This was thirty years ago, so the specifics are fuzzy. The most important thing I learned from those magazines was that paying attention to the lady’s pleasure in bed would pay major dividends. Not necessarily insisting that she come, even, because that doesn’t always happen; but a more general focus on making her feel good. Sensual touch, appreciation of her body and mind, attention to the things that push her mental buttons: the best way to have a lady wanting to drive you crazy is to make her highly motivated to keep you coming back. That may sound a little cynical, but I didn’t take it that way then or now, and the results of that strategy have been mind-blowing!
I learned a few other useful things. For example, sometimes it’s nice to play with a little pain during sex. Having a foreign object in your butt can feel a lot nicer than a 14-year-old might immediately think, for both boys and girls. Learning to use my tongue properly on a lady would take me far. Some people’s sex fantasies (such as some of mine, I later found) weren’t going to happen in real life without a lot of pre-arranged role play.
So that’s what I can pull out of that dim past. I can’t think of a single thing that came from those magazines that has harmed my sexuality, or given me unhealthy expectations; but I think it helped that my parents had already given me a skeptical, critical eye and taught me that other people were humans to be respected, not my playthings. (… again, I figured out later that was okay too if it had been agreed upon beforehand.)" - Shok
***
"My first experiences with pornography were all through the Internet; before then, I wouldn’t have even known where to look, or even really that it existed. But the arrival of the Internet into our home happened to coincide with the summer before junior high. I can’t recall if my mother had already started working at our family business before then (she raised me as a stay-at-home mom), but even if she had, the primary difference was that I now had the entire summer home alone (a novelty, as my elementary school had been year-round). And so, the boredom of endless days to fill by myself, plus the Internet and a lack of parental supervision (not to mention the porn filters that only really seemed to gain popularity/prominence later), basically set the stage.
I can distinctly remember the first pornographic image I saw online- a photoshopped (not that I knew that at the time) image of a breast-baring Gwen Stefani, who was my idol at the time. To my best recollection, I was less “ZOMG there is nakedness on the Internet!”, and more interested in making sure my collection of printed-out Gwen Stefani pictures was exhaustively comprehensive, which of course required looking up more naked pictures of Ms. Stefani. Or at least that must’ve been what I told myself- certainly curiosity played a part. And from the slippery slope of the celebrity nude came the actual porn.
I’ll stop here to say that I can’t remember very much of what I viewed as a young teenager, and while it’s possible that’s the result of the passage of time, I much more suspect that the trauma of later being found outsort of blocked it from my memory. I remember the circumstances- I would spend hours online, and soon figured out that I didn’t even have to use my hands to masturbate, but could simply rub myself back and forth on the computer chair (which eventually developed a clear and obvious stain, one that was later made more painfully obvious by the larger discoloration laid over it in my attempt to clean it off). My dad would sometimes come home in the middle of the day to grab something he needed, so I always had one ear out to hear for the sound of the garage door opening . . . even with the computer somewhat ensconced away in the den, the inability to simply close out the porn sites typically meant I needed to force the computer to shut down before anybody coming opened the door. What little I do recall seems like generic mid-90’s porn- mainly lots of site tours with strategically-placed stars. I can’t remember if I ever looked for specific content, but one detail has long stuck with me: I had no idea what the word “hardcore” meant, but I knew that when you typed it in, you got the sex stuff I was looking for. It just seemed so strange to me when I finally understood the actual meaning of the word, something I’d been using as a key to gain access for so long.
I had no clue at the time about how to be Internet-savvy, or that things like viruses existed, so I fell prey to a lot of old tricks. On one hand, it was great- I don’t think I had to do much searching; once “hardcore” brought me to a website, it was almost guaranteed I didn’t have to do anything more than let the pop-ups and other links take me on a journey. On the other hand, it was a nightmare- particularly because I didn’t know the rules governing shady pornsite tricks. There was no rhyme or reason to me why some websites would let me close them or go back to the previous pages while others didn’t respond to my frantically clicking the “X” or “back” button, or why porn would sometimes show up unbidden upon opening Internet Explorer. Like I said before, it usually meant cutting off these sessions short when someone came home unexpectedly, desperately clicking or sometimes shutting the computer off. Looking back on the experience, I am just so very curious about today’s young kids, ones with effective anti-virus/malware/spam software and a keen knowledge of how to navigate the web . . . if their Internet isn’t filtered or heavily supervised, what do their porn experiences look like? Mine was so very much about loss of control with the way porn just popped up and websites didn’t act right, compounded by the fact that I couldn’t very well ask anybody about it.
Who knows how long it took for my dad to find out (I can’t imagine long if he was at all smart), but one day, he took me aside in private and told me- not angrily or disappointed, but matter-of-factly- “I know you’ve been looking at nasty stuff online. You need to stop.” That’s the one thing I remember (and beginning a negative association with the word “nasty” for me that’s taken a long time to shrug off). I suppose it’s possible that he said other things, but I sincerely don’t believe he did (and if he did and I just don’t remember, suffice to say, it never gave me any positive feeling that what I had done was normal). I do know that I burst into tears, apologizing. I was also pretty unaware of browser histories, too, so I’m sure I was even more shocked that he knew.
After that, the biggest thing I remember is a reign of sheer terror. I wasn’t looking at porn any more, but I was petrified that my dad would tell my mom that I had. Looking back on it now, I’m split on whether he had actually told her or not (I could honestly see it going both ways, now), but as far as young me was concerned, she had no clue. And my fears really weren’t just imaginary- every once in a while he would make smirking comments or insinuations. At the dinner table, watching a TV show, suddenly my stomach would drop and I would become a ball of panic, desperately worried my mom would understand what he was insinuating, or ask a question and everything would come out. I still don’t know if that was innocuous or malevolent. It could very well be the case that my parents both knew and felt pretty at ease with the knowledge, joking about it slyly without ever realizing it was tearing me up inside. Or maybe he knew exactly what he was doing, trying to shame and torment me in a mean-spirited dad way (I do want to clarify that my father has never been abusive, neither physically nor verbally/emotionally). Whichever the case, I honestly do feel like I must have become more withdrawn. I remember distinctly lying on the floor one night with the news on, when they did a promo for some 60 Minutes-esque investigation about kids accessing pornography. I remember well being paralyzed, needing desperately to be so still, so unresponsive in my face that they wouldn’t even notice me there, that I couldn’t get up and leave lest it look suspicious. It wasn’t just something that on-the-nose, either. Anything sexual on TV (and we’re really just talking PG-13 here; basic cable with my parents) made me feel extremely uncomfortable if dad was around.
Fast-forward a bit (I honestly couldn’t tell you how long) and I stumbled upon what was eventually to become my salvation: my parents’ porn. It might have been accidental (putting away their laundry, perhaps) or deliberate snooping (I’d found- and tried on- my mother’s lingerie a while back), but smushed back in my dad’s chest of drawers were exactly two old (80’s-ish looking) Penthouse letters. Not to be outdone, I found two books in my mom’s closet- Nancy Friday’s “My Secret Garden” and “Forbidden Flowers”. (At least, I assumed ownership was divvied up this way, although who really knows for sure?). It was an amazing moment. First off, I had porn again! But more importantly, I had protection. Now, if my dad ever threatened to let my secret spill, I could toss it right back in his (and my mom’s) faces. They’d be hypocrites! How could it be wrong for me to do it if they did, too? I just remember such . . . relief. A small part of me probably felt reassured in my normalcy, too, but really, my reaction was just knowing that I didn’t have to be so fearful anymore.
The second best thing about my discovery was Nancy Friday. I haven’t read any of her other books or revisited those two since, and I imagine I’d probably find them problematic now, but at the time, they were amazing. I read them over and over again, spending the same long hours that had once been in front of the computer now in the bathtub, pages slightly wrinkling from repeated exposure to the steam. I can even still clearly recall some details, like the fantasy where a woman playfully swipes grey paint on a man’s balls. Who knows what would have happened if I’d only found the Penthouse magazines- they were basically a print version of the type of porn I’d seen online, with a bit more text. But the Nancy Friday books were something I’d never encountered before- a frank, honest, and analytical exploration of sex and sexuality, specifically from the viewpoint of women. (If you’re not familiar with them, both volumes were comprised of women’s sexual fantasies solicited by the author, and then analyzed and commented upon). It wasn’t that they were tame- not by any stretch of the imagination (I remember bestiality, abduction/rape, and incest)- but they were diverse and open and though I still got off on them, they weren’t quite erotica/porn. They were real women, sharing, and then the author, talking about those fantasies without judgment. Finding a book of tasteful erotica might have been nice, but reading what was basically a sexologist’s educational material about sexuality gave me a certain sense of power. I didn’t know it at the time, but I sincerely believe all the kernels of my best sexual self that would later blossom were planted here.
After that big turning point, nothing of much substance happened. I must have eventually started seeking out Internet pornography again on the new family computer, albeit with much less frequency, duration, and Internet insanity (I was starting to get the hang of navigating it successfully). At some point I was gifted my own laptop. Who knows how for sure, but somehow I encountered and found I really, really liked gay male porn. And when someone in the Bisexual.com forum where I had been hanging out gave a glowing review for a movie called The Crash Pad, I made my first actual porn purchase (can’t recall if I was still in high school or already in college and away from home at that point). That, as I’m sure you can figure out, started me on a whole path into queer/ethical/feminist pornography, the sex-positive movement, and my own identity, which I’ll always credit. Sex-negative/radical feminists can complain all they want about the problems with SEXY! feminism, but how long would it have taken me- the reading-Ayn-Rand-in-high-school girl raised by politically conservative parents- to come around without this amazing porn leading the way? I was struggling but still fairly hostile to a lot of basic liberal ideas in my first college sociology class . . . sex-positive porn snuck up on me, funny as it sounds.
Now, I like to think I have a pretty good relationship with porn; I consume it regularly, use it as an erotic outlet as well as a way to support those aforementioned queer/ethical/feminist and usually indie pornographers. I don’t feel any shame about it. But I do still wonder how many of my sexual interests may have been forged in my youthful porn-viewing days, particularly since I can remember so little of what I actually saw then. And I am still angry at my father (and my mother, too, if she knew), angry and sad that nobody thought or wanted to sit me down and talk to me at length about what was going on, why it was normal and that I wasn’t a bad person, and explain why I shouldn’t look at that sort of stuff any more. Later on when I was older, I’d learn that we basically fell out of contact with my dad’s sister over an alleged sexualized incident between my toddler brother and his cousin that ultimately resulted in my aunt’s insinuation of child abuse as evidenced by a demonstration of “learned behavior” (possibly CPS involvement? It’s still spoken about so evasively by my family). I do wonder if that might have had something to do with my dad’s reaction- something that traumatic only to be followed some years later by another child seemingly far too sexual, in a way that was frightening and made him want to keep at a distance? Or maybe he was just like so many other parents, and really shitty at or apathetic about competently discussing sexual issues with his kids.
So yeah, that’s basically it in a nutshell. On the surface, it sounds so boring- girl discovers Internet porn, dad finds out and says stop it, she does for a while, finds real (i.e. not “how babies are made”) sex education and gets on with her damn life. But of course, that hardly captures all the intense emotions I felt at the time." - Anonymous
***
"My first encounter with porn was discovering my father’s November 1975 Playboy stashed in a hamper where we get extra blankets and sheets. The magazine absolutely electrified me. Actually, it was more like a nuclear detonation behind my eyes that rocked every cell of my being—like being blasted off to and absorbed by some previously unimaginable nirvana.
And so it began.
My childhood was largely defined then by an obsession with stealing glimpses of porn—not difficult in New York City of the 1970s. I studied and memorized the names and images of newspaper ads for big-screen X-rated films. I’d endure endless shopping trips with my mother for the reward of a Mad magazine and, of equal importance, frantic visual consumption of skin mags—which then could feature nipples on the cover—exploding all over the newsstand. Trips to Times Square nearly made me pass out. And this was all before—way before—puberty.
As child porn became a very hot topic in the news, I actually fantasized about becoming a “child pornography star” by the third grade. I imagined I would be getting naked and having sex with really pretty eight-year-old girls in actual movie productions. This fantasy endured and got more elaborate until by around 12, I figured out that kid porn didn’t work that way.
One detour: the 1978 Hustler scratch-n-sniff issue turned up in the Our Lady Help of Christians schoolyard when I was ten (and a very bad student). The open vaginas shocked me, but I wanted more of them. I wanted more of everything naked and female. What severely jolted me in a different direction were the violent images in the cartoons and article illustrations. It made me think: “Couldn’t they use that space to show more naked ladies?” Also: I couldn’t IMAGINE what the scratch-n-sniff centerfold was supposed to smell like.
We got a VCR during my first year of high school in 1982. A purloined cassette of the XXX film “Little Girls Blue” hit me the way that first Playboy had. Shoplifting porn mags and knowing other teens at the video store who’d let me rent porno flicks kept me high on home video porn throughout adolescence. I got extremely obese and hopeless when it came to dating girls. Coincidence? I don’t know. I only lost my virginity, at 17, when a cheerleader said she’d have sex with me if I bought her boots like the ones Madonna wore in “Desperately Seeking Susan.” She got her boots. The following year, 1986, I lost more than a hundred pounds and went to college, but I remained terrified of females. Drinking booze, eventually, helped.
Throughout this all, and into my early 20s, I developed a philosophical stance on porn. Remember that at the time—from NOW’s anti-peepshow marches on 42nd Street in the 70s up to the Meese Commission in ’86—the political left and the political right were 100% EQUAL in their vehement opposition to pornography.
Punk rock overtook me early on, although not the lefty strain of it, but rather the decadent, nihilism of the Butthole Surfers and the Ramones’ anthem “I’m Against It” (“I don’t like Jesus freaks/I don’t like communists…”). So, to me, if porn was the ONE issue that could unite the two political poles against it, then it had to be THE TRUTH. Or, at the very least, My Truth. Because I was “against” everything (to a degree, I still am and I think that’s a healthy impulse).
At 23, I began publishing a sleaze-culture zine called HAPPYLAND that wallowed in and celebrated extreme sex, extreme music, extreme films, extreme art, and, in every extreme sense, porn, porn, and porn. HAPPYLAND enabled me to charge through the fourth wall that had always separated me from all those women and all those acts in the pages on the screen of XXX entertainment. I then wrote for and eventually got editing jobs Hustler and Screw and half-a-dozen other sex businesses, on up to Mr. Skin. As a result, I have been involved with sex workers, personally and romantically, ever since (although my wife, who I married when I was 42, has no skin biz connections… except me!).
No one ever sexually abused me, but I have always exhibited the “symptoms”. So the question stands: did porn corrupt me? Might I have gone another way had I not seen that Playboy at such a pivotal moment of my development? They are interesting and, of course, unanswerable queries. I also developed severe alcohol and narcotic addictions in my 20s from which I have been clean and sober for nearly 15 years (due to active, daily addressing of the situation). Porn, to which I was every bit as compulsively powerless over in times past, remains active for me. But, you know, I’ve long been cool with it.
The various strains of porn to which I have been most drawn were, first and foremost, depicted lesbian sex (and that's still what does it for me most). As a teen, I obsessed over facts and figures in magazines such as Adam Film World and Erotic X-Film Guide regarding the big screen porno movies of the 70s and 80s; it was an extension of my general cult/exploitation/B-movie passions.
"Girls Gone Wild" really blew my mind when I first discovered it because I want to live in a universe where I see EVERY WOMAN NAKED. And, on those tapes, that's what happened—you saw a female, you saw her bare body. The shortcoming, of course (beyond any ethical issues of drunkenness and naiveté), is that all the women were very mainstream types (although that, too, packed its appeal). The emergence of alt-porn in the 90s and Kink studios seem to develop right along with my own libido's appetite for "what comes next."
In terms of body types in porn, I am severely drawn to massively voluptuous fat women and (by contrast, I suppose) to skinny, flat-chested women (particularly redheads) who have long, thick nipples (my affectionate name for them: doorbells; Madison Young is a supreme purveyor of just such a pair). I also love extremely pale skin, but that sounds, uh, uncomfortably indicative of something it shouldn't (and doesn't) when you single it out. " - Mike
***
"So I started looking at porn right around the time I learned how to read. My brother is 12 years older than me and was about to graduate high school right as I started kindergarten. I was a snoopy and curious kid who never slept well and was always prowling around my house when everyone was at work or while folks were asleep and so i remember finding his porn stash when I was really little. I remember he had a lot of Hustler and a lot of Penthouse and he had these little "specialty" magazines- one of them I was particularly fond of was called "girls on girls" and another one that featured a lady named "Lotta Topp" I think and was just fascinated with her enormous clitoris, even though at that time I didn't really know what a clitoris was... I just remember being confused a bit but really excited about the fact that I had a hard time figuring out whether or not she was a girl or a boy, because she seemed to be a little bit of everything to my child-mind. At any rate, I figured out that the men in the family generally had a stash hidden somewhere, and that wasn't limited to my brother. My grandfathers, my dad even. Though when I got caught sitting in the bathroom with a copy of penthouse "hidden" in the phonebook and my hands down my panties, my mom flipped out and my dad got rid of all his porn and told my brother to do the same (he basically just moved his stash, which i eventually found again.)
My first visual flash of porn on video was when i walked in on my grandfather watching some video of 2 people fucking. All I remember was an extreme closeup of some intense PIV action going on and that the lady had this awesome hairy bush. I backed out of the room slowly and thought my grandfather hadn't noticed me come into the room. Found out later that he had. And he had talked to my OTHER grandfather (my mom's dad) about it. Both sides of the fam lived in the same neighborhood in E. TN, on the same hill in fact, and we lived in a trailer between their two houses, so I was always around them. The summer after I turned 7 was when my grandfather caught me going thru his porn stash (I mean it was pretty obvi, he kept it in the end table next to his recliner) and when he found me looking at it he did shit like ask me if I liked the pictures, if I wanted to do the stuff that was happening in the pictures... basically grooming me to be molested, which he did end up doing after a time, and while he was doing it he used the fact that he had caught me looking at his porn as a sort of "keep quiet" tool and as a justification for his actions- he'd say he "knew I wanted it" because I'd been looking at his magazines, that sort of stuff. The molestation part of things only went on for a few weeks because on the day he tried to make me give him a hand job something in me snapped and i started screaming and yelling at him and threatening to tell on him and all that kind of stuff. He laughed at me and told me no one would believe me but he did stop doing it. I think it surprised him that I protested or something. Anyway, after that I tried to tell my mom what had happened and she basically just hid it from my dad (my dad never found out about that, or that my grandfather had also molested other girls in the family, some of them for years) before he died. Anyway. At least my mom didn't ever let me stay unattended with my grandfather. I think she believed me but didn't really know what to do or how to handle the situation.
Anyway...
Looked at porn all the time as a teenager, mainly thru magazines, then got really into videoporn when I met my first long-term relationship, a guy, who was really into s & m and all kinds of kinky things. There were abuse issues in that relationship that I won't go into now but that's the relationship where I was introduced to Joe Christ, this indy film maker who also had a side business making fatgirl porn so i made some movies for him (4 of them, solo stuff.) I never got paid all I was owed and the guy died a few years ago (I slept with him too, it was kinda expected to be part of the filming if that makes sense.) Not to be a name dropper but thought it's an interesting tidbit/piece of trivia that Joe Christ was married to Nancy Collins, the person who wrote the novels that the Vampire the Masquerade characters are based on.
All that stuff happened in my early twenties.
Because of the above-mentioned abuse and other types of abuse, including emotional abuse and neglect by other family members, I've struggled with depression that I have always felt was really crazily tied to my sexuality. I have gone thru phases where I have been against the porn industry hardcore but I have realized that activism against that industry often becomes backlash and respectability policing of the folks who work in the industry and I think that is really fucked up. I kinda think of the porn industry like I think of, like, Wal-Mart. Huge businesses that exploit people for profit aren't ever cool. I believe in the power of sex and eroticism and porn, even, has revolutionary potential to me but I have only found very few superqueer superindy porn things that don't just carry so many of the same tropes into them that it's hard for me to watch just about any kind of porn. That said, and this is the thing that fucks hard with my mind, I note the physiological effects that watching so much pornography thru my life has had on my brain and my body... basically, I can be as dry as the Serengeti and having all kinds of sexual dysfunction but can go search "amateur lesbian" and watch a five minute mainstream regular porn video of some cunnilingus or whatever and boom. Waterworks. Orgasm in 2 seconds. It kind of disturbs me because it feels like I can't control that physical response. I want my sexuality to be my sexuality and sometimes it feels like I have let video images take over the part of my brain that is sexual.
I just came out of a relationship that was intensely mentally abusive and in that relationship there were a lot of sexual issues.... I was sexually assaulted during that relationship, repeatedly, and repeatedly compared to younger, thinner afab people and porn stars when it came to sex. When I entered the relationship i was in a very highly porn-critical phase that was sort of coming to an end- not that i'm still not critical of the sex industry, and I can talk more about that if you like. The approach I took in the relationship was that I just didn't want to watch porn because I didn't like how watching it made me feel. That would turn into very long discussions about why I didn't like it, which would then turn into my former partner getting angry with me for even talking about it and accusing me of trying to control her sexuality. I never did that, not once I just tried to have boundaries around my own experience of sex . So we would have these long arguments. It was really bad. I would never tell anyone whether or not to watch porn, it's never been something I thought was useful or effective to do even when I was at my most porn-critical. Now I think it's just kinda a thing, like fast food or what ever--- there are issues with the way the businesses are run but the most important thing is to understand the experience from the POV of people who are working inside it. I guess the one question that hasn't ever been satisfactorily answered to me, is one that Andrea Dworkin asked, and don't run away just yet... the question she asks is simply why there needs to be an endless supply of people available for men to fuck on command, why does that have to be assumed to be just "part of nature?" can we question that?
It makes me happy to see people out there producing queer porn that's fat friendly and all that stuff. I think that for me, there is so much standard porn imagery tied up in my own PTSD around being abused that it's really hard for me to deal with and at the same time sexually arousing to me to a degree that disturbs me. It's that automated response that really really bothers me and makes me feel like I have a chip in my head, like I've been programmed or something.
I read your posts about going to orgies, etc. and I so wish I could get to a place where I felt like I could do something like that. I have had my heart broken in so many ways over the past year that I really would like to find some nice sweet person to get under so i can get over some of the heartbreak and rejection I've been feeling but now I just can't. I have a friend who tells me that she is super attracted to me and I think she is super beautiful but every time she wants to be affectionate I absolutely freeze. I just want my sexuality to be mine again. I feel like too many of the wrong ones have barged in past my defenses and now I can never know if I can trust someone with whom I share my physical body, if that makes any sense. Meh. " - Anonymous
***
"I started seeing porn early on. I think I was four or five when I found my dad's playboy and hustler magazines and was caught looking at them under my covers. Then I think 11 or 12, I found my dads vhs porn collection. I would watch it everytime they were gone. And I would rewind the vhs back to where it was on timer. It made me very sexual at that age, I had sex with a boy in neighborhood at 12. But when I watched it I always wanted to be the girl in his str8 porn. And I also remember trying my step moms vibrator in my ass like I seen a girl do in one of his porn. But I don't think it made my life bad, it just made me accept sex and love sex. I have always been free when it has came to sex. I love sex and I love porn. Am I addicted to it? NO, but I have seen almost every kind of porn in my 33 years of life. I think it was educational to me as a teen. " -Michelle
So I just got an alarming and apologetic email from Patreon, which you can read below. Apparently PayPal threatened to freeze all creator pages unless adult content was blocked from using PayPal via Patreon.
Don’t get me wrong- I adore genderfuckery. I love men in skirts- a-lines tend to look nice, though I’m a sucker for petticoats- but I don’t see that as taking away from their masculinity in any way. And no, I don’t mean just kilts- and 
The cuffs are about 9 1/2" when closed all the way and are adjustable a couple of inches in either direction. There's a chain between them that's permanently attached on one side, and clips onto the other, allowing you to put them around a bedframe (if you're into that sort of thing) or just restrict your kitten's movement as they crawl and play with catnip toys.
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