masturbation?

Many years ago, I worked with a punch and judy man and his exotic wife who helped him. When he was convicted of sex offences against children, he was unable to ply his trade and, being instructed never to go near children again, he put his puppet theatre in the shed. When his sentence was completed, he took out the very damp, mouldy puppet theatre and headed off to the seaside. On assembling his puppet theatre, he found that mice had chewed the wires that enabled him to broadcast the sounds he made with his swazzle. He insisted his wife should hold the wires together during the show.................

.....ten minutes into the show, children on the hot sandy beach began to shout 'smoke...fire...!' as his dried-out tent went up in flames! He was shipped off to hospital. Poetic justice?

I think we seem to have veered off the subject here, which seemed to be female masturbation?

Just exchanging a few anecdotes so we don't get too personal.......

I suppose it is only to be expected that in a thread entitled 'masturbation' we are more comfortable having a laugh about other people's sexual peccadillos than talking about ourselves!

My dear mother was a virgin when she was married at age 32. She once asked my sister and myself 'How do you know if you have had an orgasam?'
We had to tell her that if she had to ask, she hadn't had one!
She had five children in ten years, then my father 'shut up shop', at the age of 44, probably due to his increasing health problems. My mother was a superstitious, rather than practising, Catholic, so would not use contraception and I think my dad just didn't fancy a sixth baby. I was the youngest, and I don't think he ever forgave me for not being an abortion!

All sex was regarded as taboo by our parents when i was a young 'un. (born 1945) We were supposed to be virgins when we married, and even then, enjoying it was regarded as not quite nice. As for masturbation - an absolute no-no, especially for girls. Our parents carried on as if we'd been conceived immaculately.

So we all cheerfully ignored our parents and did exactly what we wanted, and ended up thinking that we had invented sex in the 1960s!!!

To help matters, we had great music - Doris Day and Frank Sinatra were replaced by the Beatles and the rest of the Mersey sound, the Stones and all the rest of them. We wore our micro minis and kinky boots, listened to naughty songs and managed to have sex lives in spite of parental restrictions, albeit in great secrecy.

Oh, those were the days, my friends......

Didn't we invent it I remember lots of sniggering when 1969 arrived and having to have the significance explained to me Well I was only 20!

I am older than you, Joan, so my fashion was full skirts, with sugar-stiff peticoats underneath, tight sweaters over whirlpool bras and little scarves.
I used to go roller skating almost every night, when I wasn't ballroom dancing, and I made all my own full circle skating skirts. I finally found some use for my maths. 'O' level - I could work out how far to cut out the waist because I knew the formula to calculate the radius from the circumference. I stuck sequins on them,and with the white boots they were very flattering! WE also had full circle felt skirts in really beautiful jewel colours - scarlet, royal blue and emerald green.
I was a very 'good' girl -I didn't smoke or drink (that came much later, in my late 30's) and I would not have dared to have sex - partly for fear of getting pregnant and partly because I lived in a small town and the double standards applied even more than they do today. I think one of my reasons for getting married at 18 was that I wanted to be able to enjoy sex without anxiety - as a married woman I was able to attend the Family Planning clinic.
When I got divorced at 39, I did all the things I should have done in my teens, apart from smoking, which I hate.
Our music was Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Little Richard, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Paul Ank, The Four Seasons, with ballad singers such as Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams and Tony Bennet (who is still going strong).
We had no sex education whatsoever, either at my covent school or at home. I don't remember how I learnt the facts of life but I know that when my older sister had a baby when I was ten, I had no idea of how she had done it!

We pooled our knowledge of the facts of life in the school playground. I got my knowledge from a slightly older girl cousin who told me just about everything. The school did organise sex education when we were about 13, but we'd pretty much found it all out beforehand (without trying it of course)

I also loved Buddy Holly, Gerry and the Pacemakers etc and wore those full skirts with sugar-stiffened net underskirts during adolescence.

But for me, real pop music started with the Beatles and the Stones!

Oh, I'm sitting here swamped in nostalgia, especially after reading Greatnan's last post. And Joan's. I used to make full skirts; very difficult to get the hem level I remember. On to sex though, when I was 11, I asked my parents where babies came from and they said they would tell me when I was older!! They never did but I found out somehow though the information was sketchy! There was a constant fear of getting pregnant before marriage. Being in a steady relationship, even engaged, was no excuse. The shame of a 'seven month baby' stayed with women all their lives. As for masturbation, that was another area where information was thin on the ground so it was quite possible to accidentally discover the possibilities when alone in bed without having a clue what it was all about, least of all that it was associated with sex!

Neither pooled knowledge nor reading anything I could get my hands on about sex (mainly Readers Digest, problem pages etc) informed me that female masturbation existed. It was not even alluded to in schoolgirl conversations. I think i found out about orgasms by reading "marriage manuals". It was only the books of the feminist revolution in the early 70s that brought this subject into the light of day wasn't it? Oh yes Masters and Johnson came out around then too didn't it.

Me too. Glad we are getting down to basics here! (Circle skirts - Yes!!)

I remember ONE hour at school - on periods. That was IT.
I had scarlet fever when I was about 12, and the gossip and jokes in the children's ward opened my eyes a lot.....a lot of young teenagers there.....interesting.
My parents? No way. No info.

Believe it or not, I did an anatomy course at college, and they never mentioned the clitoris.
I got into the women's movement when I was about 30 - a deluge of information and reorientation. I had the 'Our Bodies - Ourselves' book, and kept it for my daughters, so they had oceans more info than I did. And we talked about it too. (I remember one said later her 'liqorice' and the other her 'tickleish'..!)

Circle skirts yes, sex, NO, NO, NO! I had a 'sheltered' upbringing - wasn't allowed to go dancing with friends on Saturday nights and had a huge self-esteem problem because I was a bit overweight. My achievements were academic until I escaped from the parental orbit when I went to Kenya in my 20s and made up for lost time.

My mother gave me a short, Catholic version (!) pamphlet which told me the basic facts when I was fifteen. Needless to say I'd found out the facts from a biology book about rabbits when I was twelve. Every girl in my school year probably read that book in the school library. It was a reference book so we weren't allowed to take it out and we were such innocents, I don't think that even occurred to anyone. Or maybe I'm being naive . Anyway, I had to put the book on my mother's bed when I'd read it so she could hid it again until my next sibling was fifteen.

About a year ago DD2, who works with "da yoof", recommended two books which we got for DD3, then aged ten. She read them enthusiastically, asked questions about stuff she didn't understand, and took it all on board with minimal embarassment. In fact, her main interest was in the mechanics of childbirth.

I'm off to find the references for these books because I would recommend them highly for pre-pubescent kids.

Three books. We have the first two. Highly recommended.

www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0340878282/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_3?pf_rd_p=103612307&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0940208075&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_r=10H0QBHKDWDFRC171TQ4

www.amazon.co.uk/Lets-Talk-About-Where-Babies/dp/1844281736/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325326046&sr=1-1

www.amazon.co.uk/Lets-Talk-About-Robie-Harris/dp/1406324205/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b

Corrections: we have all three and DD was nine.

My friend is a nurse, she once told us of a man who turned up at the hospital with a potato stuck up his bottom. he told the nurse he had slipped in the shower and had fallen on the potato that his wife had dropped. Apparently she had been washing them in the shower with him at the same time !

Oh the poor man - what a catastrophe to leave him in that predicament (tee hee!)

I'd forgotten about the book my mum gave me about sex [without discussing any of the content afterwards] but at least she was very open about periods and such like, so I wasn't scared when it happened. I wasn't going to say this on the Christmas thread as it didn't seem appropriate, but my mum used to use the cotton wool from Dr Whites to make 'snow' for the Christmas tree! Even after reading the book I was still worried that I could get pregnant by gazing at the photo of Rudolph Valentino in my film book. I think I was even luckier not to get pregnant during my misspent hippie years, so the book obviously didn't do much good! Information about sex, perhaps but not about contraception, although I do remember mum saying to me 'don't give yer body to any man, our crimson'. Wise words.

Oh, so the anus must be an erogenous zone for men then!

Yes, petallus especially when the prostate can be reached to trigger orgasm, but it would need to be something other than a potato to achieve that!

I talked to my girls about sex in just the same way I talked about nature, the universe, anything they wanted to talk about. They knew more than any other child in the playground, and in fact some mothers thought they were a bad influence. I think there is a difference between innocent and ignorant - a child can be very knowledgeable but quite free from guilt.

I may never think of a potato the same way again

Hear, hear, greatnan. I took the same approach. When they asked questions, I answered them with information, with the result that nothing about periods or reproduction was a shock. The only time I was embarassed was when DD1 aged about five asked me in a busy public toilet at the top of her voice Why are you putting that stick [tampon] in your bottom? I didn't have a problem with explaining why, but not to all and sundry. I said I'd tell her when we got home and I did.

Do they make vibrators for men and, if not why not. I'm thinking in terms of business opportunities here. Although would men be happy to buy such an object developed by grannies [bit like the Shreddies advert].