Masturbation lessons

I don’t have kids and do not plan to, so the is admittedly not something I spend a lot of time thinking about. Last month, however, when Brian Gresko penned an essay for about teaching his pre-teen son to masturbate, it struck me as odd that I’d never even heard of or considered such a thing. I obviously didn’t receive any such lessons from my own parents, who could barely muster a sex talk that focused primarily on abstinence, nor would I have expected one. To this day, while I’ve identified many ways in which I wish my parents had been more sex-positive, I can’t say for sure that I would’ve even wanted a masturbation talk from mom and dad. But, of course, that’s probably just whatever lingering shame I myself have internalized about masturbation talking.