I'm a millennial, which means I was part of the first generation that grew up with a computer in the bedroom and high-speed internet to go with it. I started watching porn as a teenager, and somewhere along the way I built up a pretty impressive personal collection. It never once occurred to me that I was supposed to feel ashamed of it. I knew I loved watching people fuck, and it felt like something to celebrate, not hide.
By the time I got to college, my entire dorm was wired into a shared porn server that half the guys on my floor used. I didn't need a study to tell me plenty of men loved porn — I could see it with my own eyes. My roommates came to me to talk about sex. Some of them watched porn right alongside me. None of us thought much of it at the time, but looking back, that was real bonding — a bunch of sexually leading-edge guys figuring out who we were, together.
After college, I started building my own career and finally got honest with myself: I'm bisexual. Bi men tend to run hot — high libido, strong interest in sex and porn — and once I understood that about myself, a lot of things clicked into place. The reason I never quite felt like I fit in with the crowd that treated sex as something dirty or shameful wasn't a flaw. It was just a different wiring, and I'd spent years assuming something was wrong with me for having it.
I found Tumblr back when it still allowed adult content, and in 2011 I started a blog called Fuck Yeah! Friendly Fire and eventually built an audience of hundreds of thousands of people who were hungry for the same message: that wanting this stuff doesn't make you broken. These days I'm building something new, Leading Edge Sex, on those same principles — curated content and real, researched commentary for sexually leading-edge men who are done apologizing.
Why I Wrote This Book
I was lucky. I wasn't raised in a house that treated sex or porn like something shameful, and I've got good parents to thank for that. But I've watched plenty of other guys — friends, readers, strangers in my inbox — twist themselves into knots over a "porn addiction" diagnosis that, as it turns out, isn't in the DSM-5, and that the ICD-11 files its one related diagnosis under impulse control, not addiction. They're not addicts. They're horny and ashamed, and somebody sold them the difference as a medical condition.
No More Porn Shame is the book I wish had existed when I was younger and occasionally still ran into people who made me feel like my desires were something to apologize for. It's not a clinical textbook, and it's not a permission slip to ignore an actual problem if you've got one. It's a real look at what the science says, written by a guy who's been exactly where you are and came out the other side without the shame.