirky and I found the fact that I masturbated differently than other people really shameful for a long time. As a guy, you are supposed to jerk off in a certain way.
I was using the massager a lot, probably more than my parents were, and since it was kept in my parents’ room, I used it in there a lot of the time. At one point, it even got so hot that the side of it burned and turned browned a little bit. I probably took off a few years of life expectancy on that thing but on the other hand, I put it to good use.
For most of the time that I was doing this, I wasn’t very careful about my mom seeing what I was doing with the massager because I thought she had no idea what I was doing. I was convinced I was the first person to discover masturbation, because I am so smart right?
Obviously she eventually figured out what I was doing and the massager got locked away in the drawer. I don’t think it was because my parents were against their kid masturbating, but were against their kid masturbating with their back massager. Eventually I found the key to the drawer though and continued to use it.
I was using the massager so much at one point that I eventually I made it into a challenge to see how fast I could get myself off. My personal record was ten seconds. It’s kind of funny because these days, I’m really hard to get to orgasm, at least with other people. The other thing is what I experienced pre-puberty, I would not call an orgasm. I just put the massager on my crotch and it got nicer and nicer and at some point, it instantly became too intense and unpleasant and I knew it was time to put it away. A couple of times I tried to push through the weird sensation to see what would happen and it would just continue to be unpleasant. It was not like an adult orgasm, not an explosion.
As a kid I was also pretty morbid and thought a lot about what happens after you die, maybe because my grandma died when I was six or seven. I thought if I died, I needed to share this discovery. I imagined myself falling from a building and at the last minute shouting,
“Do you know what you can do with your penis!?”
In the last minutes before dying, I thought I have to at least shout a testament or something. There are a few things that need to be said before I go.
Along that thread of things I misunderstood in life, I totally pitied girls because they didn’t have a penis, therefore, they couldn’t masturbate right? It’s just not there those poor things! Also, no penis means nothing to pee out of, so I thought girls just had a cloacae like birds, where pee and poop come out of the same orifice. Obviously I was slightly confused to eventually find out otherwise.
Once I got a little bit older, around the time of puberty, I decided it would probably be fun to shove things up my butt while I was masturbating. I was a smart kid, but not the smartest about my choices of what to use; so I used a tampon. An unwrapped one, without lube. In other words, it didn’t get very far. Later on I discovered candles are really great. I used them a lot and put them in a plastic bag under my bed when I was done. I never disposed of them but one day, the bag was gone
I’m not sure I want to know what exactly my parents thought was going on when they found the bag.
Learning about Sex
I come from a very conservative and religious part of Germany. There are still differences between former East and West Germany and one of these differences is that in the West, religion is subtly everywhere. There was a cross in every classroom, or if not every, at least in most. You never notice it though, it’s just decoration, I was never really bothered by them. It’s completely natural and you don’t think about it much until you speak with people from Eastern Germany and they are like, what in the fuck are you talking about?
In the West, every child gets assigned either Protestant or Catholic at birth and that classification is on your official government records. There are exceptions, but in my class of around thirty kids, there was only one boy who did not have a designation thrust upon him by his parents. Then once you are in school, religion is a mandatory subject. All of the kids get separated, Protestants in one room and Catholics in another, and every year from something like third grade until tenth, you take a religion class.
It’s also a stereotype, but it was also true for my school, that the religion teachers are pretty cool guys. They were fun and never told us masturbation was a bad or anything like that. It was mostly just learning about the Bible, other world religions and cults. One of our lessons was even on Scientology as a cult, which was a cool lesson. Surprisingly, religion and sex don’t have any crossover in my brain.
There was also a bit of information about sex and sexuality in “Bravo,” a German magazine for teens, but I always hated the magazine because it was pop culture and I was always into counter culture.
In school, people told me they admired me about my “no fucks given,” attitude; but at the same time, I was only avoiding people because I was afraid they were going to hate me anyway, so I wasn’t really above things, I was just never really into peer groups. You do your thing and I’ll be over here being lonely.
Even though I hated this magazine, I was really grateful for these three pages of letters to the Sex Ed team. There were all kinds of questions and stories about all different kinds of sexual topics that were made to be super straight forward. These stories and bits of information really changed how I felt about what I was doing.
It was this really stereotypical message about how “it’s totally normal,” but I really enjoyed getting that message and I think it was important in how I grew to view my own sexuality.
