Education through media

Bo from Belgium

Mieke Maaike

When I was thirteen, I found a book on my mom’s nightstand called Mieke Maaike’s Obscene Youth by Louis Boon. He’s a great writer and well-respected in in Flemish culture. Most of his work is quite serious except for this particular book, which was a satiric, pornographic story about a girl named Mieke Maaike from the time she is nine to nineteen.

The cover was nice and caught my eye, it was pink with a picture of a woman posed seductively. I didn’t know what the word obscene meant so I asked my mom. She said that it is something that you are not supposed to talk about. So you can see how that peaked my interest. I asked her if I could read the book and since she was very sleepy, she said yes. Immediately my dad, who was also in the room, almost lost his shit and yelled “NO!”

As to be expected, whenever nobody was home I would sit in my parent’s bedroom and read the book. It contained among other things, a lot of pedophilia. Then there was bestiality, a lot of violence, consensual and non-consensual, there was incest, forced incest and all sorts of other things. It was really driven from the character herself though; almost every situation was something that she really pushed for.

(EDITORS NOTE: for brevity I have cut most of the description of the book but it is actually really shocking, interesting and worth checking out. Check out the Wikipedia article.) Or, you can watch this very confusing and funny Youtube I found of what I assume is these two women reading from the book.

The whole book is about Mieke Maaike trying to go out and have more intense sexual experiences. As soon as she does one thing, it’s no longer exciting so she has to push the boundaries further. It starts off pretty innocent but then it escalates incredibly quickly. Soon sex is not enough and that’s when it goes from downright problematic to insanely problematic. She needs it to be provocative, cross peoples’ boundaries and hurt people.

Reading the story, parts of it gave me the tingles. I knew it was not real but I got confused by what I would get tingles from. If I was getting turned on by things like non-consent or bestiality, what does that say about me?

By that time I had had a little bit of sex ed in school, but not enough to really understand a lot of elements about sexuality.

Playing games

My brother and I used to go online and play games where we would like run a restaurant or something random. There was one game though that we never really cracked, though, we attempted it a lot. It was called Orgasm Girl. You get this anime girl wearing clothes and you have toys you can use and your goal is to go from the situation you are in, to making the girl orgasm without waking her up. If the nipples get hard, you get points and with those points you can buy things like scented candles. There is this meter of how asleep she is and another meter of how turned on she is. It was exciting but also I think we just didn’t realize yet that it was something that most people would be embarrassed about or keep to themselves.

This is probably the creepiest game I have ever seen. The intro to the game states:
“Orgasm Girl is the hottest lesbian angel around and she has only one objective: to give young girls intense orgasms while they’re asleep.”

If you want to see an even creepier video of the game being played: https://mysexgames.com/games/5/orgasm_girl_ashley/mp4

The only person I think I told was a neighbor boy my brother and I played with a lot. He was usually involved in a lot of the things we got into. He was the only kid on our street and he was one year younger than me and one year older than my brother, so that worked out. The three of us used to play together a lot but I stopped when I was around thirteen. They still played together, but I kind of kept away. When I noticed that I wasn’t playing with them any more, I wondered why I had stopped.

I was bored one day and wanted to revive that relationship so I went to go and play with the two again. The neighbor kid said that he wanted to play doctor. I already knew, no, this is not gonna fly. I kept trying to play something else but he kept pushing. So I told him ok, but I would be the doctor. He pushed back and demanded that I be the patient. He wore me down until finally I was the patient.

I laid on the bed. I had this turtleneck sweatshirt on slightly pulled up and he told me I had to pull my sweater up more.

“Why?” I asked.

“You just have to.”

“Why? I told you I am not doing it, why would I?”

Then my brother of all people, blurts out,

“Otherwise we can’t touch your boobs.”

First of all, I think they were between grape and kiwi size. I know some girls hit puberty earlier but that was not my case.

I stormed off angrily and ran into my neighbor’s mom on the way. I blurted it all out and she got really angry with him. Rightfully so. I think she also felt that I was too naive, which I guess to a point, I was.

I understood the concept of playing doctor and knew it was something that I wasn’t interested in. I think maybe they made jokes about playing doctor or something like that in some TV series. I don’t know where it came from but I had this instant no.

A/S/L

Whenever I would get bored, I would go onto these chat rooms where basically everyone is in this common chat but if you wanted you could enter a private chat with someone. I think I started doing this around fourteen, but of course I would pretend I was older. Just a few years to make it a bit better to talk about sexuality with me. Guys would always ask me to go into a private chat with them. We would start out just talking, then, after a while, they would always ask to meet up. I always said no because it felt very “stranger danger.” I didn’t want to meet up with someone somewhere, especially with an older dude.

Transport wise, I wasn’t super mobile either and if this guy had a car or a motorcycle, I’m fucked, or I could be. I mainly just wanted to text. Sometimes there were guys who, after a while, would freak out about me not wanting to meet up and say things like,

“Well, I want to meet you and talk! Don’t you like me?”

I would say, “yeah, I like you, but respect what I am saying to you.”

Sometimes they would blow up at me. Sometimes after a while, they would start to use emotional blackmail. I sent one guy cover art I had made for a school assignment and he said it wasn’t good. I asked why and he said, he wouldn’t tell me unless I agreed to see him. I told him I wasn’t going to do that, and he knew it. So he said, fine, I guess you will never know. It was just a stupid school thing, I didn’t actually care. I don’t know what he thought he had on me but that was not it.

Some of these people lived really close to me and it started to get scary after a while. The worst was when for some reason, I told this guy who really wanted to meet up, which house I lived in. I would see him bike by through the windows sometimes. I knew he couldn’t see me because we had really reflective windows but it got a little bit too far. I didn’t know what to do anymore.

At a certain point, I was in the computer room chatting with him and there are these things in messenger where you can type a certain key combination then a GIF or emoji that you assigned to that combination will appear. This guy, I think accidently, sent a GIF of this animated couple in a naughty position with the dude just smashing into her.

My dad was in the room and I knew that first of all, my dad could see this and might be angry at me for not doing anything about this. Then I also realized, this is my shot.

I went, “Eew dad, look what the dude sent!”

My dad got on the keyboard and said it was Bo’s father and that he better stop and leave me alone.

I didn’t really mind the animated thing so much. I can handle two people having sex on the screen. But I knew that my dad would be offended and I knew I didn’t want any contact with this dude. I just didn’t know how to approach it because I didn’t want to be a dick.

He never contacted me again.

Sex Ed

The sex ed we got was pretty good overall. I first got it when I was twelve and then each year of high school after that. Somewhere around 6^th year, there was a weekend where we all went away with the teachers to this Abbey and there was sex ed there as well. I remember seeing a model of a uterus right before we went to lunch. I did not like that. Actually it wasn’t so much the uterus, the uterus was ok, it was just a plastic thingie but the guy showing it had so much junk coming out of his ears. That is what really disgusted me. I lied though and told everyone it was the uterus.

Then later in our sex ed, I think when I was seventeen, there was a picture of a penis in one of our handbooks. One of my male classmates said it was a really ugly penis and I was like it is? I didn’t think it’s ugly. I mean it’s not pretty but it’s not ugly either. Then I started wondering what other penises looked like. I wasn’t sexually active yet so I had no idea.

I went to a Catholic School and so we had religion classes. It wasn’t just blasting about Jesus, we also learned about different religions. Mostly Judaism and Islam. Then there was also morality. In this class, we would also have assignments where we would have to think about a certain situation and what it would do to us.

I only remember one particular one which was; if you are in a relationship and your partner still masturbates, do you think that is ok?

I hadn’t even kissed anyone so I didn’t know. In a way it seems kind of gross but in another way, I am not involved, he’s not doing it with someone else, it seems pretty ok. I was having that inner discussion, while not wanting to really say anything to the group. Eventually, a loud and obnoxious girl in my group told the teacher that I didn’t have an answer. The teacher came and said it was fine if I didn’t have an answer; the assignment was to think about it, not to get the right answer. I was like fuck, thank you.

Overall we got taught quite a lot about sex in school. I think it’s also a little bit about us being the prestige school. We were one of those schools where everybody leaves with a bigger ego than they came in with. We would learn way more than the curriculum dictated. If we were supposed to learn 3,000 words of French, you could bet your ass we would all know at least 4,000. We were supposed to be the cream of the crop, and you can’t have the cream of the crop getting pregnant.

I was really surprised when I had my first sexual partner because he didn’t know a lot of the things I had been taught in sex ed. We went through the same system kind of but in Belgium we have a three path education system.

First path prepares you for university, second is more technical so you could study further but you could also just get a job after school and third path prepares you for a certain profession. I went to the one that prepares you for university and he went to the lower one so I guess there might be a difference there. It was confusing for me that he didn’t know these things. I had to teach him a lot about things like birth control and safe sex. I guess not everyone in Belgium got as good of a sex education as I did.

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January 7, 2019 TAGS: Belgium, consent, feminism, Flemish, learning about ourself, learning about sexuality, Mieke Maaike, pushing back, sexuality, video games, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The guilty gender

Alphonse from Germany

One day I was walking around after school with my sister and we found a porn magazine on the street. It was already a bit wet so the pages stuck together. We worked so hard trying to separate all of them. My parents were traveling so a friend of my parents was looking after us. After school my sister and I spread out all of these wet pages all over the whole room. We just found it so interesting, looking from page to page. Then this friend of my parents came home and we said, “Oh we found something! Come and have a look!” We were so proud. In the first moment she was interested, oh what did you find? But her facial expression quickly changed to disgust and she said, “Oh no, you have to throw it away!” I thought why? It wasn’t sexual to us, it was just interesting to see all of these pictures. Still, I just threw it away and we never talked about it again. I don’t think she mentioned it to my parents either.

Not long after, we were visiting a friend of my parents who was gay. I was bored while the adults were in the kitchen talking, so I started looking around his flat. I found this big library and between the books, I found another porn magazine but this time it was a gay porn magazine.

I looked at it and didn’t like it somehow. Then I looked further and I found a heterosexual porn magazine. It was called Pleasure.There were thee erotic stories in the magazine and I can still remember all of them. So I took it home. I stole it. I found it so interesting I had to look at it more.

In German school we had actually a really good sex education. I think it started when we were in 5^th grade. It was also common to have this book at home to teach kids about sex and it was quite explicit. I remember there was this photo of a penis and a vagina and part of it was funny to us but it was explained really well. What was missing is maybe the emotional part of sexuality but that’s maybe difficult with kids. Anyway, I knew the technicalities of sex from quite early on but seeing this porn magazine was really interesting and forbidden so I had to take it home with me.

I had experiences with erections before and I had touched myself, but I always felt there was a bodily reaction that was too intense so I didn’t continue. It was just too much. But then I had this porn magazine and I was really excited so I started to touch myself again. What once was too intense, was now really exciting. The energy was rising and then suddenly I had my first ejaculation. It was really scary because suddenly it just happened.

I was aware of the concept of ejaculation but I had read in books that it usually happened during sleep. I was really looking forward to wet dreams but then when this ejaculation happened, it was almost scary, like something broke. I felt a bit guilty because I thought that because I had my first ejaculation with pornography, somehow my system was messed up. I thought maybe I didn’t experience wet dreams like other boys because I had broken something.

Unfortunately, the porn magazine kind of got lost after a while. It was cool to talk in school about this stuff and say, “Oh I have a porn magazine.” Of course all of my friends wanted to see it and borrow it. Then one friend gave it to another friend and then it was just gone. I felt so stupid, for five minutes you are the cool guy because you can say here is this magazine but then it’s gone.

I always had quite an interest for porn. I often felt guilty for that but also somehow joy. My relationship with my parents was a bit twisted or complicated and I think that was very much intertwined. I felt really guilty having sexual urges at all. I had been taught that it was ok to have sex if you are in love but the wish to have sex without being in love was practically abuse. I didn’t allow myself the thought of wanting sex, which made masturbation kind of weird. I wanted love but with hindsight, I think I just confused the two things. I really wished to love and to be loved, but it would have been more honest to say that I just wanted sex. It just wasn’t possible to allow myself to have those thoughts.

My mother was abused as a child and I think she gave me a real messed up self-image and idea about sexuality. In this self image, male sexuality equaled rapeism and aggressiveness. Because of this, I didn’t end up actually having sex until I was 22. I couldn’t let myself want to touch someone or want to be physical with someone because I wanted to be loving and not like all of the “other guys.” I think that mostly came from my mom and it was really hard to get around this idea. This idea manifests in how you act and then it becomes your reality.

My father was absent at times and then when he was there, he wasn’t really present so he wasn’t a good role model. The main emotional influencer was my mother and I think she was really messed up. When my sister started having boyfriends, my mother was often so tense and scared of what would happen. One time when my sister’s boyfriend was at our place, my mom called me into her room and told me I had to go up to my sister’s room and kick her boyfriend out. They were just kissing but for my mom, they were doing terrible things. So I had to go in and say, “Hey I’m sorry but you need to go now.”

My mother was a really intelligent, structured type of person but not very physical or emotional. As soon as things crossed over into this physical or emotional realm, it was just a bottomless pit. This was the atmosphere in our home. These topics just didn’t exist. It was like there was a rational world that was in a way open-minded but as soon as it came into this body world, it’s danger and panic mode. I think this really shaped me in a way. I enjoyed al of my first sexual experiences, but they were always followed by immense guilt. Years later I finally understood that I was actually feeling guilty about being a man or being male. It’s kind of messed up.

Even now almost at forty, I haven’t figured out this balance between masculinity and sexuality. Eventually I managed to acknowledge that I really enjoy sex and that that’s ok. It was really hard for me even to do that though. I really had to fight this feeling of being guilty just for being there or for the act of wanting sex itself. Wanting sex seemed aggressive in a way. This was really the first step.

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September 26, 2018 TAGS: abuse, berlin, childhood, Children, discovering sex, discovery, experimentation, exploration, exploring sexuality, Germany, guilt, learning about sex, learning about sexuality, love, masturbation, mom, openness, parents, porn, porn magazine, pornography, sex ed, sexual guilt, shame, stories, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

Playing house, the rated R edition

Emma from Switzerland

When I was around seven years old, my friend and I started playing what we called “Mom and Dad.” She always played the dad/husband and I always played the mom/wife.

We always had jobs. I, as the woman, worked in a very modern office. My friend as the man in the relationship, either worked at an office as well or as a gym instructor. When we played that we both worked in offices, we would work at the same office. This would always be how we met. I would get a cup of coffee and bump into her and we would immediately fall in love because we thought that’s how love works.

If she was playing a gym instructor, I would go and get some tips on how to work out properly. She would touch me and show me some exercises. It was always then that I realized I fell in love with her/him. We would talk about our attraction towards one another and go on a date, which would always be to go out and eat. She, as the man, would invite me of course. Then I’d invite her/him to my apartment where we got intimate. I can’t remember how it first started; we just wanted to show each other how mature we could be.

We would lay on top of each other in our underwear, she would have a tennis ball or something in her panties. Sometimes we would kiss but most of the time we would just lay there. We would always wipe our mouths with our hands first though so the kiss wouldn’t be wet, because god forbid we taste each others saliva. We thought that was gross. It wasn’t erotic in any way but we felt very mature for doing something we thought adults did all the time.

Sometimes we would continue playing, going to work the next day, coming home, having dinner and then having sex again. Most of the time the play ended after we “had sex” though. We would figure out new roles and start all over. The getting to know each other part was much more important because there was this intense build-up, even though we both knew how it was going to end.

We always played this game at my place, never at hers. I guess because she was Turkish and her parents would get really mad. My mom walked in on us once and asked why we were in our underwear. We said that we were playing “babies.”

Maybe she knew, maybe she didn’t. I honestly have no clue. She just laughed and asked if we wanted some snacks or if she should bring us our bottles. I think she just went with it. She probably would have felt uncomfortable if she really knew what we were doing behind closed doors. Even though I think what we were doing was normal, I don’t know if she would have.

I told my younger brother that I was playing this game and he thought it sounded like fun so we tried it too. I just thought it would be nice to actually play with someone male. We never kissed though; we would just lay on top of each other, somehow exploring our bodies, which were so differently formed. I don’t think we realized what we were doing at first.

When we started playing the game, we didn’t know that we crossed a line. The awareness of doing something forbidden or something just not suitable for brother and sister to do came later on. The realization of what sexuality means or what intimacy means on the other hand, comes a lot earlier than most people might realize.

My brother and I have always been very close and we still are. After a while though, I as the older sibling started to realize that one shouldn’t be intimate with ones brother in the way my brother and I were and I told him I didn’t want to play this game any more. He was disappointed because he liked the sensation our intimacy gave him. He was younger, probably only six years old and he didn’t have a clue what this kind of physical sensation meant, he just enjoyed it.

We never talked about it and even if I know that what we did is normal in terms of our development, I feel a little embarrassed. This experience is also something I have never told anyone, not even my girlfriend of many years, even though we always say we have no secrets. I just don’t feel comfortable thinking about the kind of sensation that was between my brother and I when we played this game.

My brother and I are still very close. We hug often, we’re really good friends and can also show physical affection, everything on a normal level though, nothing intimate anymore. But still, sometimes I feel like there’s something between us holding us back from getting closer. Sometimes there would be a random touch while talking or doing something. A touch that doesn’t intend anything but we both twitch back just a little.

The knowledge that we were once so intimate with each other is still present in both our minds I guess. It’s like a constant reminder to not get closer. Also when we watched Game of Thrones together and the incest scene between Cersei and Jamie Lannister first came up, we both started to feel awkward.

At some point my friend and I stopped playing the game as well. It’s not that we became aware of the intimacy or anything, we just didn’t want to play anymore. Other games were more appealing, more fun, more interesting.

This girl and I went to school together until we were about fourteen, then we parted ways, finding each other again when we were all grown up. We got drunk one night and started talking about this game. We were both rolling on the floor laughing because at first it was so awkward. Then we just started talking about how weird it was that I, who always played the female part, ended up being a lesbian and she, who always played the male part, is straight. We thought about how our game could have been an indicator for my sexuality now.

We both studied psychology so we know this is a normal thing for children to do as soon as they start becoming aware of their own bodies. That’s also why we’re not ashamed of it. Exploring ones sexuality has nothing to do with sex but rather with becoming aware of your own body. We both know what we did is not embarrassing in any way because it’s normal for kids at that age.

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July 12, 2018 TAGS: boundaries, brother, childhood, Children, discovery, experimentation, exploration, exploring sexuality, family, husband, kids, learning, learning about sexuality, openness, parents, playing, playing house, pleasure, pretend, sexual boundaries, sister, sleep overs, stories, switzerland, wife, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The sultry affair with romance novels

Kim from Canada

I have always been really into reading. When I was growing up, the most easily available books where those dime store romance novels, usually Harlequin brand. My mom had quite a collection of them and new ones were always coming. Between the ages of ten and thirteen, I easily read over a hundred of these books. My mom had no problem with me reading them either. She was like whatever, she’s in her room reading, at least I know where she is.

It’s funny where parents choose to draw their lines. I think she was more concerned about me going out and doing stuff in the world than reading about it. If it was outright porn she would be like fuck this and it would be done in two seconds but this was ok. If it’s sold in a pharmacy, then it probably wasn’t too bad. It was breaking her Judeo-Christian rules to some degree but at least she knew where I was. I was the baby out of five kids so she couldn’t give too many fucks. She was just trying to survive.

I really loved reading but it was a lot of escapism too, it was so much easier to build worlds back then. I started reading these romance novels and recognizing in a very non-critical way that there were all of these kinds of tropes, dark princes, the stern guys who were hard to love and unyielding. Then there were some who were super flirty, which are the ones I liked. I didn’t like the stern ones, I thought they were assholes. Women were supposed to love you because you have rough hands? Who cares if you have rough hands? Treat me nice.

I never wanted to tell anyone I was reading these books. It was my private world, like Dungeons and Dragons for girls. I didn’t want to tell anyone else because if you hear their reaction to it and they don’t like it, it’s going to shatter your world. It’s so fragile, why would you do that? You have to protect so much about yourself when you are young. North America is a bully culture; there is no debate about that. You have to be so proactive in being a different person just to get some form of acceptance. You are trying to build something nobody else can touch. Not telling someone doesn’t mean you are shutting them out, it means you are maintaining it for yourself.

In these made up worlds in my books, I could imagine complete faces of people I had never seen before and really get into it. I was good at textures and how people looked, where they lived, houses they lived in. I was really into the details.

It’s interesting to see that kind of dance the two characters go through because it has this rhythm about it. It’s usually these people who meet and it’s intriguing but there is always some kind of weird conflict that is going on. Something tears them apart and there is some kind of misunderstanding. Then afterwards she realizes or he tells her that there is this misunderstanding, it’s like any rom-com. The misunderstanding is not what it seemed and then they can actually get together.

The getting together part was the most boring for me. It’s satisfying only for that moment. It’s like an orgasm. I was more interested in the whole thing leading up to it, the sexual exploration and figuring out what the boundaries were.

Since the characters weren’t able to be in each other’s company very often, the words were so sparse that they meant so much more. Usually the author is filling in a lot with things like, “he turned to her in this kind of a way,” or “he turned as if to say.” I found that interesting because it spoke to the way that we speak without speaking.

One thing I liked was most of the books didn’t speak down to you. There were some of course where the boy enters and you are supposed to be excited that they are there. That was boring. I didn’t want to faun over some guy who didn’t deserve it. I knew the important part was the way he acted or the way he held himself or the way that he talked to me. He had to do something to make you interested. Not just because this is the story and he’s the only person there is so make it work.

There was one that I loved a lot, it was called Unconquered, I think by Bertrice Small. What a name. If your name is Bertrice, what else can you do besides write romance novels? That book changed my life. It started off, spoiler alert, with a privileged woman in Maryland. They had this big estate and her father died and the rule was that the estate would go to the next male heir. So it was going to something like a half cousin and she was like fuck this, this is my house, I grew up here, it should go to me.

It had this feminist streak and I loved it off the bat. The guy, the partial cousin, was partial enough to be romantic, was her romantic aspiration in the end but there was so much fighting. At times I thought she would give in and other times she was so over him and couldn’t stand him. I thought that was kind of cool because she didn’t give in too soon. If they give in too soon it’s boring. She was losing something important, she was losing her estate so she fought tooth and nail but eventually, in order to keep her family estate, she had to marry him.

At some point, she gets sold into slavery into this harem in Egypt or somewhere but she has a good experience, which of course never happens. She experiences all of these orgasms and sexual pleasures with the man that runs the harem. There is always the possibility to go off to the consulate and be rescued but she has a real deep relationship with this guy who was not her husband. She said to him, “I feel really conflicted because I am a wife and I know I was kidnapped but here I am with you and I have had pleasures with you outside of my husband.”

He said “those are your pleasures, that’s no ones business” and it blew my fucking mind.

As a kid it’s just like what? Is this possible? I hope I get kidnapped! Ok for the record no, but for me it was so crazy. She had different relationships and then she went back to her husband. That was what was intriguing about it. She had all of these different lives. She was fiercely independent and fiercely herself. That was what made it interesting. Any time you get a whiff of different possibilities and different narratives you really feel alive and that is what I connect it to.

She also had a baby and her baby wasn’t the center of the story after. I resented that in a lot of novels. The ending in a lot of romance novels was oh they got married! I don’t need to see that, I was here for the sex and the intrigue. I don’t really care about you getting married, it’s implied. I was really bored by that and I felt kind of abandoned when a story ended that way.

That book also had one of my favorite lines out of all of the books I was reading. “His phallus was l like an ivory tower, veined and blue.”

You can’t beat that.

One of the things that I really liked about the novels was that it was exactly at the level that I needed at the moment.

As a kid I would draw things that were sometimes overtly sexual. I thought it was funny, haha look it’s a dick type of thing or people kissing. I would show them to my friends and I just thought it was funny. I never drew anything like penetration, that was so gross and foreign and violent to me. But people kissing, oh yeah, that was the level I was at. I was horrible at drawing people so they were distorted with these huge lips.

One time my teacher found some drawings and she called my mom. I was like oh no my life is over, she is going to murder me! You don’t understand man, it’s not a joke! It’s not a joke! My mom asked me where I saw this kind of stuff and I told her, in these magazines that I found from my brother and she lost it. My brothers were in their early teens so they weren’t exactly careful about hiding their porn.

He got in massive trouble, especially because she had some fucking teacher calling her. It’s always bad news when your kid’s teacher calls you. I’m sure you feel so much judgment as a parent, they are looking down on you. She’s this black woman raising kids by herself, it’s like I don’t need to deal with this shit, I am trying to keep shit together. Don’t bring me this crap.

Between the magazines I found from my brother and a soft-core porn that I saw once accidentally on late night television, I was able to understand the gist of what sex was. What surprised me about the difference between porn and the novels I was reading was that there didn’t seem to be any joy attached to the porn. I couldn’t attach those anguished sounds with pleasure.

There is the kind of porn where it feels like I am a potential victim and the kind of porn that is more drawn out with a story. Somebody has earned my interest, my care. I would have liked that kind of story where people didn’t have to have this forced coquettishness or coyness of oh my god, what are you doing to me?

You know what the fuck is going on. It’s either that or she is being attacked or violated and it’s not romantic, it’s not even cool. You never encounter sex as a good thing in porn. It’s something from a male gaze. It’s not about you, it just involves you because you have the parts.

I don’t remember where I heard this from but it really stuck with me:

“When it comes to women and sex, women like everything around sex almost as much as the sex itself.”

That is exactly what it was, sex itself wasn’t the plan. I liked everything around sex, especially since I didn’t fully understand sex. I knew how it worked mechanically but I didn’t quite understand how it worked organically. You don’t learn that kind of thing from porn and I didn’t get much information from anywhere else.

My sex talk with my mom was about three sentences at most. She said, “you know what it is, don’t do it.” That was it basically.

I am sure these romance novels affected the way I thought about relationships when I started dating, probably in some ways that I can’t even describe. I feel some of it gave me high standards and maybe some of it kind of entrenched me with a lot of bullshit. There are probably weird connotations going around in my subconscious that I don’t know about. My subconscious and I are friends but we don’t talk.

I had to get past a lot of things to get to the point of who I know myself to be. At least it gave me a place to start because what else is going to teach you? A lot of kids are starting with porn and that’s so far from what sex actually is. I try not to have too much judgment about it but sex is a powerful thing. It’s not a moralistic thing at all, sex is just reality, it’s where we come from.

There is a lack of diversity in terms of thinking about sex and how organic it is. It’s really to the point and to the detriment of the woman sometimes. You have to divorce yourself from it. Most of the time when you watch porn you’re like oh my god do I hate women? Just even to enjoy it you have to fracture parts of your mind because your empathy can’t stand a lot of it. Here the empathy wasn’t lacking because it was given the dignity of the story, some kind of evolution or background to say context matters and things lead up to other things and they all matter in their own way. In the way that life actually does.

Eventually I stopped reading the books kind of all at once. My friends started to have boyfriends and the mysticism of the relationships and sensuality and sexuality kind of fell away. None of these interesting things that were happening in the stories would ever happen in real life. By learning more and more about the real world, these imaginary worlds stopped being so intriguing.

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June 11, 2018 TAGS: bullying, Canada, childhood, Children, discovery, experimentation, exploration, exploring sexuality, kids, learning, learning about sex, learning about sexuality, pleasure, ponography, porn, porno, puberty, reading, romance, romance novels, sex, stories, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The making of a pansexual polyamorist

Markus from Germany

If I think about why I am the way I am as an adult, especially sexually, it’s not difficult to figure out where some of these things come from. I’m very sex positive and open about my sexual side, I’m pansexual and I’m polyamorous (poly). This is kind of the story of how of all of these three identities came to pass. They’re independent but still connected.

Sex positive

If I think back on anything that happened when I was super young, that’s more in the sex positive strand of events. I don’t really know what my earliest sexual memory is but I know I was playing with sexuality before I had any concept what sex actually was.

Starting from the age of five I started playing these sexualized games with a few close friends. I would have sleepovers with one friend and we would play truth or dare and would dare each other to do this kind of proto-blowjob. We would just put each other’s dicks in our mouths for a few seconds, not really doing anything. We had no idea what a blowjob was but we were curious and it felt good.

I have no idea where we came up with this idea. In my memory it wasn’t really sexualized at all, it was just curiosity. It was a funny game and it felt good. I didn’t even know what sex was and I had no concept of gay or straight.

We also somehow both were interested in trying to put things up our butts. Mostly we would take the knights out of our Lego sets and use their little lances. They were really tiny so we thought we could handle them. Again it was just a funny game. Nothing sexual and nothing that had any association of being straight or gay.

What probably shaped me more than anything when it comes to being open and sex positive, was that my parents are very liberal and I spent a lot of time at nude beaches growing up. There was also always nudity in the house. Not while watching TV or something but if you change or if you go to the bathroom or shower it was a normal thing to be naked.

Before I was even born my parents went to nude beaches in France. We would drive down with the camper van every summer until I was fifteen or sixteen. We would all take our clothes off right when we got there and then put them back on five weeks later. I was around naked people all summer, every summer. That’s the atmosphere I grew up in. I think that lead to this sex positivity or to this idea that bodies are just normal and nice and nothing to be ashamed of.

I also always felt like sex was not a big deal. It’s a nice thing that you can do; definitely nothing to feel bad about. It’s just about how you like it and how the other person likes it. Not this kind of, you only have sex after you fall in love and decide you are going to get married kind of thing.

The way my parents talked about sex was also super open. My mom bought us a pretty common, and in some ways very German, sex ed book when we were in elementary school. The story was about a family who was having another baby and they explained to the kid they already had how the baby was made. It was pretty nice and positive, not just biological but also about how sex is about feelings and also for fun.

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.

My friend would talk about these pictures as if he could read the character of the girl depending on what she was doing in the picture. As if a woman with exposing pictures would be more bold or daring than one with a shy posture. As if that wasn’t at all connected to the guy who took the pictures.

Around that time I also started playing again with trying to insert things in my butt. It’s interesting to think about it, am I interested in anal play because I had this primer of experimenting with it at an early age or did I experiment with it because I was into it?

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.

Once my mom even found this incredibly racy mail order catalog that I had stolen from my dad. It was essentially hard-core porn. I had a bunch of friends spend the night in the basement and we were looking at it. Then the next day, I came home and my mom had cleaned up the room and just stacked the magazine with everything else. She for sure saw it but decided not to take it away.

Pansexual

These basement sleepovers escalated over time. Eventually we did the classic comparing penis size thing and got all horny and ramped up. I don’t remember if it was the same night or just on this escalation of how things were going but one of my friends and I were cuddling on the sofa watching a movie, but in a very, we are never going to admit what is happening kind of way, we aren’t even going to admit to ourselves what is happening.

We were lying next to each other and he started grabbing my cock and we just started making out and touching each other and he gave me a blowjob. That felt like a big deal at the time, we were only thirteen. That was the most intense sexual experience I had had by a wide margin.

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.

The story is actually not as nice as it sounds because it was followed by a very traumatizing experience.

I was stupid enough back then to think that everyone else thought the same way I did. So, when we were thirteen, in a conservative school in the countryside that was ripe with bullying already, I thought it was a good idea to tell one of my friends about what happened because I was so excited about it and had zero guilty conscience. I just thought it was this great thing. I was even proud of it a little.

The immediate reaction from him was mixed. He just thought I was crazy. Maybe this isn’t what he would have wanted but it was ok. It wasn’t an immediate bad reaction. The problem was that he told someone, who told someone else, who told someone else and it wasn’t long before what felt like the whole school knew.

I had random people coming up to me and asking me for a blowjob.

It’s hard in retrospect to see how this contributed to the overall state of bullying but I had some really bad times of being bullied physically and philologically and that definitely fed into it. What’s even worse is I brought this on myself in a way. This poor other kid though, he was smart enough. He would never have told anyone but then he was outted as well.

He never confronted me about it but this definitely broke our friendship. Years later we talked about it and he very rightly felt it was incredibly stupid of me to be open about this. We say “eine Steilvorlage liefern,” which means serve it to them on a silver platter.

I learned that just because I wasn’t homophobic didn’t mean that others weren’t as well. That pushed me back into the closet. I didn’t have experiences with guys again until much later. Amazingly enough, I didn’t feel bad about myself; I just felt that everyone else was stupid. I was always ok with the fact that I liked guys but it took me a long time to trust other people.

Polyamorous

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.

When I was thirteen, my parents got divorced and my mom told me that my dad had another girlfriend. I was really upset about it. I thought this was why my parents were getting a divorce.

It wasn’t until my twenties when I started talking to my mom about me being poly that she told me that it wasn’t just my dad who had a girlfriend, she also had another boyfriend. It wasn’t like he was sneaking around with a girlfriend; they were trying to make poly work.

For so many years I didn’t see what they were doing as being poly, I just thought my dad was doing something he shouldn’t do. I just didn’t have the full story until ten years later.

Sadly there aren’t many positive role models out there for poly.

Even before finding out that my parents had tried to be poly, I questioned monogamy quite a bit for myself. As a teenager I had a girlfriend that I liked but I didn’t love. I loved being sexual with her but none of that meant that I felt like being monogamous with her. Somehow there was this cognitive dissonance in my head. I knew I liked this woman, it’s nice to hang out with her, it’s nice to talk to her, it’s nice to have sexual things with her, but somehow society expects more.

It felt completely right but it also felt wrong because I didn’t fit inside what society thought this girl should be for me. I would go to music festivals without her when I was 17 and I met some girl. It was an immediate sexual connection and we ended up in my tent.

I didn’t really have a guilty conscious. I felt like it’s so obvious that of course I am doing this. What does this have to do with my girlfriend at home? They are totally unrelated things. It’s totally the poly way of thinking but there was no concept of poly at all.

I think overall my parents taught us a lot of good things about people and relationships. It was a lot in subtle ways about pleasure like with food. Eating good food and hanging out with friends was always a focus. Those are the kinds of values I got from my parents. You should be nice to other people but you should also enjoy other people and you should enjoy yourself and enjoy life. It’s not about work or money.

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May 9, 2018 TAGS: ass, bisexual, bullying, childhood, Children, cuddling, early experiences, experimentation, exploration, exploring sexuality, France, games, gay, gender, german, Germany, kids, learning, learning about sexuality, love, nude, nudity, openness, pansexual, parents, poly, polyamory, porn, queer, romance, school, sex, sexuality, shame, sleep overs, slumber parties, stories, understanding, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

Sex in the country

Martina from Switzerland

Switzerland is really small so the countryside and city aren’t far away from one another. We lived in the city but had a stable with horses and other animals in the country about half an hour away so we would spend every weekend out there.

Both of my parents worked with animals as well so we always had a lot at home.And what do animals do? They reproduce. My brother and I learned a lot about sex and reproduction just by watching the animals.

My parents were also really open with us. Whatever we wanted to know, they would tell us. They would always tell us the truth but in a way that we would understand it. We were open-minded kids and wanted to know everything, as most kids do.

I once saw a sheep give birth and I realized that it must really be horrible so I told my mom that I never wanted to have children. She was really surprised that I made that connection even though I was so young.

We also had Icelandic ponies. My mom used to breed them so she took pictures of the ponies having sex. My brother and I loved these pictures, this pony porn. We had these plastic boxes that you could put photos in, like an album and whenever we could, we would put the pictures of the horses having sex on the cover. We thought it was funny.

My brother and I were also super open with each other. It was awesome having a brother who is a couple of years older because he knew all of these things that I didn’t.

Once my brother even got a home shopping catalogue from this sex shop called Beate Uhse. He brought it home and let me look at it with him. I was particularly fascinated by the dolphin shaped vibrators. Our favorite though was one shaped like a banana called Billy Bongo. We had so much fun with Billy Bongo just because it was a fucking banana and it had such a funny name. There were also penis shaped ones, so I think we figured out what they were and what they were used for.

Out at our place in the country, we had two neighbor boys who were around my brother’s age. Sooner or later, we ended up in the barn playing doctor games. It was a bit on me since I was the only girl but it was really fun. It was all very playful. The two neighbor boys were more active and my brother was the observer because you still have this brother sister thing, we knew somehow it was forbidden. Brothers and sisters, they shouldn’t mingle. We might have learned that from the animals as well; you can’t inbreed animals, it’s really bad.

Just a bit after this happened; I was playing in the garden with a really good friend of mine. There was a huge table outside and we put a cloth and towels over it and hid under the table. We were also looking at each other like, “ohh what do you have there?” Anybody could have easily caught us. It was really arousing.

I think because my brother and I were so open with our parents and with each other, we knew more than other children in our age group. This actually left my dad in an awkward situation once.

My mom wanted to buy this American Quarter Horse. The man who imported it from the United States lived in Germany so the two of us went on a road trip. The owner of the horse was this really stereotypical, old-school farmer. He was going around yelling “bumsen” all of the time, which is like a slightly less vulgar way of saying fucking.

I went back to kindergarten the next week and had all of these new words that I picked up and of course, I was saying them every chance I could. My kindergarten teacher was rightfully surprised and wondered why this little girl was talking about fucking. She approached my mom and asked her if everything was all right at home. What about my dad? Was he doing anything inappropriate?

Of course my mom then approached me about this.

After clarifying that there wasn’t anything weird going on with my dad, my mom bought me all of these coloring books with different stories about how you are allowed to say no whenever something goes too far. We went through the book together but it was just awkward.

At least I learned I probably shouldn’t use those words.

I was embarrassed talking about this with my mom but we had some good discussions. Growing up, we were constantly told to be safe and not go with anyone we didn’t know, even if they offered us candy or anything like that.

In Switzerland during the 90s there was a lot of media attention to abducted and abused children. I don’t actually know if there were more abducted children in the 90s or if it was just that it was a big media story.

When I was really young my cousin, who was either 15 or 16 and lived in Germany, was abducted and killed not far from her home. I only met her a few times and I was so young that it wasn’t a really big thing for me. It really affected my mom though. It was her sister’s child and she had much more of a connection with her.

After that, my mom was a lot more careful. She told us to watch out and to always say no, always say stop if you don’t want something. Never be stupid. I was always pretty careful, even when I got older. I would always think do I want to do this or not?

Overall I think Switzerland is quite safe though.

Switzerland is also quite liberal and not very religious. There are religious people but it depends on the area. Zurich is very liberal for example but still there were some kids in my class who were a part of these weird religious constellations. There was a guy named Timόtheos, the Greek version of Timothy, which means “in God’s honor.” We had Latin together and in the textbooks there were always pictures of Romans with very nice (and often naked) bodies. Whenever we started a new chapter, he would go through the book, trying to look as little as humanly possible and put Post-It notes over all of the pictures that had penises and boobs.

We also had a couple ICF (International Christian Fellowship) members in our school. It’s one of these very fundamentalist modern churches. They organize camps and concerts; it’s very young, very cool. What they teach though is really awful. Things like that homosexuality is evil and if you’re gay you’re possessed by the devil. You couldn’t see it because they were really cool, they went to snowboard camps in winter, they had their dancing class and all of their cool friends. But when it came to sexuality and all that, they were really conservative.

One of my good friends growing up was one of these ICF girls but she was really open and very tolerant towards other people and their opinions. We had great discussions about relationships and stuff like that. I think she was an interesting person because she was so open and a scientific person somehow but still had this other part of her.

Her family was also really nice and they really liked me. Whenever I spent the night, her mom would always tell me, “God bless you.” One night her brother was playing at some Battle of the Bands and it was a metal band. When we got home, her mom kept saying,

“I felt the demons there, I felt the demons there!”

Well yeah… it was a metal show…

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April 19, 2018 TAGS: abduction, banana vibrator, Beate Uhse, billy bongo, bumsen, childhood, Children, discovery, doctor, dolphin vibrators, exploration, ICF, IFC, International Christian Fellowship, learning about sexuality, pleasure, pony breeding, puberty, religion, religious, romance, sex, sexual development, sexuality, shame, stories, switzerland, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The Entrepreneurial Kisser

Tristan from Germany

I was six when I first fell madly in love.

Her name was Sabrina and we would see each other every day, sit next to each other in school and hold hands all day long. We thought that we were going to get married and have kids one day.

In the first grade, during the breaks between classes we would go behind the school and hold hands and kiss. Our school had this disgusting gray, blocky, Russian looking architecture so there were a lot of corners you could hide behind.

One day my best friend saw us and asked if he could watch and we said sure. He told another friend, who then told everyone in the school. It wasn’t long before people started lining up to watch us kiss. After the crowd grew past ten kids, we started telling people, “yeah you can watch us kiss, but you have to buy us a milk from the machine.”

Sabrina really liked this vanilla flavored milk that they sold for fifty cents.

I was really happy for Sabrina to have the milk that she liked but after a while, I wanted to have money too. I wanted to buy some weird bullshit like weapons, costumes, Spider Man figures, and Nintendo games. It’s crazy how sexist we were raised actually when it comes to what boys and girls should want.

My friend Alex became kind of like the bouncer and collected the money for us and in return, we gave him a cut. It grew to about twenty people, sometimes strangers, sometimes friends of ours. We were first graders but even fourth graders came because even to them, we were crazy.

We did this just about every day for a year. Then summer vacation came and I didn’t see her for two weeks. I cried every fucking day, it was really bad.

One day during the vacation, I was reading Bravo! Magazine, which is a really popular pre-teen magazine in Germany. There is a section about sex where Dr. Sommer would answer kids’ questions about sex and sexuality. I saw something about kissing with tongue so when Sabrina came back, we decided to try it.

French kissing made it possible for me to raise the price to two Marks. It’s weird but they were so shocked and impressed. People were either grossed out or really excited about it. Either way they would pay to see it. We made so much money during our time doing this. It’s kind of stupid looking back on it but I spent all of it on toys and costumes. I had all of the coolest toys though.

Everyone in the school knew what we were doing, including the teachers. We were twenty kids leaving school during the break then coming back all in a group with a bunch of people talking about the kissing. None of the teachers found out that we were actually taking money for it though. We only got into trouble because we went outside of school property.

Even that was only an issue because there was a man who allegedly tried to lure kids into his car a year before, so everyone was afraid of kids leaving school property. There were also a lot of junkies in the neighborhood.

We did this every day for years until we finally broke up. As much as I loved Sabrina with all my heart, I also fell in love with other girls all the time. But the way that I loved was very genuine. I was really madly in love with them, fascinated with them and thought about them every day. But after a while, I forgot about Sabrina and she forgot about me.

Click here for another story from Tristan

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April 5, 2018 TAGS: Bravo, childhood, Children, discovery, Dr. Sommer, experimentation, exploration, exploring sexuality, first girlfriend, first kiss, first love, Germany, kids, kissing, learning, learning about sex, learning about sexuality, love, making money, making out, My First Time, sex, sexuality, side hustle, stories, young love, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The Russian super women

Anja from Siberia

Remote ice pocket

I am from a really, really small town. It’s not even a town. It’s a village in Siberia, a few hundred kilometers from the Arctic Ocean. The town was founded the year I was born, 1988, because they found natural gas in the middle of the forest. They needed people to work there so they brought in two or three thousand people. That city is the capitol of the region, which is about the size of France but has only 80,000 people. (By contrast, France has a population of 67 million)

It’s always cold and snowing. We have no spring, no fall, and only one month of summer. It snows until June, then in July, it’s maybe 25 degrees Celsius (77 Fahrenheit). Everything thaws in a week and all of the animals come out. Then in August, it’s snowing again. There is so much snow, we don’t even have roads. The only way to get to the town is by helicopter.

Gender relations are also incredibly weird where I am from. Women work, often more hours than men because they make less money than men. She also has to wake up at 5 in the morning to cook lunch for her husband. Then she has to prepare everything for the kids, cook, clean, iron, everything. In the evening, she comes back later than her husband but she still has to take care of herself, make herself beautiful and cook a big dinner. My mom was like this. Really the women in Russia are super women.

Men on the other hand, are quite different. We actually really have a lot fewer males in Russia because the life expectancy for men is so low. The average age for women is 76 and for men it’s 66 (stats from 2014).

Men also start drinking really early. This is actually why I broke up with one of my exes. He would disappear and go drinking for three weeks at a time. Not just drinking weekends but the whole three weeks. Men also really get physical a lot and people see it as normal. It happened in my family and to a lot of my friends. People think that being with someone who treats you like trash is still better than being alone. If you are thirty and not married, you are thrown out by society.

My grandma on my dad’s side, who was born in WWII Germany, was actually married seven times. In Russia that is a no go, like really a no go. Someone who marries twice in Russia is not a good citizen. Someone who marries seven times…

(editors note: as soon as Anja stared speaking about her grandma and her seven husbands, her tone completely changed and she actually started to whisper as if the shame of such a thing was even too much for our phone conversation)

Her husbands kept on dying. It’s a sad story, she had five kids, all from different husbands. One kid even died with one of the husbands. She just kept burying them, a lot of them were just drunks. Normal Russian things like drinking and forgetting to turn off the fire, alcohol poisoning, drinking coma or drinking and going to swim. This was her life. I think one husband was drinking and riding a horse and he fell off.

An article from the BBC found that 25% of Russian men die before they are 55, and most of the deaths are alcohol related.

The town lesbian

From when I was seven years old, I had this best friend; we were like twins. We would sleep at each other’s houses five nights a week, we did the same sports, we loved the same boy. We were also very exclusive. It’s funny because with my partners, I don’t really experience jealousy, but with my friends, I’m really paranoid and jealous.

Already by ten, people started joking that we were lesbians but I didn’t even know what that meant. We never had sexual education in school and my parents never talked to me about anything. I never even saw my parents kissing or doing any kind of physical stuff, it was all very hidden. I didn’t even know how people kissed on the mouth.

Then one of the many nights we were spending the night together and sharing a bed, I don’t know what happened but my friend and I just started kissing and fingering each other. I don’t even think I had masturbated or seen a porn before we were so young. I’m not even really sure how I knew to do it. It just felt so natural. I was a bit scared though if it was too deep or something. I was afraid she could lose her virginity. This happened a few times over our years of friendship, but we never talked about it.

Not only would people call us lesbians because we were together all of the time but my mom started to call me a lesbian because she thought I was boyish. I always wore pants, I cut my hair short, I never wore make up, and I never wore sexy underwear or bras. A lot of girls who had boobs would have bras that give you shape and I hated them. My mom kept buying them for me but I never wore them.

I don’t think I was so boyish, I just think I was not what they wanted out of femininity. My mom had this joke, she would say, “oh your dad has bigger tits than you.” I always had small breasts but it’s a weird thing to remember about my mom. I also never plucked my eyebrows so she would say that I had the eyebrows of my dad. It was the 90s and everyone plucked their eyebrows. Especially in Russia, everyone had this stripe of really tiny, almost invisible eyebrow.

I am not sure if my mom actually thought I was a lesbian or not but she was unhappy about the way I looked. She wanted a girl. She wanted a girl who wore dresses and make up.

Funny enough, when my brother was born, she started dressing him up in dresses.

Homophobic Russia

For a long time I was not sure if I was into men or women. I wondered if I had this suppressed lesbian part of me that I was never able to explore. I always would have crushes on friends and women in Russia but I would never dare act on them because of society.

When I was seventeen, I moved to Saint Petersburg and I felt I finally had the chance to figure it out. I started dating a woman and ending up falling in love with her. I was on a volleyball team at the time and I brought her to one of our matches. It was such a horrible idea. After they found out I had a girlfriend, the girls all said they couldn’t change in front of me anymore. They would all go and change in the toilet.

I cried so much about this.

It was just one match that I brought her and I lost all of that trust. They wouldn’t speak to me anymore. We had been playing together for half a year already and I didn’t think they would care.

But it’s Russia, it’s really homophobic.

I didn’t play with that team much longer because of this mistrust. It was all different levels. It wasn’t just the changing; I really felt that people were treating me different.

I also had one boy friend in Saint Petersburg who had so many problems because he “looked gay” by Russian standards. He was super skinny, wore tight jeans, open shirts that showed his chest, a choker and had long, permed hair.

It wasn’t unusual for him to get harassed but one day when we were in the train, this huge man started aggressively swearing at him. He got closer and closer to us, ready to hit my boyfriend in the face. We jumped out of the train and the man ran after us. It wasn’t so unusual to be harassed but this was the scariest because it was during the day around a bunch of people. In these moments, I would normally try to kiss him and show he wasn’t gay but in this case, we just had to run. I am pretty sure that this guy would have beaten him just to blood and no one would have stopped him. No one would say anything. People wouldn’t even care. A lot of people in Russia don’t take gay people seriously. In some cases, they don’t even see them as human, just a thing to joke about.

“Male hormones”

Another thing that really traumatized me was that when we were twelve, all of the girls in my class went together to the gynecologist, like some kind of school trip.

When it was my turn, the doctor didn’t even look inside of me. She told me I had a lot of male hormones so I would probably have a hard time getting pregnant. I cried so much because I knew from really early on that I wanted kids. She just looked at the top of my pubis where I already started to have hair. Later I asked my aunt, who was a pharmacist, and she said it was probably because of how my hair grows. She said a special direction or thickness of the hair shows that I have more male hormones. I also didn’t have tits at twelve so maybe that was also a part of it.

That was a lot of the reason I started to shave my vagina hair, like maybe if I shave it, the male hormones will go away.

I didn’t think about this again for a number of years until my husband and I couldn’t get pregnant. I told him maybe I wasn’t getting pregnant because of the male hormones and he was like

“What is this bullshit? Where did you hear this?”

I just carried this idea with me. Of course once you think about it, how can you possibly check if you have more male hormones or female hormones just by looking at a vagina? A lot of these kinds of things just stay with you until you are forced to confront the idea.

Watch out boy she’ll chew you up, she’s a maneater

When I was growing up, my mom started to have some pretty bad mental health problems. Even after being so harsh towards me about “being a lesbian,” she started talking all of the time about how horrible men where. She would tell me all of the time to never go out with a man, never fall in love with a man, never trust a man. In the last fifteen years, I don’t think she has had any contact with men. Something really changed in her mind.

My mom and dad were pretty miserable together and when I was fourteen, she basically told my brother and I that she was unhappy because of us. She said she never loved my dad and that she had this life just because of children and we should be thankful that she sacrificed her life in order to make us happy. My mom was pretty fucked up. She left us and signed the papers saying that we were not her kids anymore. She made us guilty for her unhappiness.

It just came to a point where I thought I never want to make someone be with me. I really freaked out when I got pregnant because I didn’t want my husband to think that he had to be with me just because we had a kid together. We had always had an open relationship but when I got pregnant, I went a bit crazy and really pushed hard for both of us to date more people.

It’s not just my mom either. I have this thing in my family actually that’s quite interesting.

My mom’s mom left my grandpa at around fifty years old, the same age my mom was when she left, and went into the same full denial of relationships.

Then there was my great grandma, who was also around fifty when she left her family and went to a shaman village.

My region has a lot of shaman villages. People would go there to get treatment if they needed healing or anything. The shamans were always men though and mostly Inuit.

She was neither of these things.

All of my aunts would always tell me the story of how she left her husband and kids and went to one of these shaman villages and did this healing. They didn’t call her a shaman, they called her a Babka, sort of a healing grandma. She lived there and healed people. After a while, people starting telling my aunts that their mother was turning men into pigs. It was only men; she couldn’t do it with women.

Because of this history of women in my family, I was worried that maybe it would happen to me. I went to a psychologist, but they couldn’t tell me anything. In all of these women, there were no signs of mental health problems or anything until they were around 45, so I still have some years to go.

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March 19, 2018 TAGS: alcoholism, babka, best friends, childhood, Children, discovery, drinking, drinking problem, experimentation, exploration, exploring sexuality, first kiss, gay, gender, gender expectations, girlie, homophobia, learning about sex, learning about sexuality, lesbian, love, male hormones, masculine, mental illness, open relationships, openness, parents, pleasure, polyamory, puberty, queer, romance, Russia, Saint Petersburg, sex, sexuality, shaman, shame, siberia, sleep overs, slumber parties, society, stories, tundra, working women, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

Sex and sin

Jazz from Australia

At the age of fourteen I discovered masturbation and became a born again Christian, so I had a lot of conflicting ideas. My very formative experiences of sexuality were framed in sex is sinful and dirty and there are intense, life long consequences.

The first time I discovered masturbation I was reading a teen girls magazine. They used to advertise screen savers for your phone in the back of the magazine. At this point, phones were 10 pixels or whatever so you could pick something for a dollar and they would send you this image for your background. There was one image, a silhouette of a naked woman like the stickers that truckers have, and somehow that mad turned me on. I started masturbating to this silhouette and from then on, I would sneak around and look at my dad’s biker magazines because they had pictures of naked women. It was a very sneaky experience because I shared a room with my younger sister and I was trying to be stealth about it.

I totally wasn’t in hindsight. I wasn’t very discrete about anything.

This was also the time of chat rooms. One time, I started talking with a boy and we started flirting in a private chat. In the same conversation with this stranger from the internet, I tried to proselytize about Jesus and masturbate while we were having cyber sex.

That moment basically sums up my teenage years. Of course as a teenager, hormones are just happening and sexuality is something that is very sudden. At the same time though, I was in an environment that demonized sexuality. I got the whole “masturbation is wrong” and “gays go to hell” and all that. It was a very conflicted time in my life. Over the next couple of years I was masturbating every day. It was this newly discovered thrill but every time I would feel guilty about it.

When I was sixteen I had a serious boyfriend who was also Christian. This is the first time I, let’s say voluntarily explored sexuality with someone else. It was such a weird and messed up experience because we were both Christians and clearly we were not allowed to have sex because we were not married. We were still dealing with teenage hormones though and really wanted to engage sexually. This is really silly and embarrassing but at some point, he told me that he talked to God and God talked back. God said that we were allowed to fool around as long as we didn’t have sex. We were special somehow and free from this rule. Then later apparently God changed his mind because he said that it was ok for us to have sex after all. We were an exception again.

I thought hmm it sounds a bit iffy but ok.

It was really exciting, everything in my body was like yes this feels great but the second half to that experience was oppressive guilt and shame. These two things somehow coexisted for many years. We only had sex once and in a way, I was oddly indifferent to it. I though ok, cool we did that, I lost my virginity along with the thought, what in the fuck am I doing? We almost had sex twice more but both times I felt weird and I decided I didn’t want to do it anymore so we stopped.

I think a lot of it was denial, God being ok with it was a way to justify what I was doing. Though there was always this underlying feeling of this isn’t right. It was just waiting to crush me. I didn’t have anybody I could talk to about it because everyone I knew was also Christian and I assumed they would judge me. I didn’t have any friends that were outside the church.

The whole time I knew in the back of my mind, this is not legit. This is wrong. It feels wrong, it feels bad. The church I was in and the environment I was in was clearly teaching against sex and masturbation.

When we were eighteen, my boyfriend said that if I didn’t want to have sex until I was married, that we should just get married. I didn’t feel ready to get married. My boyfriend tried to convince me, saying that since masturbating was also against God’s will, if I was going to masturbate, I might as well marry him. Then we could have sexual contact that wasn’t sinful. I thought he made a good point so I just didn’t masturbate. I stopped all sexual exploration for two years. It basically killed my sex drive. I thought if I masturbated, I would have to marry him.

Eventually one day I broke down and masturbated and thought ok, I guess that’s that, I have to marry him. I nearly got married at eighteen to this guy, partially because of all of the intense sexual pressure and guilt and shame.

I didn’t have sex again until was twenty-one. No sexual contact, nothing from sixteen until twenty-one, it was a dead zone. At twenty-one I had a long and drawn out existential crisis where I realized, how do I even know there is a God and that shook my whole world. It was starting from scratch. Rewriting my own moral code rather than having a book to reference. I finally started to realize it was my decision whether I has sex or not, it wasn’t up to God.

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February 19, 2018 TAGS: Australia, chat rooms, childhood, Children, christian, Christian boyfriend, cyber sex, discovery, exploration, exploring sexuality, guilt, hormones, jesus, learning about sex, learning about sexuality, mariage, masturbation, pleasure, religion, sex, sex ed, sex talks, shame, stories, talk to god, teen magazines, teenagers, youth, youth club, youth group BY: stumbling

Stories

Every time I tried to access sex, it was taken away

Sophia from Australia

I went to an all girls catholic school so our sex education was abstinence is key.

The importance of virginity was magnified with an emphasis on if you lose your virginity, it has to be with someone you are in love with and cares about you. It wasn’t that we had to wait until marriage, which was probably progressive for a catholic school but that losing your virginity was special.

Because I didn’t really have anyone to talk to, I ended up not having much of an idea about sex for a long time. My best friend and I talked openly about boys and sex but she knew just about as much as I did. The only way we could learn anything was renting movies that had some kind of sex scene in them. I would go to the video store every week and read the back covers of all of the movies searching for anything with any kind of sex scene. We were still young so my mom would watch the movies with us and would either tell us to cover our eyes or make jokes whenever anything sexual came up.

I wish talking about sex could have been a normal thing. She could have made a comment about it that wasn’t trying to push it away. I think I would have done things so much differently if I had just been allowed to see it or to know more.

We had a family computer with internet growing up but I never thought to look for porn or any other online resources. There was one time I Googled something like cute boys and I didn’t clear the browser history or maybe I left the page open and my mom found it and asked “who’s Googling cute boys?” in front of everyone.

I was so embarrassed I never did it again.

There were two main things that I used the computer for, chat rooms and to play The SIMS. Normally I would just talk to friends in chat rooms or on instant messenger but one time when a friend was over, we went into a random chat room and started talking with some guy. It wasn’t anything crazy but he sent us a video with “gonads” in the name. Again, my mom found it in the browser history. I ended up blaming it on the other girl and she got in a lot of trouble.

I started playing The SIMS in sixth grade and I became obsessed. During school holidays I would play for eight hours a day. At some point, I figured out that you can make the characters have sex. There are two different options: “whoohoo,” which is fun sex and “try for baby.”

It was romantic in a way because a little jingle would play if the woman had fallen pregnant, the kind of jingle you would use to put a baby to sleep. Of course since it was a game you didn’t see anything when the characters had sex. When it was the woohoo option they would go under the covers and thrash around for a few minutes. You could also do it in different areas like in the car or in a hot tub.

Even if it’s just a game, The SIMS was good because it had variations of consent in a way. If you do something that someone doesn’t want, they stop you. You can’t force yourself on someone, you actually have to get through different stages. First you have to create a friendship with them and you have to wait and see if you get the attraction back. Once you get that, you can go for the kiss or the make out and then more and more until finally you can fuck. If you annoyed them though, you go back to the bottom and you have to work back through the levels. You couldn’t just go around fucking everyone.

I told my brother that you could do this in The SIMS and he told my mom right away. Of course after that, my mom took the game away. Every time I tried to access sex, it was taken away.

I was getting in trouble anyway because I was playing The SIMS way too much. At some point I thought ok, I need to go outside. I finally stopped because I realized I could be doing all of these things, but in my own life. Why am I building a character here, when I could make myself better instead?

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January 26, 2018 TAGS: Australia, consent, discovery, exploring sexuality, learning about sex, learning about sexuality, openness, parents, puberty, religion, sex, sex scenes, sexuality, shame, SIMS, stories, teenager, try for baby, woohoo, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

Growing up with zero shame

Zach from the United States

When it came to my parents, there was zero shame imposed on me about my emotions, physical stuff, sex, or anything else. In particular between me and my mom. I knew way too much about her relationship with the guy I later found out was not my biological father and in part because of that, I never had the feeling I had to keep anything from her.

My parents knew that I was starting to hit puberty and was starting to be interested in girls. I was also fairly open about the fact that I was starting to feel sexual urges. If you are not told having or sharing those feelings is wrong, you don’t think that it’s bad or inappropriate.

When I was maybe ten or eleven, I got ahold of an old VHS porno at camp. I watched it with some friends of mine and then later on, many times by myself. Even though I hadn’t yet gotten to the point where I was ejaculating, I knew it was coming because boys talk and everyone wants to brag about finally ejaculating. Somewhere in all of those things that boys say, there is a bit of true information and a bunch of bullshit. I at least knew enough to know that the ejaculation thing was real and I was very much looking forward to this moment. I knew something was supposed to happen and it wasn’t quite happening yet, but it was going to soon. It created this encompassing urge for half a year. I just wanted it to happen so badly.

During the summers while I was growing up, my parents and I would take these trips to see different amusement parks.That year we were going to Cedar Point, which is outside of Cincinnati, somewhere in the Midwest. I got my own hotel room and for whatever reason, that night I really wanted to see a porn. I knew if I rented one, it would show up on the bill and my parents would see. So, I went over to my parents and asked their permission to get a hotel room porno because no shame right?

I remember this experience so precisely. I went through and watched the first five minutes of each one for free and then settled on the one I liked best. It was something like Hollywood Strippers “N”, it was one of a series. It was just shots inside of a strip club, girls doing strip teases, very vanilla. There was one outfit one girl was wearing that really stuck out to me. It was just strands of little pink pearls in a little gown. She had it hiked up over her hips and was shaking her ass with various layers of pearls falling around her ass. At that moment, I had my first ejaculation.

I can even recall the taste in my mouth. That coppery taste where all of the blood vessels are dilating under you tongue. You can even taste the blood a bit from all of the dilation. Then just wave of “it’s happening! It’s finally happening YESSS!” I was so proud. I think I did it three times that night. Winding back to that same scene with those pink pearls.

I was so excited I told my parents about it the next morning. We were in line for the park and I bursted out, “oh my god the best thing happened last night, I had my first ejaculation!” I don’t think I used that language exactly but I was bragging about it. I can do this new thing!

This is the level of zero shame that I grew up with sexually.

I think they may have told me,

“You may not want to share that too publicly, you can tell us, but maybe keep it more to yourself.”

There was never any kind of feeling that I shouldn’t be telling them or that it was weird at all for me to be sharing these kinds of things.

Read more from Zach here

Or, read about how Zach’s mom dealt with her own coming of age here

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January 8, 2018 TAGS: ass, childhood, discovery, ejaculation, exploration, exploring sexuality, learning about sex, learning about sexuality, masturbation, openness, orgasm, parents, pleasure, porn, porno, puberty, sexuality, shame, stories, United States, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The Playboy Channel, the best thing ever

Julian from the United States

My early sexual experience was mostly just a lot of longing.

I grew up in the 80’s, the time of cable and cable scramblers. My dad knew our cable guy so we got every channel including HBO, Showtime and Playboy. I was obsessed with the Playboy Channel and wanted to watch it every chance I could.

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 wanted to watch Playboy all of the time but it wasn’t that easy. I’m an only child and my parents liked to stay around the house so I didn’t have many opportunities to watch at home. I did have a best friend who was a year older than me and super cool. As a kid it is already super cool to hang out with someone older but this kid was particularly cool. One of the reasons I liked hanging out with him was his parents were really active and would go out so we could stay home and watch Playboy, which was the best.

His family had this big party when I was eight or nine with both kids and adults. At a certain point, all of the adults left and it was just me and all of these older kids. One of the boys asked, “What now? What do we do?”

I was like, “hello… of course we are going to watch Playboy.”

One of the guys said, “no, we are going to play cards” and they left the room. I had this flash of enlightenment of like oh, I totally understand what just happened. They didn’t want to watch Playboy because the young kid suggested it and it was socially unacceptable to do what the young kid proposed. I thought they were all so dumb because they are playing cards and I am watching the Playboy Channel, which is the best thing ever. So I ended up watching by myself and the rest of them went to play cards. I even remember the film airing that night. It was like some kind of naturistic thing that felt very 70’s.

That was the moment I had this realization that social pressure will make you throw yourself on your own sword and make you do what is actually not in your best interest.

Which is watching Playboy channel, obviously.

That experience was actually very formative for me, not just in terms of sexuality but how I try to live my life.

Mostly my sexual experiences were just getting really desperate. Fantasizing about girls I knew or sneaking around the house hoping to find my dad’s porn stash. He had one CD of porn and that was it. I was super disappointed that there wasn’t more.

With porn you always want more.

Fantasizing about the girls in my school became a big thing. I was a very good pupil but I would fantasize situations like “if so and so would have sex with me during the SATs but it meant I would have to bomb the test, would I accept that?”

Yeah, I totally would because it would be amazing.

Even though I was obsessed with watching Playboy I don’t ever remember having an erection. I was aware of the concept of masturbation but I never tried until I was fourteen.

Then I became obsessed.

I would masturbate a lot looking at stuff on the computer but my mom would always be in the kitchen or something so every time I heard her coming, I would have to stop. Which kind of sucks for your early sexual health. It gets you to a stage of having to come as quickly as possible, which later has to be unlearned.

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.

I thought it would be awesome if Pamela Anderson was my mom so I could sleep in the same bed as her. I wouldn’t have sex with her or anything but if I had a super hot mom I could at least cuddle with her and it would be amazing.

There was also a brief time my parents thought I was gay I think, which is fair because a lot of people today still think that I am gay. I think it’s just because I’m effeminate and I didn’t have girlfriends.

My dad’s favorite game for a while was to speculate on what event or specific thing sparked my possible gayness. We would trace back to earlier and earlier experiencing trying to see if it was my “fault” or my moms. When I was sixteen, a friend of mine and I wore dresses to a performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, though it wasn’t until my mid twenties that I actually consciously did full on drag.

My parents then thought maybe it was because when I was ten,they signed me up with the opera so for a few years, I was singing professionally and surrounded by a lot of gay men. They would put us in these costumes and we would work together closely so I was really comfortable with gay people from very early on.

Then the blame got shifted back onto my dad because apparently he showed me the Rocky Horror Picture Show before I even remember. Apparently I was obsessed with the scene when Meatloaf drove the motorcycle into the castle. Once I watched the movie again as an adult, I expected that scene to be awesome but it was quite disappointing actually. Just someone going into the castle walls.

The final blame ended up finally going to my mom though because before I was born, my parents didn’t want to know if I was a boy or a girl so my mom bought me gender neutral green and yellow baby blankets.

I think our understanding of what makes a person gay or not has probably come a long way since the 80’s.

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December 27, 2017 TAGS: am I gay?, childhood, Children, discovery, exploration, exploring sexuality, gay, gender neutral, Jeanna Fine, learning about sex, masturbation, opera, Pamela Anderson, Playboy, Playboy Channel, porn, queer, Rockey Horror, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Ron Jeremy, sex, sexuality, stories, United States, watching porn, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The pleasure of pursuit

Louise from France

I’ve always wanted to figure things out on my own, learning by doing.

I grew up in the suburbs of Paris and as a kid I really didn’t think much about sex. I was good at school, involved in a lot of activities and was just a normal kid. When I finally did become aware of sex though, it was full on.

It started with my drum teacher, who was eight years older than me. I would ask my mom to pick me up a few hours after my lesson finished so that I could stay and chat with him. It didn’t take long before the sexual tension grew and he started to tell me about all kinds of sexy dreams he would have about me where he would do things like go down on me and make me cum. I had no idea what some of these things were, but they were exciting. He really planted this seed in my head. Here was this hot, older guy telling me about these fantasies and desires he had for me. For me it was really like,

“wow, there is this whole other world out there that I have no idea about.”

We kept doing this sexy, flirty thing for a few years and when I turned sixteen, we finally had sex. His idea was to burn the fire by the fire. He said he would fuck me and I wouldn’t have to do anything so I wouldn’t feel guilty about it. I could just lie down in bed and he would just do his thing. When he proposed that I thought, great, no problem at all for me. We kept meeting over the years and building this intimacy. He has really seen me grow from a little girl playing drums to being a woman moving out on my own to a new country and getting married. We really had this loving and caring energy running between us. We really respected each other and did it slow.

After that, I was hooked on this game of flirtation and seduction.

I started living a double life. I was a really good student, had lots of friends and hosted a lot of parties. None of my family had any idea what I was doing. I really liked having these two very separate and opposite sides. Outside of school, I would go to parties and get wasted with men I didn’t know and fuck random guys I met on the street. I would find sexy men on the bus or something and just ask if I could go to their house with them. Just me wanting to fuck guys, I mean why not?

I specifically was looking for the kind of guys who matched the kind of person I wanted to be; this super flirtatious, highly sexual, energetic, blooming person. And so, the guys were a lot of weirdos and intense guys and also, there were some really sweet ones.

Even though I was hooking up a lot with random guys, I never masturbated or wanted to explore my sexuality on my own. It was more about this need for being seen and desired; I needed the exterior conformation. Looking back, I know I was not caring for a lot of the people around me. It was just consuming and throwing away, consuming and throwing away. I wanted to explore the male continent and have as many sexual experiences as possible. I guess I was of the belief that the quantity mattered more than quality.

This push I had for seduction might have been either from not growing up with much of a father figure or maybe an influence of culture. French culture is stereotyped as romantic and sexy so that’s a part of the narrative you grow up with. That sexual dimension is always present. There is the constant expectation of women being sexualized objects- shaved, wearing lingerie, smoking cigarettes and sexy all of the time. No matter what, you always have to live up to these criteria. It’s hard to quantify a whole culture of course, especially since I grew up near the city, but from my experience there was this constant push of seduction and sexuality being more important than almost anything else.

Street harassment is also really bad in France so as a woman you are always very aware that men want you. There are huge debates about street harassment all over France now and different groups are trying to push people to speak up when they witness street harassment (President Macron is even pushing to make street harassment illegal). Most people don’t do much about it though, most of them are cowards.

As much as I liked the sex and adventure part of what I was doing, I really enjoyed telling people about what I had done afterwards. Pretty quickly this started to put some strain on some of my friendships. Some of my friends thought I was insane or too crazy or outside of the cultural and social norms. When I would start talking to some of my male friends about my sexual desires or fantasies, they would start to fall in love with me or want to engage intimately and I was always like shit, no, that’s not the point. It was heavy because I was stigmatized a lot as a whore or as the girl who would have a lot of sex with a lot of random guys in random places.

When people started talking about me behind my back, I really didn’t see it coming. I was so proud of my stories and comfortable talking about these things, it didn’t seem like a big deal to me. Then my last year of high school, I moved to the south of Paris and switched schools. I was trying to figure myself out in this weird growing-up period and I had people of the past reflecting an image where I was like wow really is that me? I didn’t want to be like that. That was a part of me of course but I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t want that to be all that I was seen as.

In the end though, it was good that I moved; it made it easier for me to imagine different dimensions of myself. I realized that was just a stage and I could move on. Right after high school, I moved to Germany, where the dynamic between men and women is way different. It’s tranquil here. No one whistles at you on the streets, if you go out to the clubs you aren’t going to get groped or have to defend yourself against pushy men. I have a lot more freedom here to explore my sexuality in my own way.

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October 25, 2017 TAGS: cat calling, childhood, drums, energetic, exploration, exploring sexuality, flirtation, France, French, highly sexual, learning about sex, learning about sexuality, learning by doing, love, older teacher, pleasure, romance, seducing, seduction, sexuality, stories, street harassment, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The threat of “turning gay”

Patrick from Germany

“Shame is the worst part of human sexually. It’s a normal feeling but really strong, especially as a kid. Everything that you don’t think is totally normal seems really out there and horrible.”

As a kid, I had this big tiger stuffed animal and at some point I realized if I rubbed my crotch on it in a certain way, I got a nice sensation. I starting rubbing on the tiger like this all of the time. Even if I didn’t fully realize what I was doing, I knew it was not something I should tell my parents. I knew there was something wrong or at least not allowed in what I was doing but I am not sure where I got that idea.

I knew I could talk to my brother though and I was so proud of my discovery that I told him and encouraged him to try it. We never did it together or in the same room but he later told me that he tried and thought it was great.

I kept that tiger until I was eighteen but eventually I started to be ashamed of it. Plus, I had used it so much that the fuzz on one side of the tiger was totally flat and rubbed off. At some point, my parents also noticed that the wear of the fur was super uneven. Maybe they just thought I laid on that side a lot.

I first questioned if what I was doing with the tiger was ok when I was eight. Actually, I started to wonder if what I was doing made me gay. I didn’t actually know what being gay meant; I just knew that being gay was something weird or unusual and what I was doing was both of those things. The threat of this possibly turning me gay concerned me, but not enough to make me stop.

A few years later, still using the tiger quite a bit, I started to get a hard-on when I would start this rubbing and not long after that, I ejaculated for the first time. It was at that point that I started to realize this was serious and in the category of sexual interaction. I would get embarrassed when I would think of what I was doing as sexual pleasure instead of just an innocent game or sensation. Again, I got the feeling that I had to stop and so did my brother. I told him he we couldn’t do this anymore because it made us gay and he just went with it, without knowing exactly what being gay was either. I think maybe I still thought it had something to do with touching yourself.

Of course I eventually discovered what being gay actually meant and realized that no, it’s nothing close to what I thought it was.

Figuring out what gayness actually meant turned it from something that I was afraid of to something that I could use. In school, I wasn’t a total loser or anything but I would get made fun of sometimes in the ways that groups of boys tease each other. I figured out early on though that when I got picked on, I could “play gay” and it gave me a way to scare off the kids that were bullying me. I didn’t understand at the time why this scared them but I see now they were just homophobic. From then on, whenever I was bullied, I would play this stereotypical gay caricature and the boys would get weirded out and leave. This was my way out, my way to get rid of them so I wouldn’t be physically attacked anymore.

Another big influence for me was Bravo, a German magazine for teenagers, which rides a thin line between a kids magazine and a porno magazine.

There was a section where kids could write in and ask questions about different topics within health and sexuality and the answers were really clear and educational. Readers could also send in a naked photo of themselves totally natural, no make up or whatever else, along with a short interview answering some questions like: when did you first have sex, when did you start to masturbate and things like that. Reading these gave me my first idea of what sexuality really was and taught me that you don’t have to be a beauty queen to be attractive or loved.

There were some beautiful people who sent their pictures in of course but there were also a lot of non-standard beautiful people. The market for this magazine is kids between twelve and sixteen years old so it’s especially important for people that age to see that and realize, “I am not ugly.”

Since this was before internet porn, being able to see these pictures was also exciting because it was one of the few ways to look at naked people.

Thanks Playtex

Before, I could only steal the underwear and lingerie pages from my parent’s shopping catalogs. Bravo was the first time I could see genitalia and more importantly, people of my own gender and age so I could compare what was happening with our bodies. I was really interested in what was going on with others because one of my testicles is quite a bit lower than the other and while I know now that it is totally normal, as a child I thought that made me disabled.

Another big experience is something that I don’t really know how to define but I think is important in this context because I imagine a lot of people must have similar feelings about things that happened to them as kids.

I have a cousin who is ten years older than me and when this happened he was probably fifteen so in the middle of puberty. We were both kids and didn’t really know what we were doing.

Starting when I was about five years old, we would play this boat game when we saw each other. I would be the sailor and he would be the boat and would rock back and forth while I would try not to fall off. One time while playing, I think by accident, he got a boner and he told me it was a stick to navigate the ship. I took a hold and was moving the ship left and right with it. It’s kind of funny because for sure I wasn’t touching it gently but maybe it was nice for him.

We played the game several times over the years but eventually it stopped I think because he got older and realized what he was doing.

I don’t feel that this was a negative experience that damaged or traumatized me in any way but it’s something that I find to be pretty in between. You shouldn’t do that when you are fifteen but it’s still kind of a gray zone. I wonder if other people had similar things happen to them where it left them wondering where that line is.

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September 8, 2017 TAGS: Bravo, Bravo Magazine, bullying, childhood, Children, gay, Germany, learning about sex, learning about sexuality, masturbation, orgasm, pleasure, sexuality, shame, stories, what is being gay, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

I want you to want me

Lenny from the United States

Sometimes when I had a friend over, my mom would set up a tent in the backyard and we would have little camp outs. One night, when I was maybe five, I had a neighborhood boy over and we started playing Truth or Dare. It started normally enough but it moved into “I dare you to touch me here,” or “I dare you to do this with your mouth,” which eventually turned into, “I dare you to touch my penis with your mouth,” or “I dare you to touch my butt hole with your mouth.”

All of the combinations ended up getting dared. There was never any kind of mouth on mouth dares though, only mouth to private parts. I think nipples were in there too but neither of us were very into that.

There were very specific ones that I liked better than others, like the penis mouth one, which I asked for a few times. Eventually, I must have asked for it too many times and he said, “Ok, that’s enough, you can’t do that one anymore.” That was the first time I ever had anyone put my penis in their mouth. I loved it and wanted to do it again.

The duration of the dares also got longer. It started out with doing an act for three seconds, then it was five seconds, and then ten. It wasn’t a skillful blowjob or anything, the first ones were just licks and then it got progressively more like you would treat a popsicle. I also remember the penis to mouth one was my favorite to give because the butt hole didn’t taste very good, as you might imagine.

Throughout all of this, there were no erections. I don’t think we were even old enough to have erections. It was very much about the sensations, about the feeling of being touched in certain zones and not really anything to do with an attraction to him or a connection with him personally.

It only happened that once and we were just normal friends after that. Just some very isolated erogenous zone exploration. I don’t think I had the courage to ask for it again. I wanted to but didn’t have the nerve.

Obviously I was curious but I had no idea at all what sex was or what these kinds of actions were. Which kind of leads into my second story, which is my first time doing something with a girl.

I had a sleep over with a female friend of mine around the same age, maybe five or six. Our parents were really good friends, so sleepovers were not a big deal. We had one of those couches that folded out into a bed in the living room and so the three of us, the girl, me and my mom, were in bed watching a movie. I don’t remember what movie it was but there was a scene where the main actor and actress were being passionate in bed. I don’t think it was a sex scene, I don’t think my mom would have showed us that. It was just kissing or something.

When the movie was over, this girl and I were both under the covers and we both started trying to do what the actors in the movie had just done, rolling around in the bed from position to position. There wasn’t any sort of humping or hip movements, just kissing each other and rolling around on top of one another.

That was my very first experience of intense passion. I was so into her in the moment and burying my face in her neck and wrapping my arms around her. It was just so intense, I’d never experienced anything like that before. The only woman I’d ever had any prolonged touch with was my mom. This was the first time it happened with a girl my age and my size. I think that was a lot of it, to be able to hold somebody that was my size.

My mom immediately got super mad saying, “stop it guys, you can’t do that!”

But we would not stop, we were just super attracted to each other and super into it. Neither of us had any idea what we were supposed to be doing. I didn’t even know sex was a thing or that there was a part of me that was supposed to go inside a part of her. I just knew that our bodies were supposed to be together.

My mom ended up putting us in the car and taking the girl home. She didn’t even get to spend the night. My mom told us that we couldn’t be together, that we couldn’t do this. I was so sad when my mom took her away. I wanted to do that all night. I’m sure my mom was just terrified the girl would go home and tell her parents. I don’t know what she ended up telling them but they didn’t let her come over after that. I never got to kiss that girl again.

That was the first time I had desire or attraction towards a girl. After that, I would meet girls and sometimes I would have those feelings again and want to do the roll around in bed, cuddling thing with them. That was the first time I made the transition from this is another human being that’s my friend to I have strange feelings for this other human being and want to touch them whereas I don’t want touch other people. It actually wasn’t until much later that I learned that was sex. I tried to do the cuddly game with another female friend later on but she was not into it so nothing happened.

That was also my last girl sleep over. Good thing my mom didn’t know about the tent stuff or I wouldn’t have been able to have boys sleep over either. No friends allowed for Lenny. You’re sleeping in your room with a cold bucket of water.

After I learned what sex was, I specifically thought about the boy that slept over and realized what we did was not just normal boys hanging out. That was more than playing Truth or Dare; that was different. I was ashamed of it for a long time because even though I grew up in a liberal state, it was still a fairly homophobic area. It definitely wasn’t a story that I’d tell my friends. As you get older you start talking with other boys about what you’ve done with a girl. I would never tell that story; it was a secret story.

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June 27, 2017 TAGS: attraction, camping, childhood, Children, cuddling, exploration, kissing, learning about sex, learning about sexuality, love, making out, romance, sexuality, shame, sleep overs, slumber parties, stories, United States, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The first kid to discover masturbation

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.

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May 17, 2017 TAGS: ass, Bravo, Bravo Magazine, childhood, childhood misunderstandings, Children, death, Dr. Sommer, exploration, Germany, it's normal, massager, masturbation, pleasure, religion, school, sexuality, shower, stories, West Germany, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The Entrepreneurial Porn Peddler

Tristan from Germany

I grew up in a small town in the south west of Germany, in a huge apartment complex with a bunch of really tall apartment buildings. Out back there were a bunch of dumpsters and my best friend and I would search them every day because there was nothing else to do. There was also a playground near by, which was pretty much just a bunch of sand on the ground. We weren’t allowed to play there though because that’s where all of the heroin addicts were. There were a lot of dark corners to hide in, which meant there were syringes everywhere. So it was dumpster stuff, old strollers to play with, sticks to fight with, that was the cool shit for us.

One day though, when I was probably six, we were looking in the dumpsters and found a bunch of porn magazines. I took one or two upstairs and put them in my Nintendo box. A week or two later, there were more, a lot more. It was packed with magazines, like hundreds of magazines. Some were soft-core, the kind that you could buy at every grocery store where it’s just naked bodies and some funny, kind of sexy “girl next door” stories.Then others had hard-core porn, like BDSM magazines. There were fetish, gangbangs, full on things. I remember at that time I was confused that people would do that, just why? Is this sex? Why are there five people in her body? I don’t get it. Is this how you make babies? What is the point of all of this? Of course not being able to talk to my mom about things like this, my friends and I just came up with our own theories. We were still very childish, laughing about it, ”haha I saw her nipple, oh look, he does this and that to her.

There was a constant stream of new magazines, hundreds every month. Every day we would look in the dumpsters and every week or two there would be a new batch of them. This dude must have had a massive fetish. I always imagined the magazines came from an old pervy man who would be really angry if he found out I was stealing his magazines. I thought he had to put them there because he was embarrassed himself and didn’t want anyone to know he had them. I remember being afraid of this person; some kind of dangerous old porn man.

Eventually my friend and I became more jaded and exposed to genitals and hard-core sexual stuff. At the same time though, we were still really embarrassed about it. We weren’t able to talk to people about it or ask questions to anyone who would actually have answers because it was still forbidden stuff that only adults were allowed to look at. But I realized I was very fond of certain SM (sadomasochism) things. Not like someone being beaten up but the outfits I remember I found really arousing. I would sometimes draw Catwoman masks and stuff on the pictures of women in the normal porn magazines just because I liked the look so much.

During this time, my mom and I were living with my grandma and they both worked so no one was home a lot of the time. My school was also right across the street from our apartment, so sometimes my friend and I would skip school and go to my place. By then, the two of us had also already come up with a few schemes to make money from our classmates and the magazines were another great way to do that.

We would get twenty kids or so come over to my house during the two 45-minute breaks we had during school to look at the magazines. I would stay up the night before looking through them all, picking out the best pictures in every magazine. I remember being really organized with post-its and everything. Then I would lay them out in a nice way and we would charge a cover for people to see the “peep show.” I would lay out all of these magazines organized really well and open to the best pages. We had to make groups at the end because there were so many people that wanted to come. We charged one Deutsch Mark or so, which was about the price of a set of either wresting cards or soccer cards.

My friend and I made a huge amount of money from this scheme but I was really stupid with how I spent it. In Germany we have Carnival in February, one or two weeks where you dress up and have guns and firecrackers. I spent all of my money on that stuff. My mom always asked me how I got a 160 Mark cowboy costume, and I just said I had saved up my money. I wasn’t getting money from anywhere else, I had no way of covering this, obviously I was lying.

One day, by the end of third or fourth grade, my mom came home early and all of the magazines were still laid out. I think I was looking at them and preparing my new show. She asked what I was doing and I panicked and pushed her out of the room, quickly put everything back in the Nintendo box, and ran downstairs running and crying “no no no no!” She tried to stop me but I ran past her and put all of the magazines in the dumpster. I just dumped the whole Nintendo box so when she went down there and opened the dumpster, she obviously found my box. She confronted me and said she knew what I dumped down there.

Silence.

Eventually she said, “huh,” and shrugged her shoulders. I said, “huh,” and did the same. That was the whole conversation; nothing was ever said after that. I was still scared enough though that I stopped doing the peep shows and stopped collecting the magazines from the dumpster.

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March 24, 2017 TAGS: BDSM, Carnaval, catwoman, early experiences, exhibition, exloration, exploration, Fasching, Fastnacht, Germany, Karneval, Kink, magazines, making money, masks, peep show, porn, pornography, sexuality, stories, what's that, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

Geeking out on sex

David from the United States

I grew up with a single mother so when I was young, I would spend the week at my grandmother’s house, then go home with my mom on the weekends. It was really heart breaking for me to be torn from one place to another, I always had to say good bye to someone. When I would leave my grandmother and aunt I would cry, then when I would leave my mother I would cry again.

By seven I got tired of going back and forth and I told my mother I couldn’t do it any more, my place had to be at home, no matter if someone was there or not. I think my mother understood, I made a really compelling argument for a seven year old. From then on I had a key and I would go home by myself and would be home alone until late in the evening. I had lot of leeway growing up but I didn’t have any sort of influences or anybody that I could learn from. I was just alone so much. I felt like I wanted to know more about life in general but without siblings or older friends, I had to invent the world for myself.

I was also a super nerdy kid and was obsessed with learning everything I could. I would read the encyclopedia just to have things to say to people if I ever got the chance; especially the sports section. I didn’t care at all about sports but it was what everyone else was interested in so I learned enough to be able to talk about it. After getting to a certain age, that curiosity I had towards everything narrowed in as a curiosity towards sex. I just wanted to know more and I guess I really wanted to have an advantage. I knew I would be dating eventually and I didn’t want to be in this situation where I would have to perform and I wouldn’t know what I was doing. I wanted to have as much knowledge as possible. To this day, nothing fascinates me more than things that I don’t know. If I don’t know something, then I really go all in and I try to figure out as much about it as possible.

The other side of the coin was this was the 90s, a time when stand up comedy has reached it’s apex. Basically every big comedy club that exists now, started then. You started seeing stand up comedy on TV for the first time and you had the first famous female stand up comedians. All they could talk about and make jokes about was premature ejaculation. They pretty much destroyed my sex life, I remember being really offended before I even had sex. It really sort of turned into this block for me, I was so self conscious about coming too soon, it just completely fucked with me. For a while I wasn’t coming with partners because of how much this was in my head. Now of course I see that it could have been more enjoyable for everyone involved if I had instead come too fast because then we could have just had sex again instead of all of my partners just getting frustrated at me. We could do this all day as teenagers. Female comedians didn’t mention that shit.

By the time I was thirteen, my interest in sex was on full throttle. In Chicago they had Wabash Ave, aka- Book Sellers Road. It was nothing but bookstores from one end to the other. Every day after school, I would ride the train down there and I would start at the first book store and go to the adult section, straight to the sex books.

I would pick out four or five books, throw my coat on the ground and sit there for hours reading. I read a few pages here and there, a few pages every day until I finished a book, then until I had finished all of the books in the shop, then go into the next shop and do the same thing. Then I would go back to the first shop and they would have some new books and over a period of years I read everything. I would do this until the stores closed at seven or eight, every single day, for all four years of high school. I was there religiously.

I don’t think anyone ever asked what I was doing or acknowledged me in any way. I don’t remember anyone bothering me at all. I also never really told any of my friends what I was doing and when I started to have girlfriends, they didn’t know either. I had a couple of friends that would go with me to the bookstores once or twice. They would see that I was reading a book about sex but usually just once. They didn’t know I was going every day, they didn’t know how long I was staying there. Maybe even the employees didn’t really grasp that this was the same kid that was there before, I bet a lot of them worked part time. Plus, this was right in the middle of down town so you had hundreds of people coming in the door every day. I also don’t remember seeing many other customers in that section either, but maybe I just didn’t notice or maybe they were too afraid to go into the adult section with a kid sitting there in the corner. Who knows maybe hundreds of people used to go into the bookstores and buy books just to watch the kid in the corner reading sex books.

Any time school was canceled or cut short, I would go to the bookstore and instead of having five or six hours, I had eight or nine. I just grabbed a sandwich and camped out there for the day. I don’t know if you were allowed to eat in the bookstore but I would sneak bites while reading. There is actually something romantic about reading about fisting while it’s cold and snowing outside. You got your coco, taking a sip and they are telling you about how to properly curl your knuckles.

There was one book I will never forget, it had one beautifully illustrated page of a giant vagina with little lines and arrows explaining what each part was. It’s almost like it was a pop-up book. It was just a really intricate, almost 3D style painting that really broke down the whole thing. I had this photographic memory so I would memorize what all of the different parts were and would memorize them. Then the next page went into really high detail about cunnulingus, the role of the clitoris and the hood so I had a really strong foundation before I ever even had sex.

Even if I had read probably hundreds of different books about sex, of course nothing ever prepares you for when it actually happens. You could know everything there is to know but then to actually go and try to do it is a completely different thing. It’s still a hell of a thing getting a penis in a vagina, especially if the girl is a virgin, you can read whatever the fuck you want, but it isn’t going to help you there.

Or the first time you put on a condom… Which way does this thing even go? Trying to put on a condom in the dark the first or second time, or even the fifth time you have sex or hell, even now! Especially me, I wear glasses and of course while having sex I take them off so I can’t see on top of everything else. It’s tricky. It’s like Donald Rumsfeld said, you have known knowns and known unknowns then you have unknown unknowns. You know there is going to be some stuff you know, some stuff you don’t and then there is some shit that is completely unexpected. You’re in there, you’re both naked you got your condom on, and it’s not going in. You’re trying different angles and it’s just not happening. That’s something that’s not covered in books.

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March 2, 2017 TAGS: adult section, Chicago, childhood, comedian, confidence, fisting, learning, learning about girls, learning about sex, learning about sexuality, library, putting on condom, putting on condom first time, reading, sex books, sexuality, stand up, stories, United States, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

Playing “E”

Katja from Germany

One day when I was in kindergarten, a friend came over and while we were playing, she asked me if I had ever had an orgasm. I was like wait a second, you used this fancy word but you used it wrong because that word is organism. I just didn’t know the word obviously. In German, the words are just as similar as in English, orgasmus vs organismus.

It’s confusing, terribly confusing, for a six year old. She was like no no no that’s a different thing. An orgasm is when two adults play together and it feels really good and they are naked. I was like oh, you’re talking about sex right! I knew what sex was but we were not on the same level, she knew what an orgasm was so she was far more advanced than me at that point.

No… I didn’t think I had ever had an orgasm.

She then suggested this game where we had role-playing scenes like doctor and a job interview. I still find interviews super hot by the way, I don’t know how much that has anything to do with that experience. I mean it’s probably connected right? This is what they tell you with sexual preferences and how your experiences from early childhood can influence your preferences as an adult.

Maybe that is why I am into women…

We did the whole proper negotiation before and she told me exactly what to do. She said this is what the scene is going to look like and told me exactly what was going to happen, step by step. She had this loft bed with a hammock underneath and this was the examination area. We were dressed and she started touching my body, nothing sexual really, mostly my arms and legs. Then she had her head against my chest like she was listening to my heart and told me to breathe. Her head went down to my stomach and at some point she had her ear on my vagina or pussy or whatever and I was like oh, ok this is interesting. Then she started touching my upper body in a massaging kind of way and then went all the way down to my pussy and it was really nice.

I didn’t feel comfortable showing that that I liked it so much but it was also a part of the game that I wasn’t supposed to be really into it. It was this whole negotiated power play- she was the doctor who would do all of these things and I would just have to take it, that’s the way it works, doctor knows best. I wasn’t supposed to let it show that I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. At some point, she told me that my body needed further examination so we crawled up to her loft bed. She told me to lie down on my back and put a blanket on top of me, then she laid on top of me and started touching me again. I kept thinking this is so good, so good, really, really good and at some point she just stopped.

Scene is over.

We did this multiple times, even when we met weeks or months later. It was our thing. We also came up with a name for the game. Actually it’s not really a game, we knew that, we knew what we were doing was sex. Our first thought was let’s call it X, but that’s far too obvious, of course you can’t call it X, everyone would know what you are doing. So there are S and E left. S still didn’t feel super comfortable so we decided E is a good name. From then on, every time we saw each other she would at some point ask if I wanted to go play E with her.

The other scene we would play out was a job interview. I was supposed to do the interview this time and I was really nervous because I didn’t know what to do. Of course you don’t know what to do at six or seven years old. I basically did the same things that she did, the only real difference was when we ended up on her bed, I was on top. My leg was between hers and I noticed that it feels so much better when you are on top, though I didn’t really know what to do with this newfound information. I just decided from now on I am going to make sure that I am always the person in power, because then I get to be on top once we go to bed. It was worth the discomfort of not knowing what to do.

I always wondered why didn’t we take our clothes off and actually do this but I didn’t dare to say something or ask.

What I really find interesting now was the whole negotiation part. We did a really good job role-playing and navigating the important aspects of it. The only thing we didn’t do was check in afterwards and after care. I felt a need for it too, even though I didn’t know what that was, I was longing for it. I was just super confused. The fact that we were both girls also confused me a lot. I knew that this existed, that there were women who loved women, but at the time I didn’t know a lot about sex but I was pretty sure there was an important part about a penis going into a vagina.

The way that I learned about sex actually was really great. Some kids in my class found a condom on the playground and everyone gathered around this trashcan trying to get a look. I had no idea what I was looking for, but wanted to see anyway. When I got home I asked my dad. He was like ehhhhhh….. I’m going to tell you, but I can’t do it right now, but I will tell you soon. I thought ok, this is going to be super huge and super interesting and so I kept begging him to tell me over the next couple of days. My dad used to always read me a story before I went to bed and so one night he came with his old GDR biology book and gave me a really scientific explanation of sex. It was not an embarrassing or shameful thing at all. He told me what a condom was and what people use it for and that sex is not just for making babies but people also do it because it’s fun, which is why people use condoms or the pill. He had brought a condom and showed it to me. It was a really good and easy conversation.

I felt so comfortable that I actually asked him how often he and my mom had sex and he said I’m not going to tell you that because it’s also kind of a private thing. Both of my parents were from the GDR so at least there was a very relaxed attitude about sex, especially compared to other people in the west who were a lot more religious. I am just super grateful for that night. I should tell him that, by the way, do you remember twenty years ago, you me and the biology book?

This experience with the girl stuck with me because of how much I liked it. I thought there was something wrong with me because I was so into her but obviously she liked it as well, otherwise we wouldn’t have played that game.

When I was twelve or thirteen, I had my first kiss, like real kiss with tongue with my best friend who was a woman. She did it to make the guys jealous or hot but I really enjoyed it. It was amazing and I wanted to keep doing it. I noticed I got wet as well and I was like fuck, I think I like women more than most people, or more than most females do. At this point I also had masturbated and all of those fantasies always involved women. I am not sure how much this experience with my kindergarten friend actually had anything to do with that or if I would have gotten to this point anyway.

I mean, if she is the reason why I like sex with women, then thank you so very much.

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December 24, 2016 TAGS: DDR, deutsch, doctor, exploring sexuality, first kiss, games, gay, GDR, gender, german, I'll show you mine if you show me yours, interview, lesbian, massage, negotiation, organism vs orgasm, orgasm, playing doctor, playing with sexuality, pleasure, queer, role play, scene, sexual preferances, sexuality, show me yours I'll show you mine, stories, talking to kids about sex, touching, women into women, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The Search After The Weird Pelvis Feeling

Hanna from Finland

In Finland, nudity is always right there in front of you because you go to the sauna with your family every week. You go with your cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and siblings so you never end up wondering what adults or the other gender looks like naked because you just know; you have seen naked people ever since you were born. Even though there was always nudity around, it was non-sexual nudity. For my family, it was like sex didn’t even exist. My mom didn’t even tell me anything about sex until after I was already having sex and had already gone out to get my own birth control.

What I missed out learning from my family, I just ended up learning in other ways. My grandparents were farmers and so I would spend my summers on their farm. There were cows and all other kinds of animals and when you are on a farm, you see certain things. I was probably four or five when I saw a cow being inseminated and cats fucking. It’s just this farm thing, things happen and it’s not a special or notable occurrence. It did give me a bit of an idea though about what all of these parts were for.

Around this time, like a lot of other kids, I was playing doctor with my friends. In terms of gender, my friend group was pretty equally mixed but I only wanted to play doctor with the girls. I wasn’t at all interested in the boy parts; only the girl parts. Just exploring someone’s between the legs area gave me this weird feeling in my pelvis that I really enjoyed. Of course now I know it was the feeling of being turned on, but at the time I didn’t know what it was and didn’t have a name for it. But I was totally into it. I often pushed my friends into playing doctor; there were even some times where I might have even pushed too much. I was really adamant and maybe a little aggressive or forward. I also have a younger sister and once I was spying on her and her friend playing doctor and I again got this weird feeling in my pelvis but I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t have this idea that I should touch somewhere to touch the feeling it was just there.

There was one friend in particular that I used to play with a lot, I was touching her vagina and she said she didn’t like it because it kind of hurt. I think when you are so small, the vagina is really sensitive so you can’t really put things in it. But then I found out that the asshole worked better so I started putting my finger inside her ass. I don’t know when I had learned this, maybe from cows or something but I had figured out the concept of penetration so I think I was just trying to find a place to penetrate. The vagina didn’t work and I hadn’t heard about the clitoris so that part of the vagina wasn’t interesting because there was no hole, so I just moved on to anywhere else I could try to penetrate.

Another one of my really good friends was a boy and even though we were always playing together, we would never play doctor. I was just never interested. We were always playing more “boy stuff” like building houses in the forest and driving his pedal car. We had great times but I never wanted to play doctor with him, instead, I just wanted him to tell me that he loved me and he never did. I think I got this from TV or something; that this is what men and women do, they tell each other that they love one another. I wanted to play doctor with the girls but with the boy, I only wanted him to love me.

I loved to play doctor but the games totally ended when I went to school at seven years old. My friends and I never talked about it and never played in that way but there was this shame around my game, I somehow got the information that it was something that was not ok. Soon after I stopped, some of my parents’ friends came to visit. They had a son who was one year older than me and he and I played family together; he was the father and I was the mother. He started telling me about this thing that adults do and he explained to me. We had a Finnish name for it, ähkiä,

when you make this grunting sound. The word might not actually exist, it could just be a word that the kids in my circle used, probably because they heard their parents making this agh agh agh sound. It’s a very onomatopoeic word for that sound. It’s maybe a mix between a grunt and a moan; though moan is often sexy but ähkiä is much broader, it could for example be the sound you make when you take a dump. So he told me about the things that adults do when they ähkiä. He explained that the man took the penis and put it into the vagina. Then he asked if I would like to see his penis. I kind of hesitantly said ok but as I said, I wasn’t really interested in penises. Maybe because I didn’t have a smaller brother and all of my cousins were all girls so there was no penis around except my dads and dad’s penis is just not interesting. We had this walk in closet in my room so we went there and he was showing me his penis and he asked me to touch it. I did but it was kind of gross and I just wanted to leave. Then later everyone was at the sauna and after the adults finished, we decided we wanted to go to the sauna together. It was kind of controversial because I think we were at the age where we were still kids so our parents probably thought it’s just kids going to the sauna but I got the feeling my mom was a bit unsure if this was ok because he was a little bit older than me.

When we came out of the sauna to the shower room, he said let’s try to do this thing now where we put the penis in the vagina. I was kind of backing into the corner and he was coming towards me with his penis. It made me feel kind of uncomfortable, it wasn’t turning me on at all. I was just a little bit scared so I said I need to go and pushed him away. It was scary. I don’t even remember what his penis looked like I just remember that it was scary and I didn’t really want that. Afterwards my mom told me that it’s not ok to play with your private parts. I don’t really remember what she said but I remember that I felt kind of like embarrassed and thought maybe she had even seen us. Afterwards I got the idea that sexuality was somehow shameful and for the next few years I didn’t search out or participate in anything sexual with other people. I think this too much penis too soon was too shocking and then also having this guilt of my mom talking to me about it was too much.

Even though I stopped trying to push for sexual situations to happen, I was still incredibly curious about my own anatomy. One time my best friend and I were wondering if you bleed from your vagina when you have periods, where does the pee come from? Is it the same hole? Now I would just Google it but we were really confused at the time. We decided we would try and pee and see where the pee came from and I found out it was a different hole, which was really interesting and way better than Googling it. I have always kind of been the person who just goes and figures it out if I am curious about something. I also read a lot and I would read almost any book I could get, even if they were adult books. By the time I was nine I was reading books with sex scenes and they kind of turned me on but I never tried to do anything about it. I was just enjoying this feeling that would develop in my pelvis. There were also these magazines they had in Finland for young people that usually had two or three erotic stories in each issue. I would read these stories for years and get this feeling in my pelvis that I didn’t know what to do with.

When I was thirteen, I was home alone and I had already read about orgasms somewhere and I knew people had them but I had no idea what it was really. I was reading this erotic story and it got me horny so I decided ok now I am going to find out what this orgasm thing is. From my reading I knew that I needed something I could use as a dildo. I found this travel case for a toothbrush, which was perfect because it wasn’t too big and I figured I might be able to fit it in. I had used tampons so I could kind of gauge what I was doing. I started with the toothbrush case and touching myself, I didn’t know what I liked, I didn’t even know what a clitoris was. And then I just came! It couldn’t have taken that long because if it had, I would have probably given up. I remember so well just lying in bed looking at the ceiling thinking OH MY GOD HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS! Something opened in my sky. After that I masturbated every single evening for many, many years. I don’t know how it took me so long to try.

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November 23, 2016 TAGS: ass, boys, Children, curiosity, dildo, doctor, embarrased, exploration, farm, farm life, feeling in pelvis, Finland, games, girl stuff, love, masturbation, naked, nudity, orgasm, penetration, playing doctor, pleasure, sauna, sexuality, shame, stories, wonder, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The Art and Science of Dildo Making

Ashley from the United States

When I was twelve, I broke my arm and had an elbow length cast; which meant every time I had to bathe I had to take a bath. I was sitting in the bath with my arm on the faucet one day and the water hit my clitoris. I was like holy shhittttt this is amazing and I came almost immediately. This was the first time I had any kind of experience like this so it was completely unexpected. It was this really intense feeling of warmth and it was all I could think about. For the next three months, I was masturbating in the bath every day.

After figuring out this thing that my body could do, I started to become more interested in other possibilities so I started watching a lot of porn. My parents never talked to me about sex and I grew up in a conservative state with an absence only sex ed program, so porn was the only place I felt I could find information.

It was a lot of Google image searches at first, which was pretty tame. It was the days of Limewire (an old-school media downloading service) so it was like,

“I am going to download one thing for seven hours, then look at it or watch it and hope it is good and hope I am not getting a bucket full of viruses.”

You really have to be dedicated to finding something on Limewire. I started with a lot of different kinds of porn, looking at pictures and just sort of let my mind start running. While looking at these, I thought it would be really nice to have some sort of penis like object for myself, so I made one.

I first tried masturbating in my vagina and it was super unpleasant, actually to the point it was really painful. Even putting a couple of fingers in my vagina felt really unpleasant, it didn’t do anything for me. I didn’t understand why people would want to have vaginal sex. I could put tampons in and that was good enough.

It wasn’t long before I was watching a lot of anal sex porn and gang bang porn. Double penetration became my favorite keyword. I also had this weird fear of stretching out my vagina because no one really tells you how that works. I thought I don’t want to stretch out my vag but who cares about my butthole so I started masturbating with my ass. Not only did masturbating with my ass hurt less but it also felt better.

It was slow at first, I started out with smaller things and I worked my way up. I spent a lot of time making different sized dildos out of different materials but mostly I stuck with three main supplies: toilet paper, empty toilet paper rolls and electrical tape. Once I made one I was happy with, I would use it for a while then eventually make a new, bigger one. Between when I was thirteen and eighteen, I probably made more than ten different dildos.

I came up with the art of dildo making with limited access to supplies. I stuffed toilet paper in a finished toilet paper roll though the bottom until it came out the top and then taped it. The toilet paper rolls are about six or seven inches in length and when I wanted them even longer I would stack one on top of another. The amount of toilet paper that was stuffed in the middle of the toilet paper roll would determine how soft or firm it was. If I wanted them thicker, I would alternate wrapping toilet paper, tape, toilet paper, tape and so on and so on around the outside of the roll.

There was also a difference in electrical tapes. I found some that stuck to themselves a lot better than others and some that had a silky smooth finish, which was nice. I also made the base of the dildo wider so I never lost one or anything. It was very obvious to me that you wanted a base on it. It just makes so much sense even if you don’t know a lot about dildos. I used extra paper and kind of made a ball shape on the end because it was also something that I could grab. Sometimes they wouldn’t have the right shape and it wouldn’t be tapered enough and it would feel weird. It’s literally a sculpting activity, it’s like arts and crafts for dildos.

After all of the layers of toilet paper and tape, they were pretty solid, dense things. It didn’t have the pliable dick feel to them like silicone dildos but they were sturdy. If you aren’t using lube, it has to be somewhat solid. I actually don’t remember using a lot of lube. I’m not even sure what I used. I think that’s why it’s so easy for me to have anal sex now, I need pretty much no warm up and can go whenever.

There was also something really fun about pushing my body with these toys so I would make continuously bigger toys. The idea of trying to stick larger and larger things in my butt was super appealing to me. I also used to have this four-post bed and I would manage to fasten my legs above my head to the bedposts. I hadn’t even watched porn about it, I just thought it would be really fun to have that stretchy feeling. The feeling of my legs stretching and being pushed is really great for me so I thought, I’ll just do it to myself. Sometimes I would try to fasten the dildo to furniture and try to fuck myself with it, which helped me learn a lot about tape and how to put things on securely.

After a while, I would take the tape off because it was gross. I didn’t want to leave it because there would be germs and it would get weird. It wasn’t ritualistic, but it was my thing and I was very conscious about what I was doing. There was also a lot of shame in this whole process. I would often think to myself,

“I made a dildo, how horny and weird do you have to be to make your own ass dildo out of electrical tape?”

It felt really dirty to make it and to use these materials; it felt so childish and unprofessional. Now looking back, it feels much more normal. I didn’t have any other options, you don’t know how to buy things at that age. If you don’t have a credit card you can’t purchase things online, especially if you don’t really understand how money works. Shipping it to your house is really dangerous because what if your parents get it but where else are you going to ship it? You can’t drive somewhere to buy a toy and you’re too young to even get into the sex shops. You literally can’t buy sex toys unless your parents help you. There really aren’t a lot of options.

I never actually told anyone what I was doing either at the time or afterwards. I tried bringing it up casually with my friends in Jr. High but no one would talk about masturbation. Well, the guys were, but when I asked the girls about masturbation, they said it would be weird if girls masturbated because girls don’t masturbate and that was the end.

There was this weird shame when you don’t feel comfortable talking about it with people. This all was made even worse by the fact that our sex education was abstinence only. One of the things that we were actually told in sex ed was-

“Don’t have sex. If you do have sex, it’s like giving away a gift. You don’t re-gift things do you? You don’t use gifts and then give it to someone else on their birthday do you?”

I was like of course not! That’s, a shitty gift! Even though it wasn’t stated directly, sex was seen and portrayed as dirty. It was also taught that sex was this really important thing, which actually was really good for me. I can choose to have sex with someone and it feels healthy to me now, where as I feel that if I had jumped in when I was sixteen or seventeen, it would have been too overwhelming. I just didn’t feel emotionally comfortable with having sex with someone so masturbation was a good option.

Everything came crashing down when my mom found one of the dildos. By the time she found my hiding spot, my dildo was up to a terrifyingly big size. I think that was what scared her so much. She said she was scared I was going to stretch out my vagina. She was so upset and yelling at me so much that eventually I screamed back,

“I didn’t use it for my vagina, I used it for my ass!”

That probably wasn’t the right thing to say.

Here was the thing, I was so paranoid about my dildos that I would hide it inside a box, inside of a box, inside of a box, inside of yet another box, in the back of my closet, with a bunch of other boxes around it, on a shelf that was covered and packed full of other things. That isn’t something that you stumble on, it was hidden and then you shame me about it. She also showed my dad and that was the worst part about it; you don’t show a male member of the family. How do you talk to your dad after that? Why the fuck would you show him?

Even to this day, I don’t tell my mom anything. It’s not to be spiteful, it’s because you don’t get that trust back. If she had found it and wanted to talk about it, that would have been ok. That’s scary enough, but showing the male parent and saying we are disappointed in you for your sexuality is something that really hurts. Then adding all of the really aggressive questioning on top of it all.

I think that was part of the reason I never wanted to tell this story. It was one of those things where the look on her face was this terrified, disgusted look. I started to think everyone was going to react like that. It was traumatizing to the point where I didn’t masturbate or buy toys for the next five years. There was this overwhelming guilt, all this weird shame. I started having looping thoughts. If you can’t break your cycle of thoughts, it just makes you feel worse and worse and guiltier and guiltier. Plus you can’t talk to anyone about it because obviously you feel so much shame. So I just felt gross and disgusting, thinking why would any person need to masturbate like that?

It feels weird having your own secret. You are scared when people come into your room and you aren’t there. What if they find something? You assume peoples’ reactions are never going to be accepting or enthusiastic. No one ever says,

“Cool you use a dildo too! Pound it girl, I love masturbating!”

Now I actually talk to other women and help some of them buy their own sex toys and talk about my experiences. I don’t talk about the details or my mom finding my dildos but rather my love and appreciation for sex toys and for masturbation and how both of those things make sex better for me.

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July 29, 2016 TAGS: adaptability, ass, childhood, dildos, DIY, do it yourself, electric tape, exploration, family, make your own, masturbation, pleasure, porn, push limits, sex toys, sexuality, shame, shower, stretch, toilet paper, United States, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

Sleepovers, Soft Porn and Phone Sex Hotlines

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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May 31, 2016 TAGS: Berlin Wall, Bravo, childhood, DDR, doctor, Dr. Sommer, exploration, games, GDR, Germany, phone sex, sexuality, sleep overs, slumber parties, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

Water Play at the Sports Club

Luciano from Argentina

Sex was seen as a novelty because as kids we have no idea about sex. In Argentina, no one talks to kids about sex so we all had to figure it out on our own. I had one friend who got a lot of information from his older brother who showed him some porn videos, but it all for us to interpret or figure out. Our friend told us that something was coming out of the penis in the porn and we thought maybe they were peeing on each other. He also told us that sex was incredibly painful because of the faces that the people were making. No one could really grasp why you would want to do any of this, it all just seemed terrible.

During this time, I was starting to be attracted to female bodies but I didn’t know why. There is nothing I could do with them you know. I would see pictures of girls and sometimes my dick would get hard and I would think, “Wow! How does this function?”

We didn’t know why we were attracted to girls but we knew we didn’t want to pee on someone and we didn’t want it to hurt.

Anything we were able to figure out about sex, we learned from each other. There were a few older guys in my neighborhood and we would hang out after school in a sports club where we would all share stories. Especially for guys, we would stick our dick in anything and then tell everyone about it. I even got phone calls from friends saying

“Hey man! I tried olive oil on my dick and feels so nice. Salt is a bad idea though.”

There was also a lot of group masturbation to see if we all would react the same. I had a neighbor who was a few years older than me and we spent a lot of time together. We had the first theories and even did a lot of mutual masturbation to see if it worked for both of us. What would happen if I do it to you or if you do it to me.

I don’t know if we were actually thinking about sex but rather curiosity about how everything functions. I was never attracted to him, I thought yeah we are buddies, I’ll touch your dick, I’m cool with that. We also theorized how this would work with a girl. There were these talks about what sex could be but we never thought about penetration. We thought about what we would do with a girl given the chance but neither of us were thinking about penetration. He knew there were sexual diseases though and he said he wouldn’t do anything with a girl because he would get sick. We knew about condoms but not much about the whole protection thing. I just thought that they would somehow make sex feel better.

There are a lot of these homoerotic discoveries when you are a kid because you don’t have girls available unless you have a sister or a neighbor that comes into your house consistently. Usually you are just surrounded by male kids.

Almost every day after school all of my friends and I would go to this sports club where we would hang out and talk. A lot of what we talked about was the things that we were trying and figuring out about sex. One of the biggest things that happened to me at this sports club was in the shower. There were no showerheads on the showers there so it was a single strong stream of water coming down. We would play a game where you would stay under the stream and just hold your erect dick and let the water hit it.

It hurt.

It fucking hurt a lot.

The game was who could hold it the longest without pulling away. I eventually noticed that after a while of hurting, it would start feeling weird. Then, if you hold it long enough, it feels nice for a tiny bit and then hurt like shit again. There was this build up and then you couldn’t hold it any more. I think that was one of my first orgasms that I was not conscious about at the time. It took me a long time to figure out what it was. It wasn’t a clear line where you could obtain pleasure from pain. Now that I think back on it, it was a small orgasm, but for us it was just the moment that you couldn’t hold it in anymore. Also, it was the moment your dick would go soft, though we all thought that happened because of the pain.

At a certain point I started doing it alone because it felt nice but for me it wasn’t considered masturbation. It was something I could do with my dick that felt nice but it was not related to the back and forward of masturbation that I was used to. It’s a stream of water; I am not excited about it so I couldn’t possibly be masturbating. It was more unconscious thing.

Even though all of us would tell everything that what we were trying, I never told them that I was actually getting pleasure from this. It took a long time for me to even figure out that this was a kind of masturbation or something that was actually pleasurable.

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March 24, 2016 TAGS: Argentina, masturbation, pain, pleasure, shower, youth BY: stumbling

Tag: youth

Bo from Belgium

Mieke Maaike

Playing games

A/S/L

Sex Ed

Alphonse from Germany

Emma from Switzerland

Kim from Canada

Markus from Germany

Sex positive

Pansexual

Polyamorous

Martina from Switzerland

Tristan from Germany

Anja from Siberia

Remote ice pocket

The town lesbian

Homophobic Russia

“Male hormones”

Watch out boy she’ll chew you up, she’s a maneater

Jazz from Australia

Sophia from Australia

Zach from the United States

Julian from the United States

Louise from France

Patrick from Germany

Lenny from the United States

A. from Germany

Learning about Sex

Tristan from Germany

David from the United States

Katja from Germany

Hanna from Finland

Ashley from the United States

Momo from former East Germany

Luciano from Argentina