Jonas from Finland
Finland is quite progressive, but there are still a lot of people who aren’t.
My mom was a feminist. Her best friend was gay and all of my nannies were either lesbians, or in the very least, a bit weird.
I grew up in a pretty open and progressive household. My mom always told me pretty much everything was ok, just don’t hit people. I remember feeling shame about sexuality sometimes though, so there were cues from society getting in somehow.
It was confusing because my home environment and my outside life often didn’t line up. My school was all working-class families, most of them single-parent homes. I think that maybe the people in my community were more angry and hateful towards anything different than other, better off families in Finland. The kids in those areas probably had a much different experience.
I got bullied a lot by older kids in my neighborhood, I was six at the time, so they were probably ten. They asked if I have ever taken my dick in my hand and moved it back and forth. They said it felt really good. I thought they were trying to screw with me though. I mean, there is no way this could be true, right? Knowing them, it would catch fire or something.
Even if I was really unsure about this questionable advice, one night I took my teddy bear under the blanket and gave it a try. I think my mom figured out what I was doing pretty fast because almost immediately I was taking 15-minute naps six times a day. It was either masturbation or narcolepsy.
One time, she knocked on the door while I was on my mission and whispered through the crack, “You know Jonas, it’s normal what you are doing and totally ok.”
I yelled back, “Mom, I don’t know what you are talking about!! I am sleeping!”
I just totally freaked out. I have never felt so ashamed in my life. Even if I was ashamed though, no amount of shame could ever make me stop. Even when there were moments where it was starting to hurt, I would think, ‘eh, I can do this. I am a fucking trooper.’
The porn-mine
The paper trash was always a gold mine for young boys. We would go dumpster diving and it didn’t take long before we found porn and were like ‘oh what’s this?’
We collected a lot of trash porn, but also a neighbor of mine had a huge collection we would go over and look at. His mom was really fucked up and she bought him a bunch of porn magazines when he was ten. I don’t really understand what her motivation was, but my friend covered all of the walls of his room with porn. It was hardcore porn too. We would go over there for sleepovers and masturbate like monkeys and his mom would never say anything. At first, I thought it was normal, but later, I realized how fucked up it was.
Sometimes we would also steal porn from kiosks and stuff. At ten you don’t really feel bad about that kind of stuff because you don’t realize what you are doing. It was the middle of winter in Finland, but we would be outside in this treehouse with our pants down masturbating. Nothing could stop us.
BDSFeminism
When I was around twelve, my mom bought me condoms ‘just in case.’ I was seventeen when I finally lost my virginity, so those condoms were well passed expired. My mom tried to be open with me, but I didn’t feel I could talk to her about things. I was ashamed. It wasn’t something that I wanted to talk to my mom about.
I think that’s probably programmed into us. I don’t know where it came from, but I felt ashamed about a lot of things that had to do with sexuality. When I started masturbating, I felt ashamed. Then later, I got into kinky stuff and felt really ashamed. My mom is a feminist and I wanted to hit girls, so what the fuck?
Until I was around thirty, I felt horrible because I thought I shouldn’t want to hit women. Fortunately, I eventually found people who really like it, then it became different. Before, I always felt like I was taking something from people, which I don’t want to do. After I found people who also like kinky things, it felt more like I was giving something to them.
(Read about consensual BDSM here, here and here.)
It took me a long time to get over those triggers from childhood. We really don’t talk enough about these things. I believe very strongly that you learn all of your sexual behavior before you actually have sex. We take it all in when we are ten or eleven and carry it with us. That’s part of the reason I think we should talk to kids about sexuality much, much younger. But with our religious society, I know that won’t really fly.
I also would have liked to see a wider range of information provided in sex-ed. Sure it can still be focused around penis plus vagina and out comes a baby, but there is so much more to it that takes so long to figure out on your own. There should be a book or something for young people that is more in-depth. Maybe not in the same age group, it doesn’t need to be so young, but at least for when you are older. Not sure if it’s something that we could actually do, but it would be really interesting.
My best friend and I were curious about what all of these things felt like and how they worked so somehow we decided that we would just try them with each other. I don’t think we sat down and thought ok we are going to do this, it just kind of happened. We wanted to try what it felt like to give a hickey for example, so we did that. Then we wanted to know what it was like to kiss, so we did that. Then it just gradually descended into sex. I didn’t think of it as sex though. I guess I saw it more as just playing around.
I was also very proud that by thirteen years old, I was one of the first kids in my school to download porn off of the internet. My dad is a programmer so we had internet at home way before everyone else. This was around 1996 when the internet was very slow. I would download individual images onto a disk, a floppy disk, which had 3.2 megabytes. I had one other friend who had access to the internet so we would trade disks, each of which probably had only five pictures.
This time around it was much better though, I would use things like pens. I would try all sorts of things since, of course, I was too young to buy anything proper. I had a biology kit and there was a glass test tube in there so I used that for a long time. Which in retrospect… Oh god… I even left it in the shower once and it was still there a day later. My parents never really interfered with that at all.
I have no idea how I thought about gay or straight but looking back, it was never a big deal to me. I was never worried if I was gay or straight. To me, being gay wasn’t something negative or something that mattered all that much. There was sex with whoever was hot and there were hot people of any sex. I didn’t care so much what their configuration was. I think this says a lot about my parents, they were really an island of liberalism in a conservative society.
My parents also played a bit with non-monogamy but I didn’t realize that until I was much older. They met another couple down at the nude beaches and were dating them for a long time. We would see this other couple quite often, one year we even went up to their place in Northern France. We knew them and really liked them; they had kids around our age as well. All in all, there are extremely positive memories of these holidays and of these people.
I used to run a restaurant in Portland and one time at work I was just mindlessly doing my things and went over to use the blender. As I leaned against the counter, the vibration went from the blender to the counter and then to my crotch. Right then and there, I lost it and orgasmed in front of everyone. I started freaking out and told my coworkers I had to go. I went outside and took a brisk walk in the rain to get ahold of myself again. When I came back, they were worried and asked if everything was all right. I just told them I didn’t want to talk about it.
It was all soft core, you would never see a penis or penetration, which I wanted to see but I also just liked the female figure and was happy with that. There was one porn star I really liked, Jeanna Fine, she had these really big tits and short black hair.
I was also obsessed with Pamela Anderson. I would sit and using this primitive MS Paint program, not even Photoshop, try to draw her clothes off. Like actually draw her body onto her swimming suit or clothes.
them anymore. It was really like a scene from a movie. I finally arrived to school with an Action Man and there all of the kids were, playing with “
People don’t really talk about sex in Portugal. We had zero sex education when I was younger, we just learned about the reproductive system in science class. I learned how to put a condom on a banana at queer camp when I was seventeen. The first time touching a condom at seventeen, that’s way too late. It was only when I started watching “
She then suggested this 
It was a really good and easy conversation.
