I had similar thoughts on this very topic when I was around 17 years old, I think, and still a virgin. I was thinking that maybe watching all this porn made me into a pervert, who is never going to have a fulfilling love life. I even tried not to masturbate for an extended period of time (I don't think this was all that healthy) just like the author. I watched tons of porn; it wasn't a hot topic for discussion in my peer group, but I knew that almost everyone watched it too. And when I say "tons" I mean it - I remember entire days filled with porn and almost nothing else. Oh, how ashamed I should be!

Or not.

Because here I am, more than a decade later, in a happy relationship with a woman for almost ten years, having done things the author would almost certainly classify as "things that [he] wouldn’t have dreamed of doing" and guess what? Those things, beside feeling really good (well, most of the time...) helped me understand myself and my partner much better than before. I'd argue that 'those things' are in part why we are happy together for this long and probably will be for many, many years to come. And I wouldn't even know about "those things" were it not for porn; maybe I'd try to reinvent them, but we all know how much better it is to use available library than to write your own from scratch. And it's safer, too.

I'm a pervert. Oh, how perverted I am (and how ashamed I should be!). I won't bore (or excite, depends on an age I suppose) you with details, suffice it to say that my partner and I both carry a triskelion. I must be a double pervert, because I feel not a bit of shame, nor guilt.

The thing with porn is that it gives you many paths to choose from. Half of these paths are artificial and not fulfilling at all, half of them, while genuine and based on very real human traits, are strictly forbidden by cultural norms. The problem with the second half is that almost everyone, given a freedom of choice, would subscribe to one of those paths (fetishes, styles of making love) but almost no one is granted such freedom: especially when we're young and sensitive about "what others think".

The author is worrying about what exactly? That classical, missionary style sex does not turn him on? Neither does it turn me on. And it's somehow a bad thing? Well, it is not - it just means that missionary style is not his fetish (nor mine). I would advice him to stop bothering innocent women, go back to porn and stare at it hard, long enough to understand what his fetish is - and then find a partner who shares the same fetish. It's really that simple. Just not easy at all.

Or he can pretend that he's normal, whatever this means, live a life of frustration and spend a small fortune on psychologists.

While it's obvious that porn is not about love, it is, by definition, about sex which is one of the things that love consists of. Watching porn as a teenager helps in determining an answer to a very important question, namely: "how do you want to f^&k in the future?" - which, in turn, is a part of an answer to a bigger, more important question: "how do you want to love in the future?" It's really not obvious at all that you have to love a person of another gender and it's not at all necessary to have sex with your loved one in a missionary style position. I wish more people realized this.