Girl On The Net: My Not-So-Shameful Sex Secrets. Литагент HarperCollins USD

these words giving me that trembling feeling, I didn’t know how to keep it going. Other than repeating the scenes over and over in my head, I was at a loss. Insights garnered from TV shows that I watched late at night had given me the impression that I should stick my fingers in, but I’d done that before when I was practising with tampons, and it had just given me a vague feeling of medical-grade discomfort. Touching my insides seemed wrong, and putting my fingers in my cunt seemed about as arousing as poking at an open wound. Moreover, I had no idea what I was supposed to do once my fingers were there. Should there be a side-to-side motion? A swirling motion? An in-and-out motion? Not a bloody clue. I could have done with a handbook, or at the very least a nudge and a wink and an explanation that ‘fingering’ could be done in many different ways.

      So I’d got hot, got wet, got horny, and yet still hadn’t actually wanked—until I found the book.

      It wasn’t deliberate, I’m sure of that. My dad is quite a liberal guy, but still prone to saying ‘oh, deary me’ in a jovially uncomfortable way when adverts for sanitary products appear on TV. He left the book in my room, certainly, but I know he didn’t leave it there on purpose.

      On this occasion I went to visit Dad, and spotted that things had been moved about a bit in my room. This was reasonably unusual. My room was seen as my space, so unless they’d had guests who needed a bed, no one would go in, let alone start moving my stuff around. Dad felt the need to explain, as I dumped my weekend rucksack on the bed, that he had a bad back and had been borrowing my bed for a few nights during the week.

      I found out later that it was because he and my stepmum had had a fight. Not just a ‘why do you never do the washing up?’ fight, but a full-on, storming-out, ‘I can’t bear to share a bed with this twat’ row. Hence the book, I suppose. If I were my dad, and had found myself suddenly and temporarily wifeless, I’d have taken the time to catch up on my wanking too.

      I set about putting my things in order—rearranging my room, taking out the clothes I’d packed for the weekend, and putting my own book into the bedside drawer. And that was where I found it—Dad’s.

      I can’t remember what it was called, but I’m sure it was something French-sounding. The action was set in Parisian streets, and the images in my mind are of people in vaguely old-fashioned clothes cavorting with each other and talking in strong French accents, but any one of these memories might be incorrect. The key thing I took away, having flipped through a few pages, was that it was dirty. Filthy.

      Not dirty like the pictures of shining, pink-mouthed topless women that the boys at school pored over, not even dirty like the scenes of thrashing that whirled round in my head, but dirty in ways I’d never imagined before. On the first page I flicked to, a woman tied a man flat to a board, teased him into a throbbing erection, then encased his cock in a condom-like sheath that had hundreds of tiny spikes on the inside.

      I told myself I should put this down. I thought I’d discovered the edge of filth, the world’s end, and that nothing dirtier was possible. I tried to close the book, reasoning that nothing could be worse than the passage I’d just read. Then I read the very next paragraph, in which she sat down upon the sheath, letting it slide slickly inside her, and watched the anguished looks on the guy’s face as his dick throbbed with pleasure and pain.

      OK, I should definitely put this down, I thought again.

      But instead I settled myself back onto the bed, resting one hand casually on my crotch outside my jeans. Pushing with gentle pressure at the place where the waves of heat were coming from.

      ‘I’m going to put this down now.’

      The woman started sliding up and down the guy’s dick—the sheath smooth on the outside and adding precious thickness to his erection. The book described in detail her arousal—her cold, solid nipples stiffening as she rode him faster. It drew a detailed picture of her muscular thighs, clamping him tight as she rocked back and forth. It went into lengthy detail about the mechanics of the act—how every time she sat down, sliding his cock deeper into her, the tiny spikes would push more heavily into his skin, pricking his prick so he’d moan in pain.

      Without making a conscious decision to, I was touching myself. My hand on the outside of my jeans, my legs spread wide so that the seam pressed heavily on my clit, I rubbed hard with my fingers through the strong fabric.

      ‘I should definitely put this down.’

      But I didn’t. I couldn’t. The hot, topless woman was riding the guy with such need, such a desire to come, that she’d hurt him more than she meant to.

      I was gripping the book in my left hand, rubbing harder with my right, trying to mirror the passion and the need of the woman in the book. I cared even less about the embarrassment of wanking than she cared about the pain of the guy sat beneath her. I rubbed myself, and I felt what she felt—her clit rubbing against something, her cunt getting wetter, and finally—just before I had to turn a page—that powerful gut-wrenching kick that marked the first rush of the first wave of the very first orgasm I’d ever had.

      A few years later, I found another book in my room: the Osborne Book of Teenaged Bodies. Nice try, Dad. Nice try.

      Having discovered the dirty book and spent a few happy weekends holed up in my room frigging myself cross-eyed, I eventually came to the realisation that wanking—contrary to almost everything I’d previously been led to believe—was not just for boys.

      The references to it were everywhere: jokes about boys being boys, talk of crusty bedsheets, sniggers and whispers if a guy had his hands in his pockets for too long. Not just at school, either. TV programmes and teen flicks were filled with not-so-subtle nods to the fact that boys just couldn’t get enough orgasmic alone-time. I could understand why they liked it so much—given thirty minutes on my own, I’d be able to knock out five orgasms in quick succession and still have time to do my homework. What I couldn’t quite fathom, though, was why no one ever mentioned that girls did it too.

      No one ever made jokes about me if I spent too long in the bath. No one questioned my almost constantly jiggling knee—the friction felt pleasantly soothing on my clit, and was a nice way to get through IT lessons until it was time for a bathroom break. Most surprisingly, girls themselves didn’t even talk about it.

      I remember spending hours with girlfriends as a teenager dissecting whether this or that particular boy fancied so-and-so, exactly whose hand was where during the slow song at the school disco, or whether Ricky Martin would ever be likely to shimmy his oh-so-hot and definitely-not-gay-just-flamboyant ass over to the UK to do bad, bad things to my best friend.

      But never once did we talk about wanking.

      We must have all been doing it, and none of us were particularly squeamish. There was just a feeling that no one should ever say. That we’d be breaking some sort of unwritten rule if we owned up. We were demure, delicate creatures. Creatures who were waiting to be defiled behind the bike sheds and wanted to maintain some semblance of innocence so that we could put on a shocked face when boys tried to touch our tits.

      We could be in love, we could have crushes, and we could be curious. But we couldn’t actually have desires, for God’s sake. That would be cheating. A whispered discussion about what cocks were like was all well and good, but the powerful, wet, angry lust that we actually felt was a bit freakish, a bit wrong. No one ever had to tell us this, we just knew. We were allowed to have giggles and sleepovers and secret codewords and whispered gossip and posters of be-coiffed boyband members. But wanking? Wanking was for boys.

      I’d like to say that things have changed now that I’m a grown-up. We live in a more liberated time, when we can wander into a bookshop and buy filth like … well … like this. Or read magazines that give sex tips alongside fashion advice. Or give a friend a dildo as a ‘sorry you got heartlessly dumped’ present. But I don’t think we’re really much further along the track.

      Dildos and rabbit vibrators have made girl-wanking OK, but only in quite a specific sense. Women are allowed to experiment with wanking because now there’s a way to market it. You can have a vibrator or two, you can joke about having some ‘alone