Bathtub Rash
Part of LiLu’s TMI Thursdays. Click for more awesomely bad posts.
I was eight years old when I discovered how “tingly” it felt to run my fingers around my little girl parts. I only ever did it over panties. But it felt good. And I’d rub furiously. Learning friction was fun. It felt like being tickled.
Mom caught me one day, under the blankets. A little mound of fast hands. She told me that was bad. And that I shouldn’t do it anymore. She might as well have told me it was the devil. I didn’t know what this was, or what I’d done, but I felt so ashamed. No one told me this was wrong.
Masturbation wasn’t something I learned about again until years later as a teenager. With the wonderful advent of the internet, I could search information that put my health class to shame. Internet forums. Detailed how-tos on blow jobs, masturbation, tips and techniques. Diagrams of the vulva. Learning what the clitoris was.
I had my fair share of seedy internet guy friends. The ones that would show me naked pictures of their fat, erect dicks against rulers. One dick, with a quarter on top to show the relationship of girth. If the quarter were a person, and his dick were a bed, it’d be a king sized one. That’s for sure. But, I didn’t care about braggy pictures. Not as a virgin, probably, not even now. As much as I like men who are “as big as my wrists”, guys who get all high and mighty about their big dicks really turn me off. Which is to say probably every guy “as big as my wrists”. If only dicks weren’t attached to egos, but that doesn’t stop me from liking them.
I had a Mormon friend who got asked once if she’d ever looked at her pussy. I mean really looked at it, in a mirror. Studied it. Enjoyed it. Some guy suggested she should, on the internet. Weird things can happen on the internet, and she was horrified. She’d never do such a thing!
Really, looking at your own pussy is a great learning process to self-exploration. And so, if she wouldn’t do it, I would! I didn’t tell her that, but I just grabbed a hand-held mirror one day and looked. That whole debacle inspired me, I guess. I turned the mirror round and round. Switching from normal view to magnified view and back again. I’d look at myself spread out on the floor, with a full length closet mirror in my parent’s room. Back against their bed, gazing, touching, feeling. I’d stare closely at my clit, rub it furiously then stare closely at it again. I read that they were supposed to enlarge after stimulation, and I wanted to see it happen.
Sixteen was when I learned about masturbation. When it clicked that this was the name for something I had discovered at age eight. When I’d read about orgasms and what they were and what they felt like. How you could tell when you were having one. These experiments were done home alone, of course. I think being sixteen was kind of a late bloomer, but I’m sure I made up for it.
The bathtub technique intrigued me. Everything I learned from Google. Because who knew you could orgasm from water pressure? Hot tubs. Showerheads. Unfortunately, they were not available, but the bathtub was. I masturbated every day that year. Sixteen was a good year. A very good year.
Each night, I’d take a shower and then finish off with the faucet running until the hot water got cold. I’d lie against my back, prop my hips up with the strength of my arms to hold it; like some crazy yoga move. I’d practice the art of orgasm. Moving myself in minor adjustments to hit the spot just right. Undulating my hips up and down until the feeling seemed unbearable and I’d invert my back to an arch with my head still against the mat; like a sardine version of the yoga fish posture. I learned about multiples in that bathtub.
Only thing was, as soon as I started this bathtub ritual, I began to get a rash on my back. Surely, it was no coincidence. The rash got so bad that my skin would start to flake and peel off. Little rash scabs. It covered my entire back. That didn’t stop me from my ritual, but eventually my parents noticed and I had to get it fixed. I never told them why the rash started. How do you approach a conversation like that? I would scrub and scrub and scrub the bathtub clean with soap, and mom’s bathroom cleaner, but still the rash did not stop. I felt so ashamed. Maybe I was being punished all over again, just like that night at age eight.
Eventually, the rash got better, and I weaned myself off of the bathtub; my favorite vice. I masturbated every night before I went to sleep. To help me sleep. The very first vibrator I used was an electric squiggly pen from my childhood days. I don’t masturbate daily now, but I do it a healthy amount. To this day, my back still has uneven skin tone and blotchy spots; barely noticeable now, but enough for me to nitpick. As embarrassing as it is, I have blotchy skin because of my sixteen year-old bath rubs.
