My mum bought me my first vibrator and it’s the greatest thing she’s ever done for me

Proudly sitting in the middle of my shelves is a pink box with ‘Sweets and Treats’ printed on it. It’s not, as you might expect, a baking thing. But it’s title is kind of perfect. It’s full of lube, condoms and a vibrator. It’s pretty normal for a woman to have some sort of a sex box, but did your mum buy you yours? Because mine did.

I had gone through my teen years knowing much more about male masturbation than female. A guy just casually jerking off is seen as much more normal to society, while girls don’t really talk about what they do, not wanting to be seen as ‘dirty’. Let alone admit that they used an electric toothbrush on their clit once because it felt good (come on, you know you did it too). But this conspiracy of silence left me feeling it was something to be ashamed of; I was 18 and still hadn’t entered the masturbation game.

Being the perfectionist that I am, it just seemed another thing I could fail at, (because when am I not competitive?), so I just abstained. It’s my mum I have to thank for changing my views. A few months before I left for university, my mum told me she would be out the next evening getting her coil removed. Just like that, the floodgates opened. At the first sign of talking about anything vagina-related, all my questions about my body and masturbation just tumbled out. 

My mum’s solution? To buy me a vibrator. She said it would help me get to know my body and feel more comfortable with it. And now I think every mum should do this for their daughters. Her reaction made me finally see female bodies as the temples they really are, rather than something gross that shouldn’t be touched.

This meant when I arrived at university, with my sex box in tow, I was much more open about my body and all of that wonderful physical stuff. I had the confidence to make friends with the two most sexually experienced girls on my floor, even though I had no experience myself. The fact that we were so different made others question why we were friends, but the truth is, we shared the same views on being frank about sex and our bodies. I even made my friend brownies iced with phallic images when she realised her number of sexual partners had reached 20 because now my mum had encouraged me to celebrate my own sexuality, I want to celebrate everyone else’s (preferably with baked goods).

Though I later left university, deciding it wasn’t for me, I still carried my new positive view of being open and honest about all things bootylicious. I campaigned with the charity Brook to get sex and relationships education (SRE) made mandatory in schools. When working on the campaign for SRE, we found that although teachers and MPs thought parents didn’t want their kids to learn about all things sexy, actually 86 per cent of parents said they thought SRE should be compulsory.

But it’s not just in schools that we should be having more open and honest conversations, it’s with our parents too. One study found that more than half of 16-18 year olds who had had sex said they felt they would have been safer if their parents had given them more info. The truth is, who should kids be turning to for advice: the agony aunt column in a teen magazine or a woman who has had sex (whether you want to admit it or not) for decades now?

This doesn’t just mean having “the talk” that has been so parodied in films and TV shows now that it’s a joke in itself. It means creating a communicative space between a girl and the female role models in her life, whether that’s a parent, teacher or a friend. It means girls being shown that their bodies and the desires they have, including masturbation, are natural. My mum actively encouraged me to explore this, which then positively influenced the way I felt about my body.

It still shocks people when I tell them that my mum gave me a vibrator. Usually these are the same people who whisper ‘sex’ and hide tampons up their sleeves when they go to the toilet. And the only reason I was saved from being that person was because my mum had that first conversation with me, which then led to a million conversations since, covering everything from the best lube to use to buying pubic hair oil (seriously).

She was the one who taught me not to be ashamed of my body, and I even got a free vibrator out of it.