Stumbling into Porn: A Personal Testimony

By an Anonymous Contributor
I’ve always been the good girl.  I’ve grown up going to church.  I dress modestly and have never gone past kissing a guy before.  There was a time where I never thought I’d struggle with sex because I vowed myself never to have it until I was married.  I’m still waiting to give up my virginity, but things changed when I was 20.
At 20 years old, I started to read sexually explicit fan fiction.  Fan fiction is the term for stories fans write about their favorite characters in a story, simply picking up where the series left off or creating a whole new story using the same characters. At first, I was just curious about sex.  My parents never talked to me about sex, and I was never comfortable talking about it to them.  I lied when my mom asked me if I knew what sex was.  So instead,  I learned about sex through fan fiction of my favorite characters.  I thought to myself, ‘Now I really know what is going on.’
But I didn’t stop there. Once I knew the basics I kept reading, spending a great deal of time alone in my room, not realizing how this was changing me.  I started to self-gratify more often. I loved reading the smutty parts.  Soon, I was reading about homosexual scenes or orgies among these characters. Naturally, I thought about these situations when I self-gratified.  I never thought I’d get into that, but again, it didn’t stop there. 
After that, it led to watching porn.  I wanted to see what a man really looked like.  I googled men, then that led to watching people having sex.  Once upon a time, I would’ve been mortified watching these videos, but reading about sex became not enough.
  
Through the years, I have gone through the cycle of stopping then starting back up again, always the same- reading about and watching sex.  When I would go to church, I always heard things geared toward men about porn, and thought, ‘But I struggle with this too…what about me?’
It was more obvious to me that watching people have sex is porn, but even in my heart I knew I was reading porn.  For a lot of women, their version of porn is often when we put ourselves into the story: there is a hunky hero who knows how to woo us, satisfy us in bed, and someone who would eventually give us marriage and a family.  That’s what the lure was for me. 
Back in March of this year, I had an opportunity to go to a woman’s group for women who struggle with porn.  I was excited to find out I wasn’t the only one with these issues!  God has broken my habit of reading those stories and watching videos; He is still leading me on the path of learning about holy sexuality in Him and living daily in purity, glorifying God with my sexuality. 
It’s funny to me that I’m so tainted by sex, even though I’ve never even been touched by a man, but God is healing me and leading me toward being pleased by Him, instead of the lies the world offers.