I Started Writing Porn at 15
The shaping of my sexual identity.
At 15, I met a friend with whom I shared the strange feeling of curiosity towards erotica and sexual content and at the same time a deep repulse towards pornographic videos and images. And I’ll admit, written porn lets one’s imagination go wherever it wants, not guided by the images on the screen.
We were both in the stage of discovering our writing abilities while simultaneously coming into terms with our sexualities and identities in general. As early teenagers, we were no strangers to hormonal changes and new curiosities coming to life in our bodies and minds. She and I, like thousands of other teenagers around the globe, started skimming the internet, reading short stories and fan-fictions on sites like Wattpad, Tumblr, Skyrock, and others. They all formed outlets where we could find a certain type of writings where the plot surrounding the sexual parts was believable enough, not too vulgar for our taste, and suited our evolving senses of fetish and desire. That was until we discovered, separately, a platform that would go on to change the course of how we dealt with written pornography (as I will go on to name it in the rest of the article).
AO3 was like the online library for any unpublished books, unordinary content, tens-of-thousands-words-long stories, and an immense variety of written porn. The spectrum of identities and boldness of the writers’ words were what attracted us the most. On AO3, there was no topics off-limit, nothing that had to be cis-gendered or heteronormative, the options were endless, and you could find whatever one desired as long as you search well and got hold of how it works. I don’t remember exactly how we stumbled upon it, but each did on her own, and one day we both cracked and confessed that we found a small golden secret, which turned up to be very much golden, but not too secretive nor small.
I spent the majority of my time during lunch breaks, at home after school, on the bus rides, and in awkward social gatherings on my phone or laptop skimming through the website. It was like drowning deeper and deeper every day; a good sense of drowning, not suffocated by the brutality of the mainstream porn, not tricked by its visual illusions, not binary in the purest sense of the word, but a world where you can find types of characters and sexual practices that were out of my 15-year-old-brain’s expectations and imagination.
AO3 and its writers were my introductions to healthy communication about sex and porn, for all that it contained, it was a shameless platform where one could easily find discussions revolving around the right terminologies of the human biology, fetishes, practices, preferences, and much more. One can imagine what kind of bodily revolution this could be for a young teenager at that age, it felt like the giant gates of heaven have opened up to my face, I slowly drifted from the avid reader to a writer.
My first attempts are surely my present regrets, silly metaphors and hideous comparisons charged in the shame and ignorance that my brown Northern African society has implemented in me for as long as I could remember. Yet I kept writing, posting anonymously (don’t try to find me, you won’t, I guarantee it), receiving feedback from strangers online, and sharing tips and tricks with my friend. We each started to discover things in us that we never saw before, many of the aspects that we’d previously agreed on 100% started to shift, many others that were obscure to us started to clear up and deliver us an even bigger sense of freedom in thinking and writing.
At 15, in a conservative city of Tunisia, while still dealing with the aftermath of an ugly rape ‘situation’, with one sole friend to whom I could express my deepest concerns when it comes to sex and sexuality, such a platform came into my life like the saving light on the surface of a deep dark water. I clung to it, and I kept on writing for years to come: my vocabulary became better with time, I started to distinguish between my personal preferences and those of my readers, I learned to suit the likings of genres that the rest of my surroundings would (and still to this day) call disgusting and evil, and I developed this strange sense of full acceptance to all that is ‘unconventional’ and ‘unusual’ desire. The most remarkable and life-changing thing would be by far, and for always, learning about consent and the whole process that aligns with it. Upon logging in AO3, you are asked for both your consent to be exposed to a variety of “sensitive” topics as well as before every story you decide to read. There is a whole system that gives recaps, reviews, and tags that could tell you, before diving into a story that might trigger you, what you expect to face. Besides, the conversations that flow in the comments’ sections became the space where I could discover the point of views and perspectives I couldn’t have thought of before, that enlightened me to problematics I, in my context, was most likely never going to stumble upon.
For a young adult who spent years of her teenage-hood writing sexually charged stories, you would imagine a wild mess of a sexual human to come out of me. I am by far, the furthest case of execution you might find compared to what I’ve posted on the internet in my teenage years. I learned, with time, therapy, supportive friendship, and the process of facing porn healthily, that my two personas can not only correlate but coexist peacefully and in full acceptance of each other. What began as a trigger causing deep emotional turmoil to my traumatized 15-year-old self turned into a blessing: it became my mean and outlet to finally accept, radically, that I was no victim. For as long as I searched, asked the weirdest of questions, faced the most non-normative of my inclinations, and reached out in mine and others’ writings, I am no victim.
This goes to show that there are alternatives to mainstream porn sites that can suit the taste of those -like myself- repulsed by visual content. It goes to show, even further, that healthier approaches into self-discovery, aside from unorganized biased social media platforms, exist, and they do a damn well job at informing and educating. AO3 might have started simply as one more creative outlet platform out there for writers who found no space to unleash their talents, but it ended up for me, and I am sure for many others like me as well, becoming a safe space for comfort and creative expression of our sexuality. We could search for our strangest and most curious (most shameful as would a problematic person say) desires, we could ask the questions that no one from our entourage was knowledgeable enough of nor willing to answer, we found a community that welcomed us, understanding of where we came from, and why we needed this space just as much as they did.
There was absolutely no sense of limit, disgust, shame, fear, exclusion, or any other factor that would usually grow naturally curious teenagers into adults who’d go on unforgiving of their bodies and attractions for long years. If it’s BDSM? You could read about it. Toys? Aliens? Fur? Soft-core to hardcore? Wax fetish? Orgies of multiple genders? How is the clitoris not the same as the vulva? What is a discharge? It was all there for my teenage self to read, to understand that there’s much more to our sexualities, preferences, and bodies than what society led us to believe.
M: “I only discovered what was a clitoris when I was 19!”
O: “Seriously? And you?”
Me: “I wrote porn in high school, I knew what a clitoris was since I was 15.”
