Remember Life Before Porn?
Wasn’t the grass greener, the flowers prettier, and teenage boys hornier?
I will never forget the first time I watched porn.
Rumor had it at school that on a certain local TV channel things got frisky after 1:30 am. I’m not talking about one of those scrambled cable channels where you could kind of make out two people having sex (but not really), or the softcore telenovelas where you could catch a glimpse of a boob if you were patient enough to wait for the right scenes. I’m talking full nudity, full penetration, full-screen hardcore porn — all out in the open for any kid adventurous enough to come get it that late into the night.
As a kid I was a wuss, but at that age porn was the ultimate incentive and that gave me all the courage I needed. The plan was simple: stay awake as long as necessary and take a peek when the coast was clear. In a way it reminded me of those December 24th nights where I would fight sleep to catch Santa red-handed — only this time a fat old man was the last thing I was hoping to see.
Twenty minutes after I first heard my dad snore, I sneaked into the living room and turned the TV on, on mute, then nervously pressed two buttons on the remote: the numbers three and five — I still remember — for channel 35. It took two seconds for that old TV to switch channels — the longest two seconds of my life — but once the image finally appeared, it blew my freaking mind.
On the screen in front of me, reflected on my innocent doe eyes, was a girl, down on her knees and completely naked. Her hair was the color of fire. Her tits, round and perky like in my dreams. And between her legs, a vulva that was hairless and picture-perfect. Embodied by this girl, the secrets of feminine beauty revealed themselves to me for the first time ever… and yet it wasn’t her I was staring at.
Next to her stood a man, and attached to that man was the most shocking thing I had ever seen: a fully erect 8-inch penis, going in and out of the girl’s mouth. Through the eyes of a kid that dong looked extraterrestrial. It was hard to conceive that the underdeveloped thingy I hid in my pants could ever grow to such dimensions, and very intimidating to realize that’s what sex seemed to require.
I went back to bed that night feeling horny, inadequate, and guilty — a perfect introduction to porn, I would say.
A few months later, my parents installed an ADSL line at home, putting an end to my night expeditions. I finally had all the porn that I could dream of — on the smaller screen of my computer, in the privacy of my own room.
I was 13 when that happened. Three years had already passed since I masturbated for the first time at the age of 10. So even though the arrival of porn marked a new era in my sexuality, it wasn’t what started it.
There was an earlier chapter. One filled with wonder, confusion, and plenty of trials and errors.
A life, before porn came and changed everything.
Life before porn was, I don’t know… sexy.
The world was a much more arousing place. Or maybe I was just hornier. One way or another, it felt like I could never run out of excuses to jerk off.
A PG-13 scene in a movie, a lingerie catalog in the mail, a couple of pictures in a gossip magazine of a celebrity going topless on some beach in Europe… it really didn’t take that much. Seeing a classmate’s underwear was all I needed back then. The power of my childhood imagination — still intact — did the rest.
To get an idea of what these days were like, look no further than ringtones. Remember ringtones? They sounded like shit but there was a time when we all thought they were the coolest thing ever. Magazines would come with pages full of ringtone ads, and in those pages there was often a section titled something along the lines of “Hot Wallpapers”, featuring all kinds of suggestive thumbnails of scantily clad girls (if you’re too young to remember, I invite you to google images of “ringtones magazines” and see for yourself).
For just the price of an extra SMS, you could pair your annoying Crazy Frog ringtone with the picture of a hot chick. But why even do that? In a time when explicit material was so hard to come by, those tiny thumbnails in the magazine were all I personally needed.
Such were the days before porn.
Life before porn got weird sometimes.
As a teenager, I had all this new sexual energy in me and not a damn clue what to do with it. Some of the outlets I found were worse than others, but nothing compares to this one hobby I took up during the summer of ‘05.
Growing up I had always liked drawing. I started with comics when I was a kid, then with age I transitioned into portraits and became pretty decent at it. One boring summer afternoon, after finishing a particularly successful portrait of a classmate, the light bulb went on. “Damn, this really does look like her,” I thought to myself. “What if I were to continue the drawing from the head down and — wait for it — what if she happened to be completely naked?” Give a teenager some talent and he’ll just invent a new way to jerk off.
I would pick a girl, get her face from the yearbook picture, then look in magazines for bodies that more or less matched hers, and do my best to combine it all into a realistic drawing. When I got bored of masturbating to the drawings, I crafted these little sticky pieces of clothing, matching the clothes I saw the girls wear to school, and I would attach and detach them from their bodies like some sort of degenerate psycho playing with his collection of voodoo dolls.
It doesn’t even end there. After losing interest in the clothes, I decided to draw myself having sex with one of the girls, then added a bubble to make her say something along the lines of, “Oh yes, James! Keep going! You are gonna make me cum!” The result was so unsettling that it finally opened my eyes to the madness of what I had been doing, and only then I stopped.
Not embarrassing enough? Then you should know that one day I came to my room to find that my mom had rearranged a bunch of my things while cleaning. I always kept my pornographic drawings hidden in between the pages of a Harry Potter book, and that’s exactly where I found them… except this time, instead of the usual Chamber of Secrets, they were tucked inside the Prisoner of Azkaban.
What’s amazing about those years before porn is how much energy I used to have.
It seemed like no matter what I would resort to — or how weird it was — nothing could keep me in check for long. I would masturbate at least once a day, sometimes more, and I was perpetually horny nonetheless.
I had so much energy that it started to spill into my social life. I made new friends during those years, hung out around girls for the first time, and experienced my first crush. By no means did I become the coolest kid in town, but the progress was significant considering how extremely shy I had always been growing up.
I was just a 13-year-old boy taking baby steps, but it felt as if I was on the right path toward becoming a man…
And then porn showed up.
And when it came, it sucked me in like a black hole.
Nothing else could compete. Magazines, and drawings, and my own imagination paled in comparison — they were fun pills, but porn was pure heroin.
I poured all my sexual energy into it, and my sessions quickly spiraled into longer and longer binges that would leave me completely depleted. With time, I realized how well these binges worked to suppress not just my sexual feelings, but all of them: insecurity, anxiety, stress… I found in porn a very effective escape. The perfect coping mechanism. And that’s when things collapsed.
Just a few months after that furtive glance at channel 35, the same boy that had been disturbed by his first encounter with porn was already desperately addicted to it.
As a nineties kid, I belong to the last generation to grow up without porn.
I mean, porn was there — it always has been — but without the Internet, it wasn’t nearly as accessible as it is now, so it never really played a part in those early years of my life.
I count myself lucky for that. Without porn, there was plenty of room for me to experiment. Some of those experiments were creepy as hell, I’ll admit, but all of them — good and bad — I see only as curious attempts to explore my sexuality, and thus part of a natural process.
Porn broke with that process. In just a few months, I went from a teenager who would socialize, interact with girls, and masturbate on a regular basis, to a junkie that would only draw satisfaction from endless sessions of porn, turning into a hollow and reclusive person in the days in between.
I remained an addict for over a decade, and during that time it was hard to picture a life without porn. Those early teenage years, if nothing else, showed me that there was an alternative. That my sex life didn’t have to start and end with porn.
They also provided me with yet another reason to leave my addiction behind. As I embarked on this journey, the memory from those years helped shape one of my goals: to regain that sexual energy and curiosity I lost along the way.
Today, five years later, I am proud to say that a lot of it is already back.
There is life after porn, and it is wonderful!
What’s in your math folder?
Did you have a life before porn?
If you did, how was it?
It might be hard to picture life without porn these days, but it shouldn’t. Every generation before us did it and, even in this world where porn is ubiquitous, you too can do it now.
Build yourself a life without porn. While you will never get your adolescence back — and who would want that anyway — quitting porn will bring back some of the many positive things that you lost to addiction.
Share your insights in the comments below, on social media, or in your favorite porn addiction community, and if you know others that are struggling with porn, help them by sharing a link to this story.
Let’s start a conversation!
Hi, this is James! Thank you for reading!
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