why my uncle should have cleared his browsing history
CW: This may be on a bit of the lewder, TMI side. I'll do my best to not be too explicit, but it'd gonna be inevitable with this type of subject. Just be prepared.
When I was about 8 or 9, I borrowed my uncle's laptop to watch some youtube videos while I played games. I went into the search bar, type "y-o-u", but the first result wasn't youtube. It was a completely different website (iykyk). I clicked on it because I had no clue what the word "porn" was. It was then I was exposed to hundreds of thumbnails, women and men in different positions and scenarios. If there was ever a moment to hear Jeff Steitzer say "Infected!", this was it.
This technically wasn't even my first exposure to pornography. I remember waking up at my aunt's house one day and the playboy channel was on and a video of two women having an all you can eat-out session was playing. I had fallen asleep in the living room and one of the other adults who lived in the house either threw it on as a sick prank, or to get their kicks next to a sleeping child... neither is good. I got yelled at by my aunt because well an 8 year old absolutely should NOT be viewing that, but I was confused as all hell because I hadn't thrown it on. When I was even younger, I found a stack of Playboy magazines and flipped through one of them. It was weird, but the images stuck with me.
So now, here I am some time after the playboy tv incident, and had just discovered "oh cool, I can watch this while playing on postopia.com". It was all downhill from there. It eventually became basically a daily occurrence, about a decade and a half.
In psychology, trauma is particularly impactful in younger children than in adults due to adolescent brains still developing. Meaning that when trauma hits a child, their brain will develop at a fundamentally different level than if the same trauma impacted an adult.
I think having ADHD made things a lot worse, we are already pre-disposed to addiction and desire for easy dopamine. Pornography became my go-to for easy dopamine. It was also made worse because access became easier and easier. It wasn't as bad when I was in my pre-teens because internet was dogshit slow back then, but come into my tweens-teens, when internet was getting a lot faster and thus made things worse. It got even WORSE when I started getting smart devices, now it was even more convenient.
It shouldn't be a hot take to say that children shouldn't be discovering what their kinks are. Or trying to figure out how to get oneself off. Children shouldn't be developing self-esteem issues about their genitals. Maybe had I not discovered porn until high school at least, things might have been different. Maybe I wouldn't have done all the stupid shit I did. Maybe I wouldn't have tried to use the size of my Johnson to try and get attention from strangers online, or exchanged nude photos thereafter.
I guess I'm glad I got into it in the time I was at, because if I was 8 years old in 2025 when I started, it would have been way worse. Porn now is enabled by AI to be even more personalized, with even less safeguards. Why bother getting consensual nude photos from your crush when you could just take a selfie of them off the internet and undress them with AI, age of consent be damned?
I eventually managed to eliminate my usage of pornography, it was a silent battle because I was ashamed of even speaking about it. I didn't want to make my wife feel insecure and it felt weird to talk to a therapist about it. It took a long time, and a lot of effort. I set hard boundaries with myself to avoid triggers, the biggest one being boredom. It also helps that I've taken the appeal out of pornography. The highly misogynistic, exploitative, and abusive nature of it killed the "fun".
Side tangent: Pornography and sex work as an industry is kinda evil. Not in the prudish, conservative sense. I mean the fact that the industry highly exploits young girls; they're often abused and manipulated. It's made worse because the industry and capitalism have done their best to reduce women to nothing more than sex objects. A lot of women go into it because they're desperate for financial security. I know a friend who started hers because she couldn't afford to pay rent. If you want to go into sex work, that's well and good if you're passionate about it. You shouldn't go into it because your alternative is homelessness, and there should ABSOLUTELY be safeguards to ensure hygiene and safety standards are in place.
Anyways, it took me a while because I was more in denial that I had a problem, I saw stories of men who would do it 2+ times per day, with multiple monitors full of pornographic content. So, I didn't feel like I had an issue because I wasn't like "one of them". I knew my trigger was that I was just bored, because if my day was spent doing stuff/hanging with friends/whatever, I didn't have that urge.
I got to quitting because I finally fully understood that it was taking away the enjoyment of sex. Afterall, when you are exposed to hyper-stimulating sexual content and masturbation is easy/convenient, it makes the enjoyment of sex a lot less enjoyable, almost trivializes it. It was made easy because now I don't have a smart device in my pocket at all times, what am I gonna do? Take a laptop into the bathroom with me? I guess that's not THAT much of a stretch, but I can only imagine that being a bit of a cumbersome juggling act.
I still feel bad for those men who are in WAY deeper than I was. Some just gave up and embraced it, with entire subreddits turning their relapse into some weird kink.
Maybe in a different time, things would have been different. I can at least ensure my children don't get entrapped like I did, and make sure they use the internet safely and with supervision. If I end up relapsing in the future, well at least I will have learned from my uncle to clear my fucking history.
Pirate is wearing all-black converse, green khakis, black American Idiot shirt, leather jacket
Pirate is feeling tired.
Pirate is listening to Revolver (album) by The Beatles.
Pirate is playing Oblivion Remastered.
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