As motivational posters in your Facebook feed will tell you, true peace in life grows from the root of self-love. They are definitely, 100% referring to masturbation.

I started young, with pillows and cuddly toys making my most intimate acquaintance. At that early stage in my wanking career, I wasn’t fixating on any sexualized images or thoughts, I was just physically doing something that made me feel good, like eating Frubes or picking knee scabs.

But somehow, I knew that this was different, and I would burn with shame and regret after every episode.

As I matured, so did my technique, beginning to add fantasies as visual accompaniment to the work of my now-dexterous fingers. Here’s an example of the kind of high-octane erotica we’re talking about aged 11 – 13:

I picture myself as young woman. I have grown miraculously large breasts, and thereby earned the honour of becoming Liverpool striker Michael Owen’s girlfriend.

Fearful of meddling paparazzi, Michael has built his bedroom at the epicentre of his mansion. It has no outward facing walls, and therefore no windows. It’s dark in there, and bare but for a comfortable double bed. Sort of like a panic room. But for intercourse. 

Because I don’t know what sex would actually be like, I just picture our bodies moving beneath the 13.5 tog duvet, as if I’d successfully got two Sims to ’Woohoo’.

If you need to go and have a cold shower after reading that, I promise not to judge 😉

My post-watershed fumbling took the concept of safe sex to its extreme, and yet I felt overwhelmingly guilty about it, certain that no other girl did the same.

Around this time, the male half of my peers began to boast of their handiwork, exchanging tales of furious marathons, triumphant posh wanks into jonnies, nail biting near misses with earnest mothers, astonishing distances travelled by spaff, and even, horrifyingly, battles with soggy biscuits.

Girls? We absolutely did not pleasure ourselves. I remember one classmate’s admission that she’d touched ‘it’ whilst showering being met with horror and outrage from us all, even though she was quick to stress that it was just that her hand glanced over the area in giving it a wash.

Boys’ knobs were picaresque heroes on a wanking odyssey; girls had to pretend that the only action they got was cliterol-collateral in maintaining basic hygiene.

This pretence continued until I turned 18 when, bizarrely, Ann Summers parties became a highlight in the social calendar. To those who have never been to an Ann Summers party, imagine your mum’s done a buffet for your Nan’s birthday, but in between rounds of cocktail sausages, sugary wine and small talk, someone you’ve not met before makes you hold an 18” vibrating dildo to your nose to see if you sneeze, before pressuring you to order one along with some chocolate scented lube from a mail order catalogue.

Perpetuating the binary notion that women are either sluts or angels, we went from refusing to even acknowledge a bit of light fingering, to competitively listing out the tech specs on our latest sex toys.

There is nothing wrong with having a tool kit that enhances personal pleasure, but it is depressing that female masturbation had to be so fetishized, even commercialized for it to be deemed an acceptable admission. Not to mention that a vast amount of these products are unnecessarily phallic.

As I grew up, these myths were eradicated within the comfort of my friendship group, but fear of female sexual pleasure insistently finds its way across time and space. We live in a world where at one extreme, FGM is still seen by some to be a legitimate practice, and at the other, we are encouraged to take pleasure into our own hands only via hyper-sexualised tools.

We have the male voice telling us female masturbation is shameful, and the male voice telling us it’s giving him a boner. Where’s the voice that says it can be natural, sensual, fun, invigorating, spontaneous, or whatever it is that you personally need or want to take from it? That is if it’s something you practice – I have one friend who doesn’t bother: she says it’s like trying to tickle yourself.

On that note, I’ll leave you with this charismatic stud for a bit of me time inspiration