Just words, right?

Hello. I'm a 22-year-old heterosexual girl from Brazil. I'd like to share my story.

Basically when I was like 8 or 9 years old my parents would let me use the house's computer without supervision. They grew up without internet access so they didn't know the terrible things one can find while surfing the net. I had a vague notion that sex was the thing adult people did in order to "make babies". And then I inevitably found porn by accident.

Do you know the feeling of being so shocked by something that you just need to keep watching/seeing it? Porn was so weird that I couldn't look away. There was a specific site I used to visit that had everything you could imagine - orgies; bestiality; hentai featuring schoolgirls being raped by monsters; BDSM; hardcore sex; and the like.

The worst part of it was that it made my sexuality awake. I thought: "Ok, so this is what sex is like in real life" and then I started to feel aroused by it - and consequently, ashamed of becoming aroused by it. It is said that children are like sponges - they absorb everything they come in contact with. If you make children watch a certain type of porn, they will inevitably link it to sexual arousal. I soon started to think that all sex was dirty, naturally violent and degrading to women. I thought that, as I didn't want to be a b*tch nor to be hurt by men, I could never have sex.

Eventually my parents found out. My mother was so shocked she didn't speak to me for two days. My father cried and forced me to pray the Rosary (we're a Catholic family) so that God would forgive me for having seen porn (as if it were my fault, as if porn was something I had allowed to soil my innocence). Up to this day I don't know if they were sad because they realized I wasn't an asexual being (you know, sexism that says that women can't have sexual desires) or because I had been exposed to this sh*t that porn is.

Then I spent some years without porn. My mother eventually talked to me about porn and how it didn't reflect people's real sexual activities (well, as I know now, most people's). I remember crying after that talk. My mother helped me heal my sexuality. Now I know that sex shouldn't be a dirty thing, and that it is possible to have a healthy and fulfilling sexual life that, at the same time, respects people's bodies and dignity.

Years later I discovered radical feminism and it was like coming home. It is a disgrace to women that liberal feminism preaches that "porn is empowering" - If porn empowered women, men would be against it. If porn was good for women, girls and women wouldn't kill themselves after being exposed on pornographic photos and videos. If porn respected women, actresses wouldn't be degraded in almost every porn scene: rape, torture, racism and pedophilia would not be sexualized. To me, this is as clear as water. We must spread the word that porn is harmful to everyone, but specially to children and women.