I am 54 years old. As best as I can remember, I started masturbating at age 12. My father had told me that masturbating would cause insanity and/or blindness. I had been introduced to sex around that time by my cousins who were near my age. I remember how good it felt entering a woman and how hard my penis was. My first ejaculation was a surprise. My female cousin stopped having intercourse with me and her brother, and I wanted that feeling of ejaculation again. After that, it seems I was always playing with myself.
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Ignored alarm
I'm 22 and from Wisconsin. I began masturbating just before my 12th birthday. Within a few weeks I experienced my first ejaculation. Not knowing what it was, I was alarmed and stopped masturbating for several days -- but soon the urge was too great and I resumed, without much care.
Solo learning
When I was 10 or 11 I started having "wet dreams" 1 or 2 times a week. My school friends were having them also, and we would compare experiences. My buddy and I went to the local library and started reading sex books for pre-teens and adolescent males. We learned what "wet dreams" were all about, about erections, masturbation, and ejaculating. My older brother didn't tell me a thing, and neither did my dad.
Tickled
My life as a masturbator began long before I had heard the term or even knew what it was. I have no recollection of when it started, but I remember I used to tickle my private parts in bed at night, and that it felt very good. There was no ejaculation or orgasm associated with this activity -- just a nice, intense feeling I enjoyed. I'm sure that at age 10 I was doing this regularly.
All signs point to pleasure
As a boy of 6 I stayed on my uncle's farm for the summer. His 2 daughters were older than me by 6 and 7 years. Being farm girls they knew about sex and loved to take me to the attic where spare featherbeds were kept. There we all got naked and on those big, fluffy mattresses they taught me the basics of sex. I remember my little penis getting hard, and how it felt good when they would ride it (without penetration). But they rode it so long it got sore and I insisted on playing a different game.
Wet dream? Forget it
I'm not sure how old I was the first time I masturbated -- 10 or 11, I think. I hadn't started puberty yet, I know that much. I've always like to read, and one day I had run out of library books and was desperate so I was reading my mother's "MS" Magazine. There was an Ann Landers-type column, and some woman had written that when she was a little girl her mother caught her in the bathtub with the water running onto her clitoris. She was so upset that even as an adult she could take showers only.
Marital masturbation
I am a female in my late 50s; my husband wrote Biography #8. I grew up in a large family in a house with only 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom. Also, my parents were silent about sexual matters. I suppose those two factors account for the fact that I did not masturbate as a child or teenager. I was so ignorant of matters sexual that until I was probably 13, I was unaware the vagina existed. I believed that the anus was the female sexual orifice.
Standard practice
I am in my 50s and live in the center of Europe. The first time I came in contact with masturbation was when I was about 4. A same-age friend of mine and I were playing in a small forest, when an older guy of 10 or 12 joined us. Soon we were sitting under the bushes and discussing all sorts of things. We must have been talking about the opposite sex, when the older boy undid his trousers and started to rub his penis. He invited us to do the same, but with our 3 to 4 centimeters only at the time, we both were ashamed to unpack our treasure.
Cosmic flight of joyous gratification
[This biography is by the same reader who wrote Shimmying up swing poles.]
I feel strange saying I began masturbating at age 11 between the 6th and 7th grades, but I read about other boys starting to "do IT" as early as age 8. Well, I did do something at that age, but couldn't identify "it" as sexual or something to be embarrassed about until I touched my penis one summer's night after the 6th grade. The discovery was awesome, but the approaches to "it" using the thumb above and the index finger below were scary.
Journey of discovery
I am in my late 50s. In my family sex was a topic not discussed. Neither of my parents ever told or asked me anything about sex or masturbation. Therefore, all my early masturbation experiences were as though I was the only one who had ever done it.
My earliest memory of a "sexual" experience comes from a time at my grandmother's house when the daughter of my grandmother's cook took me behind the garage and showed me her genitals. She told me that if I rubbed my "pee-pee" it would feel good. I don't remember any more about this incident. I was probably about 5 years old.