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Deej, your childhood situation sounds a bit like mine was. I was an only child, with a very loving but probably overprotective mother. There was certainly no strip poker with the boys in the woods behind my house. I was brought up not to touch and I didn't.
When I was 14 my mother killed herself. She had been the centre of my life, and I had no idea how to grieve or to cope with the loss.
I became a boarder at the school I attended and everyone commented how well I was doing and how my schoolwork had hardly suffered. But underneath I was using all kinds of coping strategies.
It seemed like I was being made to grow up very quickly. But I just wanted everything to go back to being the way it was. I longed to be a child with a loving mother.
The thing I associated most with growing up was my impending sexualisation which I viewed like a time bomb ticking inside me. I wanted nothing to do with it. The idea that some hormone in my body was suddenly going to make girls irrisistably attractive to me scared the hell out of me.
I slept in a dormitory of 16 boys and the conversation after lights out left little to the imagination. I was probably the only boy who didn't masturbate.
I wasn't even entirely sure how to do it. In fact it wasn't until I was 18 that I discovered a new way of rubbing against the bedclothes and brought myself to ejaculation for the first time. After that I gradually tried new techniques and finally lost my inhibitions about touching myself.
I masturbated regularly, but seldom fantasised about other people. To this day I do not know whether I am gay or straight.
Soon after I turned 40, I met a woman who, after I had confided my innocence to her, made it her mission to induct me into the ways of sex. It was the first time I had even seen a naked woman's body. Slowly and gently over a period of several weeks, she taught me how to touch and carress until one romantic evening we finally made love.
The relationship did not last. She grew weary of playing "teacher" and complained, justifiably, that I lacked passion. Three years on from that relationship, despite the loss of my virginity, I still perceive myself as the innocent child. I am seeing a psycho-sexual counsellor who is encouraging me to self-sexualise. One of the exercises is to try to introduce fantasies into masturbation sessions.
He has also told me that the association of childhood with innocence is pretty flawed. Most children learn to pleasure themselves from a very young age - it has even been observed in unborn babies inside the womb.
Innocence is over-rated. Most of my life I have been lonely, but too frightened to seek a partner because I feared I wouldn't be able to cope with the sex thing.
Now I am hoping that my sexuality is not absent, but just repressed.
To all those who experience sexual attraction - gay or straight - spare a thought for those who don't.
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