Written By: Debra Hyde(Or Sister’s Hoods)
When my sister and I dine out, restaurant servers invariably learn to make eye contact as they approach, giving us a good fifteen feet worth of time to moderate ourselves. That because us girls are usually yapping away about sex. Last time out, we really outdid ourselves. At one point over pasta, my sister looked at me and asked, “When did you discover masturbation?” I asked her to qualify the question, as in when did I sense it, know about it, or discover the joys of it?
Dumbfounded that I’d complicate so simple a question, she elaborated.“When did you start playing with yourself ?” Her tone was more flat-out blanket statement, rather than gentle question.
Well, the truth must come out, I decided.
“36,” I admitted.
My admission stunned my sister. To her surprise, I had taken a roundabout route in the quest for self-pleasure, a quest that was, in fact, novel length and near-epic in nature. My sister’s, by comparison, measured out as a pithy short story.
“I was four,” she said. “I was sitting on the couch, watching TV. I found this spot between my legs and thought ‘Great! A new toy! And I don’t have to share it!’ Mom came upstairs with some laundry and asked me what I was doing.”
Mom. I could hear her accusatory tone in my head.
“What’d ya tell her?”
“ ‘Nothing,’ ” she said in her finest little girl voice. “Then I wandered off to my room to play by myself.”And with herself. (My sister always did know how to blow off Mom.)
I wasn’t quite that savvy that young. In fact, I was a little too malleable, given how I bought into Mom’s attitudes towards self-touching. I told my sister when I first became aware of arousal. “I was at least five because we were commuting from the air force base to our home, off-base.”
Daily we drove to and from Las Vegas to Nellis AFB, an air force family collectively commuting to work and school. We kids loved driving through the desert arroyos — deep dips in the roads that marked where flash flood waters ran during rare rains — and we had lovingly named them “chip dips.” I often felt the flutter of the arroyo roller coaster reach from my stomach to both my throat and my clit in an amazing two-way progression of sensation.
“One time,” I recounted, “I mentioned ‘boy, that chip dip tickled my yo-yo’ and Mom let me know in no uncertain terms that I’d said something disgusting.” In fact, the five-year-old me was deeply shocked, hurt, and shamed to find my innocent comment could invoke such wrath. She didn’t know what to do except sit by, silently wounded.
My mother’s reaction imparted to told me that somehow my body was objectionable and it could do objectionable things, things that you best ignore if you didn’t want to face repeated parental condemnation. My ensuing shame and confusion shut me down; I never did discover that ever-ready “toy.”
On the other hand, my sister was a case study in extended virginity, and masturbation had helped her wait. She relied on her toy to get her through those moments when her body craved sexual release, she d