No Birds, No Bees

My parents never talked to me about sex, in any traditional way. I only recall maybe 2 conversations that were related to the subject when I was young, and then one conversation when I was about 18, when they became aware that I was having sex.

Shortly after my sexual "awakening", I started to realize that I could control the good feeling, and make it happen. And I knew that I wanted to look at pictures of women smoking. Again, not sure why. But that's just where my mind went. And the way it manifested itself is that I would go through all of my mother's magazines: Better Homes and Gardens, Woman's Day, whatever the hell she had laying around. And I would tear out the pictures of cigarette advertisements that had attractive women in them. Because I was 11 or 12 years old, maybe 13 at the oldest, I wasn't particularly tactful, nor did I plan ahead for possible eventualities, such as discovery. I just tore out the ones I wanted, and I would look at them in bed in the dark, after I went to sleep. And I would rub against the bed, and I would have an orgasm. Then I would fold up whatever pictures I had taken, and I put them away. By "away", I mean, I threw them all on my bookcase, behind the row of books. To keep things interesting, I would reach, each day, randomly behind the books, and grab a couple, and those would be the pictures that I looked at. Of course I had favorites, but variety was an important factor.

This went on for a long time. I don't know how long. If it was months, or a couple of years. But it was quite some time. During this time, I remember three things that occurred. All of which made me feel embarrassed.

Embarrassing Thing #1: One day, my mother, out of the blue, decides to inform me that when my brother was young, he would arouse himself by sticking his penis between the mattress and boxspring and that it he would take care of himself that way. And she said that she would be making the bed and tucking in the sheets and discover a sticky mess. Now, I am not sure if she explained to me much, but I am fairly certain that the reason she said this was because either my sheets or my pajamas were starting to be stained from my nocturnal activities. But instead of being direct, she related this embarrassing story about my brother.

Embarassing Thing #2: One day, I reach behind my books on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, and the folded up photos are gone. Not one there. Of course, this makes sense. My mother was probably dusting the bookcase, and came across this pile of troubling material, and she discarded it. I can't even imagine the discussions she and my father had. I figured out that they must have been taken, but nothing was ever said about the pictures, by anyone.

Embarrassing Thing #3: One day, my mother, out of the blue, decides to inform me that my grandfather (my father's father) used to like to watch my grandmother (my father's mother) smoke, and that he would make her do it to turn him on. I just sat there, acting stupid and didn't say anything. To this day, I don't know if that story is true. I suspect it was not, and that my mother was trying to provoke a discussion around the fetish, which she had obviously figured out from the pictures she had found. But the problem with this was many-fold. First, I spent the next 15-20 years of my life thinking that my fetish was genetic. Second, it was an odd thing for my mom to do, implicating her in-laws in her scheme to try to get me to talk. I seriously doubt it was true. Maybe it was. Who knows. Maybe it was? Hm...

So that was probably all part of the beginning of the shame. Of course, the shame is not surprising in the least, since smoking is something that has become increasingly taboo. My father strongly disapproved of my mother's smoking. But he also was a supportive husband, and if she asked him to buy them for her at the store, he would comply because it wasn't loving to say "no, do it yourself". Given the lack of giving and communication that I observed between my mother and father, I have often wondered if that one act of selfless generosity, "I will buy you cigarettes even though I disapprove of your smoking", in some way contributed to my having a fetish in the first place.