I Started to Use Porn as a Tool to Test Myself

Being a healthy 30 year old guy, I thought that the answer to this question was pretty simple. I was originally going to say that I use it to come to climax, but there have been many times that I have been able to do that without the use of porn. As I thought about it some more, I thought that I use/view it in order to fantasize, which is half true. Initially, I would use magazines like Playboy, Hustler, Penthouse, or Glamour. I would imagine myself having sex with the women, as I'm sure most men do at these times. Being young at the time, I knew only the basic mechanics of sex, so it was never anything to adventurous. Then I began to imagine the females in my life were these women. Not in any kind of stalker way, but I would imagine their faces on these beautiful, naked women, posing erotically just for me. These fantasies then evolved into the women I knew personally, engaged in the mundane sex I was having with the women in the magazines (in my head, obviously).

Then I "graduated" to soft-core pornographic movies like the ones that are on most cable channels late at night. Something about actually seeing these women "in action" was like discovering Playboys all over again. It was exhilarating. Plus, I was able to expand my extremely limited, mental playbook as I thought about having sex with the women in the magazines and movies that I would never meet, and the women I was surrounded by, that I would probably never be able to "have" sexually. Still, these movies, despite their "insert tab a into slot b" narratives, never fully allowed me to realize what happens during sex (physically) between two people.

My brother was the one that actually introduced me to hard-core porn. This seemed like the holy grail to me. FINALLY, I saw, and heard, what was going on. This allowed me to open my mind to so many different things. Now the mental picture I had in my head wasn't missing anything. I actually began to tell myself erotic stories as I masturbated. It seems like that would be self defeating, since I knew what was going to happen, but it wasn't. Some of these stories involved me, others didn't. Some were about specific people, others were merely descriptions of people that never existed (as far as I know, anyway).

Eventually, I stopped "writing" these stories, and opted instead to just watch people have sex, instead of imagine it. At this point in my life, I was dating, and I discovered a whole new way to use this fantasy part of my brain. As I would watch a porno, I would imagine myself and my girlfriend doing the things on the screen. It doesn't sound like that much of a difference from before, but it kind of made the whole process easier. Instead of inventing the scenario, it was there. Instead of imagining the positions, they were there. All I had to do was substitute in my mind's eye who it was, doing it. It got to the point where I had to ask my girlfriend if she would watch it with me, which surprised me when she said yes. On these nights, we would try to match what the actors on the screen were doing, which I'm happy to admit I was able to do most of the time. Almost as if everything up to that point had been practice. We didn't use porn every time we had sex, but when we did, it made it much better for me because, now the mental images I had in my head, of all of the women I had ever pretended to have sex with over the years, could be taken from the pretending part of my mind, to the memory part.

Then I started to use porn as a tool to test myself. I didn't really know where I was going sexually. For a short period of time, I found myself focusing on the men in the images and movies, and thought that perhaps I was gay or bisexual. But I tried masturbating to homosexual pornography, and it just never really did anything for me. So although I knew my sexual appetites were more advanced than just switching positions, I didn't really know how to go about expanding my knowledge about my sexual self. As my "library" of porn grew, I started to discover that I was more turned on by some of the weirder aspects of the sexual fringe. Nothing too extreme though. For instance, I knew for a fact that I was not interested in anything that involved urine or feces, although I did try to watch 2 girls one cup, just to see the perversion in it. I didn't make it past the first 10 seconds.

This experimentation led me to a few interesting things. I never would have thought that anal sex would be something I would be interested in, and yet when I watched it on video, I had an almost immediate reaction to it. This was yet another activity that I asked my girlfriend to take part in (both watching and doing), and once again she said yes. As I said, I never would have imagined that it would be something I would do, and yet without seeing it, I never would have known I enjoyed it. With this particular experience, I was the one performing the act on her, it wouldn't be until years later that a different girlfriend would attempt a similar act on me. Once again, I never would have imagined it would be as enjoyable as it was. Another time, I found myself watching a lot of group scenes involving anywhere up to 15 people. Something about this seemed so enticing to me, and yet I never was able to bring myself to pursue it. I did find my self in a few situations involving myself, my girlfriend, and another friend (sometimes male, sometimes female). Another thing I learned from watching porn was that I was apparently into light S&M. I found myself asking to be bitten, scratched, slapped, and choked. At first I thought it was purely masochistic behavior, but when I was asked to reciprocate, I did happily. The reason I know my interest stops at light S&M was because I was asked to take part in a rape fantasy, and as my girlfriend and I were attempting it, I just found my self getting nauseas. The most recent discovery I have made about myself was an intense interest in lesbians having sex with each other using strap on dildos. Like a lot of men, I have always found multiple women having sex thrilling, but the addition of this particular sex toy sparked in me a behavior that I was concerned might become a full blown fetish. I was so taken with the thought of a woman with a penis that I watched a few shemale/hermaphrodite pornos and I am still currently on the fence. I do not enjoy watching men performing with shemale/hermaphrodite actresses, but I can enjoy watching a woman having sex with a shemale/hermaphrodite.

So, basically I would have to say that my reasons for watching pornography are the fantasy aspect, but at this point in my life, it is all in regard to my own sexual experiences. The other reason is to learn more about myself and where my sexual desires lay.

I Was Gonna Explode

I started consuming porn at a very young age. As a budding 10-12 year old boy, it was quite a surprise to find my dad's dirty mags under his nightstand. I didn't even know how to masturbate back then. It was through some friends at school and my brother that I found out what I was "supposed to do" with this pictures. There was no turning back then, I guess. I would scour the whole of my house looking for porn, and found it. The magazines were never in short supply, usually staying in their spot for a month or two before being replaced by new ones. There were also a couple of betamax tapes that I would be itching to watch when my parents were away. I gradually became picky and started to hone my preferences and my taste. When I turned 18 I couldn't wait to buy my very own porn. I remember buying my first magazine, in a comic book and used books store. I couldn't even look at the cashier (a woman), blushed like I was gonna explode and one of my legs started trembling uncontrollably. At this time I also had my first job, and it was in an office. The office had internet connection and I could be left alone for long stretches of time. You know what happened then. I would frantically try to watch as much as I could and often jacked off in the very office. By this time, finding porn had become an obsession, I needed to find as much and the best porn available. I had started a collection. I would cut up the magazines I bought and pasted the pictures that turned me on the most and made a scrapbook. I also kept the very best digital pics I found and load them up to a slideshow viewer, you know, for easier masturbation.

Now I must mention what my sexual and romantic life is like. In a word, nonexistant. As I am writing this I am 27 years old. Virgin, never had a girlfriend, have been on a total of two dates, never even been kissed. I absolutely love women, find them fascinating, intringuing and stimulating. Yet I am a complete failure in social skills. I am incredibly shy, have very few friends, spend most of my time alone and freeze to a standstill when someone tries to socialize with me. Is consuming porn the cause or a sympton of this problem? If I had a girlfriend and a healthy sex life, would I not need to watch porn anymore? I don't know, and it's these kind of questions that are always in the back of my mind. To be sure, porn has had it's benefits. Thru amassing and sorting the collection I've learned first hand lots of skills that are useful in my career, as I am a librarian. Simply by searching for porn I've become a better librarian and able to find stuff for my users in ways that otherwise I wouldn't consider. Porn has been a distraction and a company thru all the lonely nights. And it's also brought me an unxpected and pleasant connection.

About two years ago I started blogging my porn, just to see if there was anyone out there that liked what I liked. Imagine my surprise when not only did I find someone, but it was also a woman. A middle-aged mom in a completely different country and with a taste for porn, started to comment on what I posted and it slowly evolved into an online friendship. Then we started e-mailing and sending each other semi-nude photos. She is now one of my very best friends and we still connect thru porn. I send her pics that I come across which I think are stimulating or that I think she'll like and she answers me back with her thoughts and sometimes a question or two. My life is not fascinating or exciting, but it's also far from miserable. I walk thru the street and fell jealous of the couples I see kissing or holding hands. I want to experience that, but in the meantime I am happy with what I have and I enjoy porn as a means of entertainment and self-discovery. Am I addicted? Yes, probably. But I would rather say that I'm addicted to the world and to beauty. And while not all porn is beautiful (believe me, I know), sometimes a glimmer shines thru it and that is what I'm looking for.

I Was a Geek

While I shan't recollect the details of my life, lest the endeavor elicit boredom in the reader. Suffice it to say, I shall concisely establish the context upon which it began.

My life took an unorthodox divergence rather early; during the Late Formative Period when I had accrued a collection of ritual viewing habits on television concerning alien warriors of an anthropomorphic variety frequently engaging in bloodless warfare with a sorcerous mummy--a subject matter in no short supply in the mid-80s--on a near weekly basis. The accumulated programming appealed to a restless preternatural fascination with the exotic and fantastical which thrived in a decade known for its scientific trends, garish aesthetics, and outlandishly cool-but-inaccurate entertainments. It was this extensive collection of related media that later served as evidence necessary for my first moment of self-awareness.

I was a geek.

And I was rather proud of my deduction, as the means of entertainment, though expensive as they were--as well as unattainable to a young boy devoid of discretionary funding--carried with it a significant increasing awareness that there was a burgeoning community of others whose interest were congruent with mine. And in those wonderful years when the vigor of youth are a sufficient currency upon which to purchase fortune and fun--except for the .25 donations towards video game cabinets in exchange for their services--I thrived in a fashion that supplanted in dominance the position of my preternaturally previous obsession.

The life of a geek in those days was a lonely one. Humiliation was incessant...and every member of elite society had the right to inflict it. And the women of our age found in us, not a single, desirable trait upon which to purchase anchorage for their burgeoning libidos. While I was never subjected to sermons of the demonization of sex (any sermons for that matter, we were secular WASPS), I was never subjected to positive appraisals either; my home life was sexless, and to protect my lascivious sanity from the paranoid ramblings of my critical parents, I suppressed my inclinations until this very day.

A young man with high-functioning autism, who had not enjoyed the benefits of the crucial behavioral education therapy and mentoring that would follow in later decades, could hardly have found himself in worse circumstances: I was unpopular with the peerage, undesirable to contemporary females, and unable to indulge my growing, impulsive need to immerse myself into the reservoirs of sexually charged material...which had been unavailable in my house, due to the austere nature of my parents, since before the age of five, when the interest spontaneously presented itself.

I had resolved, shortly after the age of 12, to never pursue even the most fleeting semblance of a relationship, for such optimism was futile: my autism would yield nothing more than failed proposals and their inevitably recurring humiliations. But such resolutions, though they may be steadfastly held for a few days, are abandoned in a few moments of bleak despair. Unable to change the quality of my station, I decided that, should I become unable to ever acquire sex on my own, I would pursue the next best thing: MEDIA DISPLAYING the intimate activities of those who could. And having a keen curiosity, and a very honed familiarity with stealth, I was able to acquire the first magazines of my youth through the ancient art of "a guy who knows a guy." At the cost of $12, a $5 magazine had been procured, and I was free to indulge my obsession with the previously inaccessible female anatomy in a most entertaining way.

From there, it evolved to videos, which were harder to obtain given that one needed to be in close proximity with the display case in order to ascertain the merit of said product; the solution did not present itself until the legal age had arrived. My natural repugnance continued to remain unchanged through high school, and so I failed to acquire the vile, misogynistic competitiveness of my more successful peers; their aggressive natures, and ruthlessly competitive approaches only reinforced their jaded sexual appetites, making them prone to prefer spectacle in lieu of quality. I suspect this is the key component to the pathological demand for sexual acts of a continually fantastical--and often degrading--"extreme" genres in the field itself.

And so, with no experience in dating or relationships, and an obvious lack of profound good looks, I ventured into adulthood celibate and miserable. My accrued talents of humor, intelligence, and polite behavior failed to compensate for a lack of animal magnetism and thus I was ignored by even the most casual of encounters with the fairer sex. I did not have occasion to lose my virginity until I was 24, and did so with the aid of an adventurous girl younger than myself at a swinger's party...almost the only viable option for me even today. I soon began to take not just solace, but also happiness in my porn, for it represented to me, not the constant ineptitude and failing in my social life, but rather the convenience and variety not found in a normal relationship. And if the truth be told, the dangers of real sex were not to be found either: there is nary a man who, upon the instance of consuming porn, is assaulted by the unpleasant smells, fluids, and frightful diseases, which would surely follow an authentic sexual encounter.

Without a catalyst for escalation, my porn addiction of today has remained largely unchanged: I abhor violent and aggressive sexual scenes, as well as fake lesbian titles. My distaste for anal stems not from ignorance but an obsessive-compulsive fixation on hygiene. And though my sexual life is far from active, it is also far from dead, having occasion to procure a handful of single-encounter horizontal partners at various events where that manner of play is demand, and professors of that science always welcome.

I've come to accept pornography as my surrogate sexual lifestyle: devoid of complication, disease, and odoriferous unpleasantness, and heavily populated with a wide range of women to satisfy every craving, it is a hollow yet adequate solution to my otherwise celibate bachelor existence. And while I am still aware of the inherent pathetic quality of being a man alone at my age, I would much rather be the connoisseur of an under-appreciated form of entertainment continuing to transcend the aesthetic limits hitherto placed upon it by forces of official history than a harried everyman, harangued by the burdens of emotional turmoil, personality conflict, atrophying sexual energy, and ludicrously inexcusable asinine conversations and circular arguments.

Women do not find me attractive enough for anything other than a gilded chair in the Friend Zone. And it is a development about which I can do nothing. So rather than dwell and ferment in my own isolation, I can use porn to have the "good parts" of a relationship while evading the burdens of engaging in a relationship with someone that will inevitably, statistically fail.

In closing, there are those who would sarcastically chastise me with a familiar chestnut of "Yeah, sit and watch your porn so you don't have to go through the actual effort of meeting and getting to know somebody else in the world." To those people I would respond:

"Look at the world and tell me the pleasure of becoming acquainted with it."

It Was My Friend

I currently see myself as an attractive, mid-twenties young man, with a creative job i love with a steady and good income. I have my first novel under my belt, a reasonably individual dress sense, a good sense of humour and i'm pretty confident to boot. I've come to love women and the female sensibility very much, and enjoy going on regular dates and occasionally falling in and out of love, but i've not always been like this.

I was expelled from school at 14 for drug related reasons, and immediately became a very angry young man, i started writing ridiculously right wing manifestos and generally was full of hate and bile toward the world and the way it had treated me for experimenting with soft drugs. I became lonely and introverted and that's where my healthy / unhealthy relationship with porn came in.

I had recently acquired my first modem, 14.4k, and did not need anyone or anything else. My parents were technophobes at the time and didn't know how to operate the computer my dad had bought for word processing, and i basically went to town looking for and easily finding porn.

I delved deeper and deeper and as my connection got faster and faster i became more and more hooked, until i was only looking for the most perverse and often degrading forms of porn i could find. I came to rely on porn, it was my friend, it made me feel good through the actions of others. Although i was still socially quite active, my friends were racking up notches on their bed posts whilst i stood in the side lines getting drunk and never really meeting any girls. I had lost my virginity at 14, and although i did have a string of - very - short term relationships in the mean time, i didn't  have penetrative sex again until i was 21, and i largely put this down to a mix of confidence issues and the growing porn obsession. I feel, looking back on it, porn stopped me understanding what 'real sex' was like, and put the act in a very weird place in my mind, it made it something sex is most definitely not, and almost made me think that it was a terrible, degrading act.

Porn was my solace and nemesis at the same time. I loved it and if affected me from growing sexually. Today, i still revert back to my old friend and still have a large digital collection of all sorts dating back from over the years that i keep saying to myself 'i'll delete it soon' but never do. I came out of my 'porn shell' through the love of a good, sexually active and knowledgeable girlfriend, without which, i feel i'd still hold sex as a strange, difficult entity in my head. I'm so happy that i have come to understand and enjoy sex more than looking at porn, i thought for a long time that i might never get over it, and i feel for the men that never do - i'm sure they're out there.

although now i'm dating and it doesn't matter so much, i think i know and realise that when i do eventually meet a girl i would like to settle down with, my life partner, that they will have to appreciate the fact porn and i are in it for the duration, i don't think i could every fully give it up, it's just something i need every now and again off the back of my youth. I think convincing her that it means nothing other than a quick release, however, might be more difficult than i imagine. life takes funny turns.