There’s a lot of talk about shame connected with the art and the act of masturbation; sometimes it’s overt, immediate and very hard to deal with because it comes from outside yourself, but sometimes you don’t understand the effects until you look back on it from a position of much greater experience, when you’re able to recognize your own participation. When I was a kid, I didn’t have any sense of shame regarding self-pleasure; my parents weren’t especially religious, and in spite of being raised in an at least nominally Catholic environment, I didn’t hear anything much about it. On the few occasions I attended confession, it didn’t even occur to me to mention how much I enjoyed my time in the bathroom with mom’s hand soap. Masturbation was a secret thing, but not because it was shameful or embarrassing – more because it was a body function, private like the rest of them. I had, as I think everyone has, a couple of instances of getting walked in on by family members, but it was the same reaction, for me anyway, as I would have had if the bathroom door had opened while I was on the toilet.

It took accession to adulthood for me to find out what it meant to be embarrassed about masturbating, and it arrived in a most unexpected way.

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