marriage

I cannot remember when I began masturbating, but I must have been 5 or 6. I always did it lying on my stomach and rubbing against a hard mattress. I'd never been told not to do it, didn't know anybody else did, and didn't know any name for it. I somehow had the idea, though, that I shouldn't do it where I could be seen. My sister, a couple years younger, slept in the same room, so I had to wait until she was asleep. I even remember urging her to go on to sleep, so naturally she tried to stay awake.

I was a tender young farm boy who attended a small town consolidated high school in the '50s. The study hall for the school was actually a former church. The main room had shelves around the sides and tables with plenty of chairs around the room. If you misbehaved, you were sent into one of two corner rooms that were on each side of the former entrance to the church. These rooms had windows from the desk top level to the ceiling, so you could sit at the counter and study and your lower body would not be visible to the study hall proctor. There was already one boy in the room.

I have had many years of enjoying masturbation since I was introduced to the miracle at age 9. I shared a room with an older brother who wanted the freedom to masturbate anytime he wanted, so he showed me what "the big boys" do. Of course I didn't wait until I was one of them. Suddenly, the little erections I was having made sense to me, and I began to enjoy the miracle many times a day.

I remember playing "doctor" with a neighbor girl as early as age 5. This excited me a great deal, and it felt good for her (or me) to rub my erection. (I think I have always had erections). But I never got to an orgasm from it.

My family lived in a large apartment building. At age two I became best friends with another two-year-old boy. Neither of us had siblings and we bounded around like brothers. We did everything together; as we got older we even went to the john with one another. No inhibitions at that age. I suppose having seen each other's naked bodies for years, at some point we began to explore each other and our small erections. At age 9 we must have heard about sex and decided to experiment.

I am a 54-year-old female from the United Kingdom. I was bought up in an all-female household and went to a single-sex school. My entire sex education happened when I was 12, on the day I started my periods: My mother said to me, "Never let a boy touch you." That was it. I used to wonder why. I had never seen a man's body and certainly never seen a penis.

Masturbation — what a wonderful thing! I probably started masturbating late in life. I was 15 the first time I did it. I had experimented quite a bit with girls by that age, feeling their breasts and and even masturbating them, although not to climax I don't believe. I always got erections during this petting phase but never thought about masturbating.

I was reared in a home where sex was never mentioned; I never even heard the word "pregnant." How I managed to get to be 11 years old before learning the facts of life I do not know, but I did. I moved to a new school when I was in the 5th grade, and there I began to get a real education in things I'd never heard of. I knew where babies came from, of course, but I had no idea how they got there.

My story is somewhat different because I did not ejaculate by hand until I was nearly 18. I was raised in an extremely sexually repressive home. My mother did not believe in sex for pleasure and rarely engaged in it. Sex was never discussed at our house, and neither my 3 older brothers nor I ever received any sex instruction at home.

I grew up in the 1950s in Calvinistic South Africa. It was a very straight-laced and conservative place — still is, in many ways. My mom was very religious, and sex, in any form, was not a subject of discussion. At school the word "sex" was never used. We would talk of "gender" or, maybe, male and female. A form might ask what your "gender" was. At least the modern forms say "sex" — to which I always want to respond, "Yes, please!"