Though seemingly benign, pornography has drastically affected the way I view myself when compared to other women. At the age of five, I found a pornographic magazine in my parents' room. I was immediately filled with a mixed rush of emotions. I felt oddly aroused by the images, which only compounded the shame I felt towards myself and my father, who had gotten them in the first place. Since I knew where to look, I'd search his room for pornography, and would sadly always find it. His collections ranged from Playboy and Hustler to erotic books and videos. As the years passed, I never could figure out how to deal with those images. Sometimes I'd burn them, and sometimes I would read them.

I began to believe the message that those images sent me. Women are sex objects, and further more, they spend most of their waking hours trying to appeal to men for sex. At about the age of six or seven, I began to masturbate, as I’d seen it done in a magazine. I soon got into the habit of masturbating at least four or five times daily.

During my Kindergarten years, I met a young man named Eric Olsen, who would take me into the garage behind my house and fondle me. Fortunately, the molestations stopped after I protested too loudly.

A little while later, my sister and I would act out sexual scenes using hand puppets, and later Barbie dolls. Those horrendous dolls, I can remember just looking at them and realizing that they were just another pornographic image, and that just by looking at them, I was indulging in a strange form of pornography that was marketed to children. With the use of those dolls, we acted out some horrendous scenes of rape, which even now sicken my heart to think about. My entire youth was filled with images and tensions of sex, which ruined my innocence. I used those sex games as a way of feeling more in control, by expressing my rage through mock rape, I transposed my hatred of my father on an inanimate object. All this acting led to research, and at one point I was defining a sexual act to my sex ed teacher in elementary school.

My father’s pornography collection grew steadily worse and worse, as I found books that included graphic scenes of rape, incest, and pedophilia. At about the age of 10, I reached my menarche, and immediately began filling out as a mature woman. This young age only prompted my strange perversion, though our last ‘doll game’ ceased later that year.

Incredibly verbal and imaginative, my sister and I continued our pornographic prattle, though we stopped using props, and instead focused on simply ‘story telling’. This continued on, though was finally supplemented with writing several pornographic short stories. Oddly enough, writing pornography is actually considered to be ‘normal’, much to my relief, as I still continue to write to this day.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I was finally able to look back and fully analyze the situation.

My father hated the way my mother looked, and through my entire young life, I saw her tortured as she'd fight her weight down to 110, which naturally didn‘t satisfy his obsession. Finally, she just gave in and let her weight slide. She knew about the pornography, she knew. Still, nobody did or said anything about it. Because of her silence, I grew up with the certainty that weight was repulsive. I have since come to despise food, and now struggle to maintain a 125 lb weight. Somehow the whole image squeezed my heart as I suddenly realized that those emaciated and distorted images were what my father was comparing my mother to. It hurts me to realize that my brothers have come to absorb pornography as well. Will they too end up addicted to this filth?

I can’t stand to look at the human body, and am thus a virgin at the age of 20. My last sexual encounter was with Eric. I honestly don’t think I could ever go into a sexual situation and feel that I wasn’t completely perverted, regardless of how tame the encounter was. Over my lifetime, I’ve oscillated between hating everything sexual, and being totally immersed in the thought.

Healing has been slow, as I’ve finally come into a healthy relationship with a member of the opposite sex. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel comfortable enough with my body to actually do anything remotely sexual with him, but only time will tell. I’ve been to over 200 hours of therapy, and I’m on a prescription antidepressant. I can only grimace with pain at finding that first article of pornography, and I wonder, what would my life be like if pornography had never entered the picture?

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