As a child, there was nothing more sacred than my uninterrupted, unsupervised computer time. I’d sit criss-cross applesauce on the carpeted floor of my bedroom, fingers eagerly poised over the keyboard of my mom’s overheating MacBook Pro, and lose myself on the Internet for hours.
Many of my early experiences on the Internet align with what would be expected of a child. I spent the majority of my time bouncing back and forth between playing children’s games and watching YouTube videos.
While my time spent on the computer brought me many valuable skills and treasured memories, there was one key measure my parents failed to put in place: they gave me little to no restrictions.
And so, like many others who have been in the same position, I was exposed to sexual content at an extremely young age.
One of my earliest memories using the Internet was creating my Club Penguin account on my fifth birthday. My parents were blissfully unaware of the fact that a year or so later, I’d end up seeing porn for the first time.
From what I remember, I was watching a YouTube video where a girl made a joke about some sort of website. Being a young child curious about anything and everything, I paused the video, typed the URL into the browser’s search bar, and hit ‘enter.’
You’d never guess what appeared on my screen.
I was so young that I hadn’t been through sex ed in school yet. I’m not even sure if I knew sex existed. All I knew was that I was seeing something I was not supposed to. I was at least old enough to understand that nudity was something meant to be kept private.
Naturally, this led to even more curiosity.
That encounter with online sexual content was only the first of many that would follow. While it wasn’t necessarily something that I actively seeked out, it continued to confront me, even in the corners of the Internet that should have been the farthest you could possibly get from a porn website.
Animal Jam, a children’s game where users get to play as a wide variety of animals, inspired many people to create YouTube videos about the game — one specific kind I had the displeasure of stumbling across were “mating” videos, which were essentially porn made through the limits of safety chat filters and using the ‘jumping’ action.
In elementary school, my friends would constantly say that I was the more ‘mature’ one. Unbeknownst to them, my ‘maturity’ was really the result of my unsupervised Internet access and my prolonged exposure to not just sexual content, but violence and other dark topics too.
It took years of me already knowing extensive details about sex for it to start to become a topic of conversation among my classmates. Being aware of porn’s existence only seemed to emerge in grade 5. Boys began to talk about it as if they were trying to get used to the way the single syllable rolled off their tongues, and how it tasted like something that could give them power.
In my grade 7 class, I vividly remember one of those same boys proudly declaring that his favourite number was 69. I fought back a smirk, secretly thrilled that I had understood the joke while the rest of my female classmates remained oblivious.
Knowledge about sex had become a form of capital within the walls of the classroom. After years of frequently feeling like an outsider in other social settings, I finally possessed something that others didn’t have access to.
Then high school started, and it suddenly seemed as if everyone knew everything there was to know about sex. After a childhood spent almost exclusively encountering sex on the Internet, it was now all around me in the real world.
And all I wanted to do was pretend that it didn’t exist.
My exposure to sex at such a young age left me viewing it as something that was entirely separate from my actual life and as something which belonged on the Internet. Once the possibility emerged of it actually entering my life, I felt as if an invisible barrier had been crossed.
It brings me some comfort knowing there are many others out there who have had similar experiences to me. In the future, I will continue to work towards accepting that sex holds a different value on the Internet and in real life.
When I look back on my childhood years spent online, I will try to focus on the good that came out of them, including the fact that the Internet is what inspired me to be a writer.
Because yes, I read Wattpad too.
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