Finding My First Orgasm by Hannah Whitton

Hannah Witton is an award-winning online creator and author who is regarded as one of the UK’s leading voices covering a range of topics including sex, relationships, feminism, body image, gender and sexuality.

The first time I ever touched myself ‘down there’ had nothing to do with my own pleasure or curiosity about my body for the sake of my own self-knowledge. Instead I was on a mission to discover what exactly it would feel like for someone else to ‘finger’ me. Mission report: squishy and wet.

As a teenager, I was more than happy to touch myself in the name of centring a teenage boy’s experience (what will it be like for him?) but the idea of touching myself for my own pleasure was a complete no-go. I’m not even entirely sure where I picked up the idea that a girl masturbating was gross and weird, it certainly wasn’t from my parents. I remember one day when I was about 14 years old and my mum just randomly said, ‘you’re masturbating right?’ and I was horrified and ran to my room with an ‘ew no!’ The openness at home was not enough to undo wherever I had learned that self-pleasure was not for me.

And it took years of undoing. In my late teens and early twenties I did, overall, have pleasurable sex. Not the best, not the worst. There was still a lot of insecurity, inability to communicate, fear of vulnerability that prevented the real good stuff from happening but sex felt good and I liked the people I was having sex with. But I wasn’t having any orgasms. I now know that there are plenty of people who can’t, won’t, don’t orgasm and sexual pleasure is so much broader than experiencing an orgasm, but at the time I believed that there was something wrong with me. I never faked it though, I was always honest to sexual partners that it was just something I couldn’t do. Looking back, I’ve no idea where that confidence to be so straightforward came from but I’m grateful for it. However, it did mean I got a lot of “I’ll be the one to make you cum”-energy from men which really wasn’t helpful as I just felt like it added more pressure and orgasms tend to shy away from pressure. They have performance anxiety.

Around the age of 19, I also discovered sex positivity and realised that my interest in sex went way beyond the bedroom but also into sex as a fascinating subject of study. I started to talk about sex online in YouTube videos, but I felt like a fraud because I hadn’t experienced an orgasm. So, I didn’t masturbate as a teenager because I thought it was wrong but now the wrong thing was that I was an adult, sex positive woman who didn’t masturbate. I just couldn’t win.

So I embarked on a new mission - I wanted to be the kind of woman who enjoyed masturbation and had orgasms by herself and with sexual partners. Spoiler alert: the mission was successful but I also want to take a moment to say that 1) if you don’t masturbate for whatever reason, 2) if you don’t have orgasms, 3) if you don’t have orgasms during partnered sex, that is completely normal and there is nothing wrong with you. There was nothing wrong with me back then either. Whilst we do still live in a very sex negative, erotophobic world there is a growing movement of sex positivity, which is great! But it can also make some of us feel inadequate for not being ‘sexual enough’ or ‘empowered enough’ but we are all enough. Whether you have tons of sex and orgasms or no sex and orgasms, what we should all be striving for is sexual authenticity.

I didn’t use language like ‘sexual authenticity’ when I was 20 but I like to think that’s what this mission was about. I was curious to see what kinds of self-touch felt good, what my body was capable of (and what it wasn’t), what sexual stimulus (AKA porn) I enjoyed, did I like sex toys? It was a time of sexual discovery. There certainly were some ‘a-ha’ moments but I would be painting a false picture if I wasn’t honest about the frustration, the disappointment and the low moments too. I learned that I liked watching group sex porn, but I also learned that furiously rubbing my clit and wishing for something to happen would only lead to anger at myself and a sore wrist.