It’s potentially controversial to admit to it, but I think pornography might have saved my life.
I was 16 years old and a recent escapee from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a conservative religious group with a long list of proscribed romantic and sexual activities (no gay sex, no pre-marital sex, no extra-marital sex, no oral sex, no dating before the age of 18, no divorce), when I discovered an unwelcome truth.
All my life, I’d had an enduring interest in the idea of being tied up, or maybe spanked. I gravitated toward stories in which people got captured or punished, reading the pages of those books over and over again until I’d memorized them, and wishing I could experience the same things.
It hadn’t occurred to me that this might be more than a strange personal thought experiment until I saw a depiction of self-flagellation in the movie “A Nun’s Story” and decided to try whipping myself with a belt. My reaction was sexual, rather than spiritual.
With no knowledge of how to frame any deviation from the sexual norm other than to label it as a sin, I assumed this discovery meant I was evil and that I should probably kill myself. Fortunately for me, the Jehovah’s Witnesses also had a lot to say about the sin of suicide, so I remained alive, guilt-wracked, attempting denial of who and what I was, and thoroughly unhappy.
