We live in a culture that has cognitive dissidence about nudity and sex- we see female nudity on television objectified in multiple capacities (from the shaming of fat bodies to the lust for tits and ass), are allowed to see graphic rape but not graphic pleasure in a blockbuster film, are only allowed to see penises when flaccid and not in a sexual context.

There's a lot of fear that the internet has increased exposure to pornographic material, but these stories make me wonder- when there's a will, after all, there's a way, and kids have been curious about sexuality all along. So much writing on the subject is either "all porn is good" or "all porn is bad", or seeks to make seemingly arbitrary boundaries between what's ok and what isn't.

Is  "porn culture" a thing we need to worry about? And is it new, caused by internet porn, or has the internet killed porn? Can porn be a positive force? Does porn make men objectify women (and does it make women objectify porn performers by suggesting they're different from normal women)... and does it do it more than mainstream media? Does banning "violent" porn help? What constitutes violent porn? Or is all porn inherently violent? How can we ensure the performers have safety (both on and off set)? Can you be addicted to porn, or is porn not addictive? Who's watching all this porn, anyway? Men? Women? Children?

And, mainly, why has it taken so long for a porn studies journal addressing topics like these to be created?

I'll be writing a separate article about this topic, but I wanted to create a space to host people's full stories of their first experiences with porn and their experiences now for reference. I think it's important for people to have space to talk about these topics, without feeling shamed for their positive experiences or silenced for their negative ones.  

"I can remember three main avenues to finding porn in my pre/early teens: Friends who had cable TV (and parents who didn't realize what we could figure out to get around the scrambling), trading of various magazines (Club, Playboy, Penthouse, Hustlers) with kids in boy scouts, around the school, etc, and finally the early days of the internet. I think the first actual porn I saw was watching a playboy VHS during a sleepover at a friend's home at age ten or so. I also made a fairly early discovery that if I switched one of the TVs in our house to the porn channels, it "unscrambled" for 30 seconds to a minute at a time, and still gave clear audio even during the scrambling of the video, so I was sneaking down to watch that in the very early mornings or very late nights pretty often. Mostly it gave me a much better idea of how sex worked and what it looked like than school, very weak talks with my parents, or things like TV and "mainstream" films. (My dad was a huge James Bond nut. I think I saw Sean Connery seducing / coercing women into bed before I was going to kindergarden.)

It certainly got me started on masturbating pretty early. (and often!) and started giving me ideas of what I liked / wanted. I really vividly remember actresses or models that caught my early attention. There was an ad for the porn channel on the back of a cable guide that featured a head / shoulders shot of a redheaded woman throwing back her head in what was probably supposed to be an orgasm that I cut out and kept for a couple of months, at least, to look at. I learned a lot more about what women enjoying sex (or at least pretending to enjoy sex) sounded like, and tended to listen for that. If I was trying to find something covertly and heard a guy making a lot of noise and the woman being silent, it turned me off. (I still get anxious if I'm with a partner who is very quiet. I tend to start asking if they're enjoying things and asking for guidance from them because I'm afraid I'm doing something wrong.)

At this point, I think my porn consumption is actually relatively low? Over the last few years (I'm in my early 30s now) I've tended to gravitate towards queer porn / independently made porn when I do consume it, and it's very important to see that the performers are actually enjoying themselves. I'll watch things I like when I'm in the mood, and sometimes with my partner as a prelude to / accompaniment with sex. (I've even had a couple of times where she was asleep and I decided to watch something quietly because I was horny and didn't want to wake her up, and it ended up getting her up on multiple levels...*cough*.) I follow particular performers and directors that I like, and I tend to stick to their work, but if I see something on tumblr / reddit / whatever that catches my eye, I'll go take a look.

TL, DR; It's a part of my adult sexuality, but only part, and after seeing a lot of the opposite as a kid, I tend to focus on porn where I can tell the performers care about what they're doing now that I have control over what I buy and watch." - Matt

***

"The porn that I came across gave me the idea that women were just objects in sex. with no say in how things were to be done. Growing up in the midwest I wasn't exposed to anything and so it was up to me and some fearless googling to find porn. And what I discovered was usually hetero, male targeted porn involving lots of demeaning acts on women. or what I perceived to be. There were lots of cocks forced into mouths of women who appear to be in pain or crying. men dominating women. It just didn't seem like the women were having any fun.

When I started getting sexually active it was brought to my attention that I spent very little time handling a penis. And I realized that I was in a sense "afraid" of them, I wouldn't look at it, I wouldn't touch it, just have sex with it. It wasn't well into my late 20s when i did finally become comfortable around them. I didn't even give blow jobs up until then because visions of those women would pop back into my head.

That kind of porn gave me the idea that women couldn't be powerful in sexual situations. especially when giving head. that fucking fucked with my head considering I'm fairly alpha... so my relationship with sex got really rocky until I finally figured all this out (the exposure to bad porn thing). I didn't like feeling submissive so I never gave head for the longest time, because thats what I associated it with.

Then I finally knew what to look for, and that's when sex got much more fun and penises finally handled. Haha!

But fuck, fuck that awful fucking porn." - Oz

***

Re my own experiences watching porn at 14/15/16 - I'm fairly certain I spent years trying to find sex in everything as a child, but it was a few years after we got the internet that it occurred to me that I could just look for porn there (when my parents where out the house). Spent the next few years enjoying amateur websites (the real stuff was either too crap and inauthentic, or cost money) before I started to prefer something a bit more polished (and where I knew the people in it were ok with videos of them having sex being on the internet!).

Impact-wise, I developed an understanding of the mechanics of sex that I was not getting anywhere else - what people looked like when they had sex, the things they could do, etc., as well as an appreciation for my own sexual tastes. I'm fairly certain that without it my early sexual experiences, which were in my late teens, would've been poorer. Now I enjoy porn from time to time as an addition to the rest of my sex life. I was fortunate to have no seriously bad experiences - a few 'ew' moments but nothing traumatising. I always knew I could click away if I wanted to." - Anonymous

***

"When did you get your hands on porn, what kind was it, and how did you get it? 

I grew up in Massachusetts, my time split between my grandparent's farm and Boston. I knew something about sex from a young age as a farm in it's very nature teaches about life and death and sex is a big part of that. In 1958 my mother and I moved into a small apartment on the top floor of a 5 story walk-up in Boston. Bored, I began to go through the other tenant's trash that they left outside their door every Thursday evening.  I was 8 years old.

On the floor below us lived a woman who was a nurse, or as I began to call her, The Sex Professor." She read and threw away a wide range of books from Shakespeare to The Kama Sutra, and all kinds of erotica and pornography in between. Mixed in with Giovanni's Room and an unexpurgated version of 1001 Nights were detective novels with explicit sex on every other page, magazines with girl on girl sex, very sloppy and inefficient rope bondage, and red bottoms from (pretend) spanking, and more novels with man to man sex. She liked almost everything.

Until she moved out 4 years later I read everything she threw away. Around the age of 9 I asked my mother what a few words meant from 1001 Nights. She defined the words, asked where I learned them, looked over the other books I'd rescued, and asked how much I understood them. This opened up discussions about the farm and animals, people and sexuality of all kinds, archaic and slang sexual language, and fact and fantasy. That was the end of it till about 3 year later. My sexual education was matter of fact; she too had been a nurse and in her 20s had lived in New York City in the late 1920s before the crash. In my family there has never been any shame regarding sex, a fact I deeply cherish.

When at 12 I broke my hymen in an accident on a boy's bicycle my grandmother said "Oh at least it won't hurt when you get married." I remember not saying a word and secretly smiling at her innocence, knowing I was going to have intercourse before I got married. it was 1962 and the sexual revolution was just beginning. I also began menstruating that year, and even though I was only 12, my mother began talking to me about pregnancy, birth control, and not allowing myself to be in challenging circumstances where I might be pressured to have sex. Teen pregnancies were common in the small farm town and she didn't want me to be uneducated.

What impact did it have then? What impact does it have now?

Due to my early wide and matter of fact sexual education not only was I able to correctly inform my friends who were confused in their very early teens, I was also able to set boundaries when pressured to have sex, and when I did decide to do so I was the one who choose time, place, and person. Through the years  sex life has been happy and fulfilling, as have my relationships including my primary one of 26 years which is stronger than ever.

What's your relationship to porn now?

I actually have rarely used porn as titillation. At 17 I began to be sexually active and found that while having intercourse and masturbating the sensations of the acts were more arousing to me than the images and ideas of other people.

I don't use porn as for me it takes away my focus on what I'm doing and who, if anyone, I'm with. I've nothing against it, have participated happily if a partner wishes to use it, and have found myself turned on. Yet the only "porn" I still seek are mid to late 1960s and early 1970s Frederick's catalogs. Those sexy drawings of beautiful women in girdles, high heels and lingerie will get every time!" - Sybil

***

"I was a boy of 12 when I first encountered pornography. I had a friend about my age and was hanging out his house as I frequently did, and he along with his brothers (one older, one younger) told me that they had something to show me that was "1% educational, 99% fun." They pulled out a videocassette from its hiding place in their dad's easy chair, popped it in, and we watched several of their favorite scenes, along with commentary from all of us.

I remember telling them as we shut off the tape that they had "lied to me -- that was 100% fun!" And I meant it. It was a pleasant and pleasurable experience! The older brother walked me back home, and along the way in conversation the topic of erections came up, and he described the process of masturbation -- without using the word itself, just a description of the mechanics -- as something he liked to do when that happened to him.

I know that over the next couple of years I ended up looking at various friends' magazine stashes, or attempting to use the dial-up connection on the family computer to look at porn online, though more often I sought out written smut (public libraries FTW!)

As far as impact then, it was a positive impact, though it clashed with the religious guilt and shame that told me I should hate myself for enjoying porn. Now I can look back and see that the sexually explicit materials I had access to in my early teens and onward was rather tame compared to my current tastes -- though I can certainly see that a few things have remained rather constant about my interests!

I regularly take in pornography now, and I have no shame about doing so. It's just another healthy part of daily life!" - S

***

"When did you get your hands on porn, what kind was it, and how did you get it?

I would watch porn when my parents weren't home on the computer. They weren't very computer savvy for a while. Although that changed when I one of my friends mom's showed them how to track my internet use, even after I cleared the history and tried to cover my tracks. That didn't really stop me though.

What impact did it have then? What impact does it have now?

I never saw very many fat people of color. I didn't realized it at first, but it really did have an impact on me. After I realized that I wasn't seeing very many fat people of color I wondered why this was. That experience directly influences my choice to do porn. I would like to see more fat people in porn. Especially in situations where we're not being fetishized. Just fat people being sexxxy and shown in porn the same way thin and regular sized people are shown.

What's your relationship to porn now?

I make it! YAY!" - Cinnamon Maxxine

***

"When did you get your hands on porn, what kind was it, and how did you get it?

I had several instances when I first saw porn.

One was at a girls overnight b-day party. We were supposed to be watching ET but instead put on some of their parents porn. I honestly do not remember the age (maybe 10?) or what it was like. There was too much giggling to really analyze my feelings/thoughts about it. I do remember it being very pink and slimy(?) but I was not offended or turned off by it.I think the porn ended right before the parents returned home. so we were lucky about that.

I found my step father's porn around the age of 12 or so. I was actually quite thrilled the first time I watched it and masturbated to the first trailer. It was really graphic and I could not even get through this trailer before I orgasmed. I panicked and rewound the tape back to the beginning and put it back. After that, any chance I was alone I went back to it many times. Once again, I rarely ever got to the actual movie (it was a teen camp in the woods setting, so very 70s or 80s) but enjoyed the hell out of masturbating to it.

The third was at my dad's house at a party we had while they were out of town. I must have been 14 or 15. It was actually more about amusement, because it was a vampire porn where the vampire never undressed (he just whipped it out any time there was sex).

What impact did it have then? What impact does it have now?

I think the impact was thrilling and I felt personally that because it felt good, that it was okay to enjoy it. I also felt a bit of shame or guilt, but mostly because I acquired the porn without permission and not because it was bad (my mom was usually pretty open about her sexuality and that sex was a good thing). The impact now is similar in that it is thrilling to know I got to witness and enjoy porn at a fairly young age but without so much shame. This carries into my thoughts about it today and that it is never a bad thing if the young person discovers the porn on their own. Purposefully showing porn to kids would not be okay, though.

What's your relationship to porn now?

I love porn and watch it when I am in the mood. I feel no shame or guilt. It is an easy way for me to get turned on and has been useful in settings with my partners as well. I have even made my own personal porn in a way and will go back to that occasionally, too." - Anonymous

***

"As a child I would snoop in my parents stuff when I could get away with it, and found rather easily the couple of sex toys that Mom had in her underwear drawer and that Dad had a stash of porn and random sexy board games and a rabbit fur glove in his bottom drawer....I never got up the guts to try and watch Dad's porn, just looked at the covers.  Also they had the 'Joy of Sex' books on the shelf in their room, which a friend and I snuck off the shelf one night she was sleeping over and spent several hours giggling at (while we were trying to smoke cinnamon sticks because her brother told her it would get her high, lol, those things are a bitch to keep lit)....Mom later told me that was quite deliberate that those books were easy to find, she was always very straight forward about that sort of thing.  I did however actually see video porn once when I was at another friend's house, in 6th grade, her parents were gone and she had found her Dad's porn so we got a tape and put it on....we watched for maybe 5 minutes, decided it was kinda gross and then tried to rewind it back to it's original spot :)

I don't think any of this affected me negatively at all, I think that it taught me that it was normal and not a bad thing to have porn around.  It was obviously not something that you were supposed to share your interest in with the world at large but it was fairly normal to be into visual sexy type stuff.  Having grown up and learned a lot about this sort of thing and been involved in the porn industry now, I realize that what I saw as a kid was probably terrible mainstream style stuff, but it did teach me that it wasn't the worst thing in the world and was something that most people were probably into in some way or another, even if they kept it in their underwear drawers.

I don't think it affected my fantasies at all though, because I was certainly thinking about how nice it would be if all the cute popular boys at school were lined up to kiss me long before I knew what a group scene was all about." - Lacey

***

"When did you get your hands on porn, what kind was it, and how did you get it?

I am 50. I discovered my parents porn stash while I was in Jr HS. They had several years' worth of Playboy & Penthouse. For 2 years they belonged to the Playboy clubs. That came with a subscription to another magazine. They also had Alex Comfort's book, "The Joy of Sex." The stuff was in the closet. So I read it several times a week.

What impact did it have then? What impact does it have now?

I liked to read. So I got introduced to a lot of good authors at a young age via Playboy. Penthouse introduced me to a lot of edgy / kinky porn. That opened my eyes to a lot of kinks at a young age. Many of them I still do now. The "Joy of Sex" taught me a lot of the fundamentals of sex & relationships.

What's your relationship to porn now?

I still read some magazines. Over the years I bought several subscriptions that cater to my kinks. Kept them and still look / read them. There are a few kink porn sites that I regularly follow. There are also a few select people that create porn that I regularly follow. Being a male sub, I have served several Fem Donnes. Some have taken pics of me and taped me. I look at those tapes / pics. I have also shared those pics on Tumblr & Flickr so others introduced in porn or the lifestyle can get turned on. " - Randy

***

"I distinctly remember buying my first porn magazines from a guy on the street, who had a variety of household and other objects strewn across a blanket and was selling them all.  I was twelve, and out of a sense of gender obligation I picked up Playgirl and Torso because both of them showed men’s bodies and I at the time understood myself as a little girl.  He sold them to me, bless his heart.

I took them home and read them over the next few weeks, showing them to my (mostly guy) friends.  Playgirl I found kind of bland, with it’s limp dicks and almost preppy looking boys.  But Torso was something else.  At the time I didn’t realize it was a gay man’s magazine; all I knew was the cocks were huge and erect, most of them oiled.  I stared at them.  I also read the stories, although I realized about halfway through that there were no ladies in them it didn’t turn me off.  In fact I found it fascinating.  But even after I understood the gender of the characters the mechanics of the sex still eluded me; I remember puzzling over a story about navy sailors…unable to understand what part of the body the euphemistic words “red, wet hole” could be referring to on a guy, or how someone could be fucking him there.

I also ordered the free, vibrating dildo; one of those plain, slick plastic ones that looks like nothing on the human body.  It was advertised in the back of the mag by Adam and Eve, and if you allowed them to send one of their free catalogs to your house they would also send you the dildo for free, discreetly wrapped in kraft paper.  I tried to use it a few times (I had already started masturbating around that age) but it was too big to fit inside me, and I didn’t know about lube then, or to put batteries on it and use it externally.  I kind of wish I had; I could have had a lot more fun a lot earlier if I’d known what a vibrator actually felt like on my body.  But the catalogs were awesome, and I loved looking at all the pictures and filthy descriptions with my friends.

As for impact; the items themselves mainly just confirmed and allowed a sexuality and sexual curiosity that was, for me, previously pretty lonely.  I felt like they were proof that other people thought about the things I did, and my friends reactions told me that it was just as fascinating to them as it was to me (well, maybe not AS fascinating, but close).  However the biggest impact came not from there but from what happened when Adam and Eve continued to send me catalogs that came unwrapped, and in my name.  My parents got ahold of one of them, and I still remember the shameful way my Dad read some of the raunchy descriptions aloud to me and asked what I could possibly be doing with something like this.  It was awful and frankly I’m still pissed off when I think about it, because I internalized the idea that I was doing something wrong by being sexual and curious.

I remember in his ranting that he latched on to one particular description of a butt plug; the anal intruder or something like that.  I am SURE this had an affect on my sexuality later on, like a double dose of the automatic programming we all get that says anal sex is shameful and dirty, tinged with homophobia.  My mom was mellower about it, but still made me throw the magazines out (I didn’t tell them about the dildo).

I do remember that this incident caused me to go underground with my early sexuality.  Later that year when I saw a picture of Madonna topless in a magazine and felt the first recognizable stirrings of queer lust, I was terrified.  I hid the picture inside a conch shell in my room, and contemplated asking my mom if I could go into therapy in order to eradicate these scary thoughts. I didn’t come out for another 4-5 years.

I also remember in my late teens and early 20s having a kind of subtle, persistent squick about M2M anal sex.  It mostly showed up in my feeling extra traumatized by watching simulated male rape in movies, in a way I wasn’t upset by scenes of women being raped; but it also emerged the first time I dated a boy who was bisexual and had bottomed to another man—I thought of myself as bi at the time and open minded, but I couldn’t really think about my partner being fucked in the ass without metaphorically covering my eyes.

Now I’ve worked through that stuff and I actually prefer anal sex, and I love watching gay porn.  But it makes me a little sad when I think about how that experience at 12 could have been the beginning of a vibrant, self actualized adolescent sexuality had it been handled better. " - Lauren

***

"I saw my first porn video when I was 19 years old. I stole a package that was left for my neighbor. It ended up being gay male porn. My male friend came over to sell me drugs & we did ecstasy & oxycontin & smoked weed & watched some lumberjack looking men from the 70's fuck each other on a table in a log cabin in the woods. The impact it had on me then was that it made me uncomfortable. I only watched porn a few times since then. Everytime it makes me uncomfortable & is not something I enjoy. I always feel like I'm doing something wrong & like the people in the porn are unhappy & being forced & that it's not something I should be watching. I feel like other people having sex is non of my business & I feel sad when I think of people having sex for money. I don't allow my husband to watch porn as I consider doing so would be cheating on me."  - M

***

"I was raised in a pretty sex-positive household. My parents made sure I understood the biology long before I hit puberty, and generally painted sex as something to be kept behind closed doors, but a wonderful thing nevertheless. I didn’t see hardcore porn until I was in my late teens, but by the age of 13 I had discovered my fetishes via barely family-friendly T&A material briefly touched on in evening network television shows.

I didn’t discover the porn magazines until I was fourteen or fifteen. I was in the upstairs attic trying to figure out what my parents had down with some of my Classic Star Trek Toys when I discovered the box of Penthouse, Playboy, and a couple of Hustlers. The erotic novelty of the photographed ladies wore off quickly - I could appreciate that they were attractive women, but they seemed impossibly remote and unreal. But it was the erotic fiction and sex tips that did me the favors later in life.

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 42^nd 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