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Guidance: This article contains adult themes.

I’m Hannah and I masturbate. You do, too, don’t you?

But women don’t talk about masturbation much, do they?

I’m 25 and I remember boys would talk about it openly in secondary school. But the girls? Absolutely no way. If we were ever asked by boys if we masturbated the 'right' answer (whether you actually did or not) was, “Eew, no, gross, of course not!”

If you were a boy, the 'right' answer was something along the lines of, “Yeah, every single day mate!”

These expectations - that women aren’t sexual, while men are overtly so - are harmful: to girls who masturbate and are made to feel ashamed of it, to boys who aren’t your stereotypical macho male and want to keep their sex lives private.

I was the kind of teenager that internalised all of this. I assumed that none of my female friends were masturbating, and so I didn’t masturbate either. I thought it was gross, I thought my genitals were gross.

I just want to go back in time and shake adolescent Hannah and tell her to go to her room and touch herself! But she would have to wait years for that.

I didn’t do it at all until I was 20, and that’s when I had my first orgasm. Thank the heavens and the stars for my clitoris and the way it makes me feel.

Speaking of the clitoris, I didn’t actually know that existed as a teenager. I thought female masturbation was putting your fingers inside yourself – because all anyone ever talked about was fingering.

Again, I wish I could tell teenage Hannah to tell those boys to stop and show them what to do instead.

Why aren’t we taught these really basic things about our bodies and about pleasure? My sex ed was pretty much just putting condoms on test tubes. Yes, we were shown line drawings of a penis and a vagina. But what about the clitoris? Why do so many people grow up not knowing the different parts of the vulva?

With porn standing in for sex ed (at least everyone I know), perhaps we need to counter this by showing young people that pleasure comes in many forms. And so do bodies. Young people need to know their genitals aren’t weird just because they don’t look like the penises and vulvas they might see in mainstream porn.

As it stands, people are growing up with all sorts of feelings of shame, embarrassment, confusion and regret when it comes to sex.

Since being open about masturbation with friends I’ve learnt that loads of them never masturbated in their teens, just like me. Sometimes, when I discovered this, I’d get out a diagram of the vulva and explain everything. (University was a wild time.)

Many others were doing it from a young age – but they’d never talked about it, and many of them thought it was wrong. They felt guilty and disgusted with themselves. How can this be right?

When I was 15, my mum said to me, “Hannah, you masturbate right? You should masturbate, it’s a great way to get to know your own body before you have sex with someone.” My response: “EW MUM GROSS STOP TALKING TO ME ABOUT SEX.” But at least she tried, bless her.

The silence surrounding female masturbation is almost total.

It’s part of the damaging myth that women aren't sexual beings - that, in heterosexual relationships, men should be actively, even aggressively sexual, and a woman’s role is merely to respond to the man’s advances.

If a woman has her own private sex life - in which she always takes the initiative and it is always, exclusively about her own pleasure - it directly contradicts that idea.

Well, I call bullshit. Women are sexual. Women are just as sexual as men. In fact, women are so sexual that sometimes we like to have sex with ourselves! Alone! With no one else!

It took me years to get to the place I am now: comfortable with my body, able to give myself pleasure, confident communicating what I want with partners.

Everyone’s sexuality and sexual response is different, and I believe that masturbation is the best way to get to know the kinds of touches that you like, the kind of porn you enjoy and the sexual fantasies you’re into.

I'm an ambassador for the sexual health charity Brook, and they have amazing online resources and do great work in schools covering things like porn and masturbation. This is the kind of thing that should be included in sex ed classes.

Masturbation empowers you in your sex life - to be able to tell or show your partners how you like it.

Plus, it feels good. No one knows your body like you do. Even the most intuitive lover in the world can’t get it as exactly right as you can on your own.

And there are loads of health benefits: .

And, last but not least, it’s a lot cheaper than yoga.