Draining spinal fluid

I am a 53-year-old man living in the U.K. I have been a regular (perhaps even a compulsive) masturbator all my life. However, I have also had a continual struggle to reconcile my feelings of guilt, the condemnation of my church, and the disinformation from my guardians with the pleasure I have derived from this universal activity.

I was brought up by my grandparents. My grandfather was a clergyman, and my grandmother was a domineering woman with a thoroughly Victorian attitude to all things sexual. My grandfather's parish was in a rural part of England, and the nearby farmyards and the village children who were my friends and playmates had an important role to play in my sexual habits. I was educated at a series of private, single-sex Catholic schools, and the attitudes amongst the priests and nuns who ran these schools — and the habits I picked up from my schoolmates — were another major influence on my masturbatory habits.

I can remember spending a lot of time in the summer at the river paddling/swimming and then drying off on the bank with my friends. We would often take off our trunks and sunbathe in the nude, and we would look at each other and compare our penises. I am fairly small and circumcised. Even at this early age (probably 10 or 11) some of my friends were a lot larger, and most were uncut. I can't remember anyone getting an erection or playing with themselves at this stage, but there was a definite feeling of excitement that we were doing something naughty by being naked and looking at each other in this way.

We also spent a good deal of time in the farmyards and hay-sheds surrounding the village, and I became aware of the mating habits of the animals there. Seeing a bull mount a cow, or two horses copulating, left no doubt in my mind that a penis could increase greatly in size and what it was used for. Our little "gang" of boys would play games of truth or dare in a hay-shed hideout, and many of the dares involved exposing ourselves. At this stage we began to get erections. Finally during one of these sessions, a friend demonstrated how to stroke his erection and eventually produced a small amount of semen.

I managed the same thing one day when I discovered a discarded stack of pornographic magazines in a hedgerow. I took them back to the hideout, and while looking through the pictures of naked ladies (with their pubic hair and genitals airbrushed out), I got an erection and worked myself up to my first orgasm. I can't remember much about how it felt or how I felt, but ever since I have always associated masturbation with viewing pornography and have always been excited by the type of women (large breasted) featured in the magazines.

Unfortuntely my grandmother found my stash of erotica in my bedroom and started my lifelong guilt complex about masturbation by sternly lecturing me on the evils on "self-abuse" and warning me that I was draining my spinal fluid and would go mad if I persisted. This did not stop me, and I continued to "abuse" myself on a regular basis, but I was always plagued with fears that her warnings might come true. She even forced me to sleep in the same room as her to try to stop my evil habits. I had to perfect a stealth technique of rubbing myself very slowly and carefully to avoid creaking bedsprings or any indication of what was going on.

Things were no better at school, where in the fevered atmosphere created by hundreds of pubescent males with no other outlet for their sexual frustrations but to indulge in single or mutual masturbation whenever and wherever they got the chance. The priests would thunder from the pulpit in chapel on the terrible sin of "self-abuse," or listen to our confessions of "impure thoughts and acts" and make us fear for our eternal souls.

This biography ends abruptly; I'm sure everyone would like to read the rest of this reader's story. So if you're the one wrote it, please consider sending us a follow-up.