My Climax Story
Image: Pixabay
At the age of 25, I made myself cum for the first time.
A recent break up saw me channeling my inner Bridget Jones: eating copious amounts of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream (karamel sutra flavour, obviously), happy hour drinking with the girls and then crawling home to my bed and crying myself to sleep. However, there was something missing in my post break-up regime. I was sexually frustrated. Yes, I could have easily jumped on an app and found a hook up like many other single millennials. But the bitter and messy break up left me feeling insecure and my walls were up higher than ever before. Subsequently, I was going through my ‘men are trash’ phase and the thought of being intimate with a man made my skin crawl.
“At the age of 25, I made myself cum for the first time.”
That’s when it sunk in: I finally had to put some work into my own orgasms.
My earliest recollections of masturbation were in my teens and are often tainted with guilt and shame. Like many South Asian teenagers, my parents didn’t give me ‘the talk’. Any opportunity of sex education through popular culture in my house was robbed by my Amma awkwardly fumbling to change the channel when a sex scene graced our screens. And the school’s sex ed wasn’t any better and in most cases, male-centric with female pleasure completely out of the picture. Yet another way the patriarchy was causing havoc in my life.
Image: Pixabay
With the onset of puberty, my hormones were becoming increasingly uncontrollable. Something had to be done. Armed with the limited information I had on masturbation, I turned on incognito mode on the family laptop, loaded up Pornhub, and began to instinctively touch myself. I could feel my body let out a little sigh of relief, but it wasn’t long before my mind was overwhelmed with guilt, urging me to stop. I felt like a bad woman. I didn’t feel very lady-like. It felt impure. What initially felt great turned into feelings of shame, and the climax I longed for never came (between my legs) in my adolescence.
Fast forward to my twenties and the loss of my virginity, masturbation was put on the back burner. Guilty of being that one friend who was always in a relationship, my libido was always satisfied by my partners. When masturbation did come up in conversation with friends, I would lie in an attempt to not seem weird or look like a bad feminist. The only people I could talk to this about openly were my partners who were very supportive and encouraged me to order toys and explore my body on my own. But my attempts usually failed as one, I didn’t have the patience and two, the vibrators I used just weren’t right for me so the reliance on my partners for orgasms continued until singledom hit me in 2019.
After spending hours online on a rainy November evening, I found the one. How did I know? The glowing five-star reviews that praised the vibrator for its clitoral stimulation abilities. Thankfully, I have been in relationships with men with whom I had open, healthy conversations about sex, not only helping me overcome the years of guilt surrounding my own pleasure but also leading to the discovery that I climax through clitoral stimulation. With a tap of a few buttons, the order was placed and within two days, my brand-new toy had arrived. The time had come. Door locked, lights dimmed, candle lit and legs wide open. I was ready to go. What followed was 10 minutes of pure, intense pleasure and any feelings of guilt were replaced with joy. At 25, I finally had my climax, all by myself, for myself and on my own terms and it felt fucking great.
