When I was thirteen and my brother was sixteen, we were walking in the woods behind our house. My brother found a Hustler magazine. We flipped through it. I was disgusted but intrigued. My brother was elated.
“I’m going to have so much fun with this Michelle,” he exclaimed. I wasn’t entirely sure what fun he was talking about. I did know he did things with his body behind his locked bedroom door and the bathroom.
When I was twenty, and still a virgin, I tried to masturbate to orgasm. I thought of male body parts. Nothing was working. I wore out my hand and rubbed myself sore. I was sore for three days.
When I was thirty I had become good at masturbation. If it was a class in school, I would have gotten a gold star. A vibrator helped immensely. I learned the magic of multiple orgasms. I always thought of my ex-boyfriend. I only broke up with him because he moved to Boise, Idaho. Elaborate domestic fantasies unraveled in my head.
When I was thirty-five there were no men I knew that I wanted to think about so I thought about actors in movies. Never major stars. I could only think of attainable men. For some reason, they always ended up being British. I started running out of actors so I called my cable company and got a subscription to the BBC.
Masturbation was becoming an ordeal. A necessary ordeal. I had to craft an entire narrative around the actor. How would we meet? What would I say? What would he say? What would we do? I practically wrote a romance novel in my head before I could orgasm.
I married at forty. I stopped wanting my husband to touch me at forty-one. I bought a new vibrator, renewed my BBC subscription, and wrote stories like mad in my head.
This is my masturbation story.
I wish, truly, I could orgasm thinking about any old man’s thigh. I know that’s what my brother did when he found the magazine. He stared at a boob and had waves of pleasure. But I guess being a female masturbator I became a storyteller with an audience of one. Maybe I should find a wider audience. There might be a market.
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