You know what? Here goes.

I've watched porn off and on for years, maybe about 11 or 12 now? I'm 28 now.

Bear with me. This relates.

As a kid I grew up under the mistaken belief that I had HIV/AIDS. I'm not sure if this is a common thing for you folks, but for me — from the ages of 6 to 13 — I believed I had a highly stigmatized disease.

After "exploring the bodies" of two other young boys, their naked bodies and their penises, in a closet of my mother's bedroom, I left that situation without any meaning or capacity to understand. The strict immediate feeling I recall from that situation, which haunts me to this day, is that something quite trivial happened. I thought their penises were interesting, and as friends that they were interesting. I was not particularly attracted to them, as I was 6. In a very strong way, I thought of them as just like me, and the entire event was more exploratory than sexual.

I wasn't a very "street smart" kid, so to speak, but I could read at an 11th grade level in the 3rd grade. Letters and words simply made sense, and I could blaze through all sorts of sentences, sentences ranging from the domains of paleontology to technical manuals. I picked up a long list of dinosaur names and weird terms like "Automatic Torque Control System". My mother an overworked engineer living in the South, a quite rigid Baptist woman deeply committed to a traditionalistic faith. "Faggot" was a word she used with its most poignant pejorative meaning.

Shortly after my escapede with my male friends, I found myself watching television here and there in the early 90s. Whenever I needed a rest from my LEGO-labrynth of a room, I'd think to myself "I need something less mentally stimulating". You know the feeling, of wanting to watch a dumb action flick and all that. I'd literally spend 14-16 hours a day with LEGO, to myself, already quite solitary beyond my brief list of friends. Sometimes I'd go days without eating or sleeping, contriving some thing, dismantling the idea, going at it again, engineering my room into a universe that exactly met my specification. I couldn't sleep sometimes, unless I arranged the pieces perfectly together, squeezed them tightly again and again, or at least imagined what pieces would need to exist in order for me to complete my idea.

But I digress — the point here is that media become a means of peace from myself. However, for my restricted social mind and my over fledgling intelligence (again, we're talking 6 here), the media sensationalism of HIV/AIDS turn'd me into from a solitary, perhaps even arguably "autistic" child (I'd rock, throw fits if others touched my LEGOs, slam my head into trees, desks, walls, engaging in this peculiar wrist writhing activity — which I still do today, with this unsettling third-person onlooker feeling, and so on), from something a bit askew... into something much more troubling, much more foreign to what people, I honestly even believe, can, well, believe to exist.

After I had acquired the idea that my mother was vehemently opposed to whatever it was the television sensationalized, this particular disease — a disease —, I became detached and removed from human reality almost over night. I thought to myself literally daily that I made the gravest mistake possible, and that no one could ever know. I had associated my act of exploration with the contraction of this disease — I fell pray to a very terrible ill-logic.

I never drank after others. I strove my best not even to touch others. Hugging became a sin. My grandmother grew to despise me because I'd "never kiss" her. My was alienated by my avoidance, and my non-participatory attitude. I avoided other kids. I frequently gave non-responses to other people. Talking become a chore for me, particularly a chore not to confess in passing that I had done something wrong. I thought eye contact would give me away. I thought getting too close to any person would ruin my chances at least having a happy life alone, without ridicule or hatred. Each day as I absorbed myself in my own thoughts of some inevitable death either of the disease or hatred. LEGOs were honestly the only thing that kept me mentally stimulated or at least distracted from my own fate. God quickly became a Divine Comedian, with whom I'd engage in discourse, banter, madness, and with every emotion from hatred to guilt. When I came across the Book of Job later in life, it was chillingly accurate, and it made me exceptionally angry.

At one point the idea faded. I got smarter, and I learned that I had not contracted the disease.

But by this period, I realized something else was amiss. There was an error, of a very big sort. Around the age of 13, I realized that I was on a planet, rife with social life. The most immediate thought was that I had a lot of catching up to do.

In high school, I found myself gravitating toward the "socially awkward" group. The band kids, the self-professed rejects and minorities. The oddballs. The gamers. I distinctly recall at the age of 16 being in a room with some of these friends, where suddenly during our video gaming session, a porn magazine was revealed. I experienced no erection, and there was no interest. These pictures of women, naked and such — your typical work of gaudy pornographic material. I found it charming, almost endearing primarily that I was in a room with other males, and everyone was cool about the situation. I played Soul Calibur or Smash Brothers or whatever game we were into that week, against a friend, another flipped through pictures of naked men and women, another friend toggled the two activities. Then the day ended, as normal.

Here's then, when I got an idea. There's something "normal" about porn. I had come to the realization that in order to "fix" myself, I needed to "be normal" just as I was then. Guys looking at naked chicks, and not really thinking much of it. We said "she's hot" here and there, or "that's corny". It reminded me very much of my experience at 6 or so.

I left that experience thinking, "This porn stuff can help me in some way." And that's when it happened. I found myself strongly interested in this material, but I was after something. Sure, yes, I found it arousing — but then that was secondary to some more basic initiative: "this is normal. I am normal. I can do this."

I found myself spending hours a day looking at porn. I always tried to find just the "right" porn. The Internet became a well brimming with material. The "right" porn consisted of these scenarios that started off 'real' and then ended in this rather unexceptional way. There was a lot of POV as well — not necessarily interested in the people participating but their parts. My own penis is slightly disfigured from my circumcision — well, asymmetrical. It's not a jarring or grotesque disfigurement. As a kid I thought it was upsetting, and brought concern. It's essentially a seemingly incomplete job.

But the people and the themes never really interested me. I often found myself looking for the "right" penis, the "right" vagina, the right complexion (regardless of race), the "right" people. It went everywhere, from race A-on-race Z to race Z-on-raceA, and then back again. I found myself trying to figure out quickly what I am to do, and just how much was necessary for a "normal" experience. I always knew that anything beyond hardcore porn was beyond my needs, that fetish porn was beyond my needs. I wanted something that gave me what I thought everyone else had already figured out. Gradually it warped into something bigger — not in terms of the content I accepted, which always ranged from softcore to POV to roleplay (for years, it was a lot of role-play — I even spent years going into RP chatrooms with "sex" topics and working up my capacity to describe these sexual activities), but in terms of the commitment and preoccupation, the amount of time spent.

I want to be clear here. At no point did I think "This is was people do normally" — I was looking at the situation as someone who had a lot of catching up to do, and who strove to be normal. I wanted people to believe that I "got along" with sexual activity, that I understood what it was about — and that I wasn't obsessed with something more fundamental: fitting in.