Conservatives Want To Ban Pornography. Without It, I’d Probably Be Dead.

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. 

This state of affairs lasted for nine years, and I spent the time paranoid that someone might sense my interest in this subject, and that I’d be rejected by everyone I cared about as a result. My secret felt like one which I must keep perfectly, forever, so I tried hard to appear normal — to be normal. 

At 18, I began a relationship with a fellow student at drama school. Our romance didn’t progress as far as actual sex, but when he suddenly broke up with me after three months to date another girl in my year instead, I became convinced it was because he’d sensed that there was something terribly wrong with my sexual tastes. I determined to try harder — to never let anyone see what was wrong with me beneath the surface. Again, I considered suicide. 

Being alone was painful, but risking being known was a far more frightening proposition.

The first portrayal I saw of someone who was maybe a bit like me was in Pulp Fiction, which I watched when I was 20. The rape scene, complete with BDSM paraphernalia and a gimp in a leather hood, was clearly intended to be horrific, and I was duly horrified. I wasn’t entirely alone in my interests, I concluded — there were perhaps some male rapists who were like me, though probably even they only existed in fiction. It was not a comforting thought. 

When I was 24, the movie Secretary, starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, was released. I took myself to see it at a cinema in Leicester Square. Alone, naturally. I couldn’t possibly have told any of my friends that I wanted to watch it. Even as it was, I was anxious that someone might recognize me. 

I sat sheepishly in the dark, on the back row, and watched the gentle story of a young woman falling for her boss, who spanks her. She seems to like it. The problem was that in the first scene of the movie, she’s discharged from a mental institution, and she’s a habitual self-harmer. Her boss appears no less unstable. They weren’t rapists, which was something, but they weren’t OK, either.  

I still didn’t consider the possibility that there might be people in the real world who liked this kind of thing, and that they might not have anything wrong with them at all. Until the following year, when I stumbled into an art gallery and found myself confronted by wall upon wall covered in BDSM artwork.

It was electrifying. I saw sculptures depicting submissive women, with no suggestion that they might be mentally unwell. I saw photographs of dominant men and women, with no implication that they might be murderers or rapists. For the first time in my life, I saw my sexuality represented without being pathologized. The relief of it still resounds in my mind, 21 years later. 

Many of the artists whose work was displayed at the gallery were in attendance. One of them approached me, and asked if I’d like to model for him. I was already modeling professionally, so I agreed, and he introduced me to other members of the thriving BDSM art world.

Additionally, it was 2003, and the internet was booming with online magazines depicting all sorts of sexual tastes. I started contacting the photographers who worked on these magazines, asking for shoots.