Of course, it's practically de riguer for autobiographies including a chunk of adolescent boyhood to talk about masturbation. This is usually accompanied by inappropriately earthy accounts of place, frequency, method, lust object and guilt. I say, "inappropriately". That's a personal judgement. My experience wasn't particularly earthy, nor connected to depersonalized lust, and I just wonder how unusual that is. My fantasies were deeply romantic, in all the ways that an adolescent boy would die rather than admit. In this, hormones played a kind of painfully intensifying role, rather than releasing a surge of sexual urgency.

My romantic fantasies, circa 1971, involved companionship, affection, fun, and holding hands with a girl I liked, who liked me. This strand of my psychological life remained separate, at least at a conscious level, from the physical experiences and experiments of puberty right through my teens. When I fell in love with one (usually unreachable) girl after another, the motivation and the end were social rather than sexual. Of course, the hand holding of my early fantasies developed, in actual relationships, into more - into as much as I could make happen, I suppose. So my hormones were firing. But I never imagined my girlfriend, or the unattainable object of my desires, having sex with me as a spur to masturbation. And it wasn't as if I still didn't know how the physical connected with the emotional. I think I was repulsed by the idea of a sexual fantasy starring someone I wanted to love, and didn't want to imagine sex with someone I didn't care for.

How long did this last? Well, when the two strands began to touch I really was in love, and the fantasies were being shared. But the other way they could (and eventually did) touch is when the desired person gets objectified in the imagination into a sexual stimulus. This is what pornography is about.

What puzzles me is accounts of adolescent boys masturbating to Penthouse. I can understand that experience leads to the fusion of the physical and the emotional - that with sexual adventure, ectasy and frustration, the physical stimulation comes to rely on the erotic context, and that in fantasy, personalities are sometimes dehumanized to provide that context. Porn has the same effect on my libido as on other guys. But is it normal for males to start their sexual lives that way? Did I just have a sheltered upbringing, and hold religious views that repressed my natural sexual urges into sanitized relationship-oriented desires? Or is this progression, from the physical-stimulus strand and the desire-for-loving-relationship strand, into a single love-and-sex strand, something that is repeated between and within lives, perhaps at different rates?

With the turn of my inner life towards love, my pre-teen fantasies fell away, but the acute sensitivity remained, and where I was previously afraid of criticism, now I was afraid of rejection. So it was that to act on my desires meant leaping over a wall of self-doubt and shyness. Usually the wall was too high, and my infatuations were imprisoned. This, I think, is a fairly common teenage experience.