I was a pretentious and perverted child from an early age. I enjoyed reading witty British novels meant for people much older than me, played games with my Barbies like "Salem Witch Trials", and running my hands up my sides until I got that shiver up my spine. I thought that's what an orgasm was, and I liked it, so I spent a lot of time in my room lightly tracing my fingertips up the sides of my torso. It didn't take long for me to begin repurposing art supplies in my erotic explorations - the Squiggle Wiggle Writer was a particularly interesting sensation.

I was already fantasizing about kinky scenarios, though I didn't know that's what they were called. Lacking other children to play with, my imagination ran wild with dangerously sexy situations. Of course, lacking any real context, the way these desires manifested were somewhat odd. My first fantasy I can recall is imagining myself strapped to an exam table while Shredder from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles traces his blades over my flesh and interrogates me. I resist, of course, and he gets rougher and rougher until he just takes pity on me, washes away the blood and tears and caressing the marks he's made. To aid in these daydreams I would use my blankie to tie my hands together, or to gag myself while I moaned. I'd pretend I was a pony, a pet loved by my owner, my hair brushed and adventures embarked upon.

I think it's important to state here that I hadn't seen any pornography. I had no idea what that was. Internet porn wasn't accessible to me. All I knew was that there were situations I saw on cartoons and TV shows that excited me and made me want to touch myself in ways I didn't really understand more than "this makes me feel good". My first "adult" material was Nancy Friday's "Women on Top", Alex Comfort's "The Joy of Sex" and some particular passages of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" (the original version was pretty kinky!). Bodice rippers ignited the flame further, and I became hungry for any depiction of sex that I could find. My first video porn? Annie Sprinkle's "Sluts and Goddesses".

I began masturbating furiously. I learned that my clit was too sensitive to enjoy being touched (later a piercing would change that), that clothes pegs on my nipples felt strangely nice, and that when I lay on my stomach and thrust a Crayola marker into my cunt the cap would undo, just slightly, and then pinch my inner labia in a way that hurt unless... unless I was close to orgasm, which I discovered while doing this, an explosion of pleasure and pain mixed together. I was maybe 11 at the time.

When I did my survey about kids and porn, I realized that while we culturally worry endlessly about the "pornification of culture" kids have a natural curiosity about sex, pleasure, and their bodies. They'll create fantasies, they'll masturbate, they'll seek out sexual material in the form of erotica or porn magazines or free websites. I think that curiosity is natural, and I think that without harmful power dynamics coming into play from older people, it can be really healthy. I'm glad I was encouraged to read about puberty, that my parents gave me a first book about sex that included masturbation. I didn't grow up with it as this secret forbidden thing, and therefore didn't feel the need to explore it until I was really ready. Everything I devoured relating to sex was contextualized by the frank discussions with my parents and the books about teenagers going through puberty, it wasn't in some black hole of my understanding.

I think that trying to deny kids their sexuality or stifle it is more likely to cause them to struggle with their fantasies. They're more likely to get warped ideas from the depictions of sex they come across, because they won't really know how varied sex can be, or that people get pleasure from lots of different activities. In the survey there were people who learned from the porn they found, and some of them learned positive messages, other learned fear and dread. One of the things I noticed that made the difference was how their families treated discussions of sexuality with their children. The other thing was wondering on first contact whether the people in porn were enjoying themselves, if they felt comfortable. It makes me wonder, if I'm honest, how terrible porn is for kids to discover. Are the lessons they teach any worse than Disney Princess stories? Are they worse than what we learn from video games? I think sex and violence are the least of our concerns - the lessons about codependency, success at any cost to others, and gendered role restrictions seem to me to be more pervasive and certainly more subtle.

I wouldn't say that the TMNT have responsibility for my inevitable kinkiness. But I also don't think the desires they inspired messed me up. Unlearning the idea that loving someone hard enough would change them, though... that one hurt me far, far worse.