The Pornification of My Imagination

I was six years old when someone else began writing the sexual stories in my head.

I didn't have words like pornography, sexuality, consent, masculinity, arousal, trauma, or rape.

I was six.

I had an imagination.

And someone got there first.

My abuser used pornography to groom me. He showed a little boy images he wasn't developmentally capable of understanding and then connected those images to what he did to my body.

At first, he raped me.

Eventually, I complied.

That sentence is difficult to write because there is a part of me that still wants to make compliance mean something it didn't mean.

It wasn't consent.

It was a child learning what happened when resistance didn't make something stop.

But my developing brain learned from all of it.

My body learned.

My imagination learned.

And that may be one of the things about childhood sexual abuse that is hardest for me to explain: the abuse ended, but the education didn't.

He left.

The pictures didn't.

An Imagination That Doesn't Feel Like Mine

My imagination can become intensely sexual incredibly quickly.

Sometimes inappropriately so.

A woman can be attractive. She can be friendly. She can smile at me or show me attention, and before reality has even had an opportunity to establish what is happening, my imagination can already be miles down the road.

It writes a story.

It fills in blanks.

It sexualizes ambiguity.

And I hate it.

Because underneath all those images is a very simple question that I desperately want to be able to answer:

Is she actually into me?

I often don't know.

My imagination can be so loud that distinguishing another person's actual signals from the story happening inside my own head becomes incredibly difficult.

That's isolating.

Because intimacy requires two people.

Fantasy only requires one.

And somewhere along the way, my imagination became very good at eliminating the uncertainty that real intimacy requires.

Pornography doesn't have to wonder.

The woman wants him.

The man knows what to do.

Everyone somehow knows what happens next.

There is no awkward uncertainty.

No vulnerable pause.

No terrifying question:

Do you want me too?

Real women aren't characters in someone else's imagination.

They have their own desires.

Their own boundaries.

Their own fears.

Their own histories.

Their own choices.

To genuinely know another person means allowing her to remain separate from the story happening inside my head.

And that is much harder for me than I wish it were.

What I Thought Was Sexuality

For a long time, I thought the damage was pornography.

Then I thought the damage was sex.

Then I thought maybe something was simply wrong with me.

Because the contradiction is exhausting.

I can want intimacy and be terrified by it.

I can experience attraction and immediately become overwhelmed by what my imagination does with it.

I can want sex and be triggered by sex.

I can crave connection and disappear inside myself when connection becomes possible.

My imagination triggers me.

Attraction triggers me.

Sex triggers me.

And somehow I'm still supposed to know when a woman likes me.

For years I saw all of that as evidence of something shameful about my sexuality.

With some distance, I'm beginning to understand something different.

Pornography wasn't simply placed in front of me.

It was woven into abuse.

Sexual imagery became connected to fear, secrecy, powerlessness, arousal, attention, confusion, shame, and survival before I had any ability to separate those things from one another.

My sexual imagination didn't develop on neutral ground.

It developed inside a crime scene.

And decades later, sometimes my body still knows exactly where it is even when my adult mind knows the danger is long gone.

What Was Taken

But recently I realized there is another loss underneath all of this.

Something I didn't know how to name before.

I lost my sexual masculinity.

Not masculinity as domination.

Not conquest.

Not body counts.

Not sexual performance.

Not being the guy who always knows exactly what to do.

I mean something quieter and much more important.

The ability to inhabit my sexuality as a man without being afraid of myself.

To want a woman without immediately becoming lost inside fantasy.

To remain present in my body while experiencing desire.

To wonder whether someone wants me without my imagination answering the question for her.

To initiate and still respect uncertainty.

To risk rejection without experiencing it as annihilation.

To hear no and remain whole.

To hear yes and trust it.

To experience arousal without shame.

To experience tenderness without waiting for danger.

To be sexual without feeling predatory.

To be masculine without becoming the kind of man who hurt me.

That is the masculinity I am talking about.

And I never really got the chance to discover it naturally.

Most boys slowly encounter sexuality.

There is curiosity.

Awkwardness.

Crushes.

Fantasy.

Rejection.

Reciprocity.

First kisses.

Embarrassment.

Desire.

Boundaries.

Discovery.

Eventually, if they're fortunate, they learn that another person's body isn't something you decipher from a script. It is attached to another human being whose desires must be discovered with them.

My education started differently.

An adult introduced pornography into my imagination and rape into my body before I could possibly understand either.

Porn taught my imagination how to be a man before I ever got the chance to become one.

But what it taught me wasn't masculinity.

It was certainty without vulnerability.

Sex without discovery.

Desire without relationship.

Bodies without ambiguity.

And a sexual world where nobody has to ask the question that scares me most:

Do you want me too?

The Cruel Paradox

There is something especially cruel about what happened.

Pornography gave my imagination an exaggerated image of male sexual power at exactly the same time abuse was teaching a little boy that he had none.

In fantasy, the man knows.

In reality, the boy was powerless.

In fantasy, desire is obvious.

In reality, my boundaries didn't matter.

In fantasy, sex is controlled.

In reality, sex happened to me.

Maybe that helps explain why fantasy can feel both powerful and terrifying.

It offers certainty where my earliest sexual experiences contained none.

But that certainty comes at a cost.

Because real intimacy requires uncertainty.

I have to allow another person to surprise me.

I have to let her tell me what she wants instead of imagining it.

I have to tolerate not knowing.

I have to remain inside my body long enough to discover what is actually happening.

And perhaps hardest of all:

I have to believe that my desire itself is not dangerous.

The Difference Between a Thought and a Want

I'm beginning to understand another distinction that matters enormously.

What appears in my imagination is not necessarily what I want.

An image can arrive without being invited.

A fantasy can be conditioned.

A sexual thought can be intrusive.

My brain producing something does not automatically make it a confession.

For most of my life, I haven't always known that.

So I judged myself by the contents of an imagination that someone else helped shape when I was a child.

That is an impossible trial to win.

Maybe healing requires a different question.

Not:

Why did I think that?

But:

What do I actually want?

That question belongs to the adult me.

And the answers are surprisingly different from the pornography.

I want connection.

I want mutual desire.

I want playfulness.

I want tenderness.

I want sexuality that doesn't require me to leave my body.

I want to look into someone's eyes and remain there.

I want to recognize another person's desire because she has been free to communicate it—not because my imagination decided it for her.

I want to experience wanting someone without immediately needing to possess the outcome.

I want sex that is something two people create together rather than something my mind has already scripted.

I want to be present.

Reclamation

Maybe the goal isn't to clean my imagination.

Maybe it isn't purity.

Maybe it isn't becoming less sexual.

Maybe it isn't eliminating fantasy.

And maybe healing doesn't end with me becoming some perfectly regulated man who never has an inappropriate thought again.

Maybe the goal is ownership.

Because there is something I want back.

Something that should have been mine from the beginning.

My imagination.

My desire.

My body.

My sexuality.

My masculinity.

Not the counterfeit masculinity pornography showed me.

Not the powerless sexuality abuse taught me.

Mine.

I want to discover what kind of sexual man I actually am when neither my abuser nor pornography gets to answer that question for me.

I want to learn the difference between arousal and danger.

Between imagination and intention.

Between attraction and projection.

Between wanting and taking.

Between fantasy and another human being.

Between compliance and consent.

Between sex and intimacy.

I don't want to become less sexual.

I want to finally discover what my sexuality might have become if it had been allowed to belong to me.

I cannot give that six-year-old boy the childhood he should have had.

I cannot make someone else arrive five minutes later so that I get to my imagination first.

But I am here now.

And maybe adulthood gives me an opportunity that childhood didn't.

I can pick up the pen.

I can question what was written there.

I can keep what genuinely belongs to me.

I can cross out what doesn't.

And for the first time, I can write the sexual story of my life with another person beside me instead of an abuser standing behind me.

My imagination was pornified before I understood what an imagination could become.

But it is still my imagination.

My body is still my body.

My desire is still my desire.

And my masculinity is mine to define.

---

He got there first.

He doesn't get to stay.