Here are a couple of excerpts from an amusing article by Edward Keenan at EyeWeekly about why people are often afraid to examine and explore their own kinks:

“…It seems to me — perhaps because I’m a man — that this is especially true of men. And maybe we all prefer it that way, prefer that dudes keep the stash of porn in the back of the closet, never to be shared and never to be discussed. When we as a culture think of women masturbating, we see it as an act of self-actualization. Whether it’s Hollywood or a sex educator doing the portraying, the general picture is of a candlelit scene in the bathtub or on top of a freshly-laundered duvet in which a woman learns about her own body and her true self by taking things into her own hands. It’s a voyage of self-discovery.

For men, meanwhile, in both our broad cultural imagination and in our own individual minds, the voyage is a desperate journey into the heart of darkness. The idea that what we find there might be a reflection of our true selves is horrifying…

…Today, one sits alone at a computer with no limits but the imagination. And that has led to an odd situation that, as a “keep me completely anonymous” friend of mine explained recently, leads you into ever-darker corners of the jungle of your psyche — places you didn’t even know existed in your mind, and places you’d rather not go during daylight, places that scare you or kind of gross you out. As he said to me, when you encounter www.jizzonglasses.com for the first time, you’re kind of surprised it exists. What kind of pervert gets off on this? When you’re looking at it again for the 100th time a year later, you realize you’re the kind of pervert who gets off on it.

The number of patently odd, often degrading and weirdly specific porn niches that exist — take a Google wander through the initials DP, A2M, CFNM or DVDA for a relatively (I use that word advisedly) tame introduction to the world of porno pigeonholes. Is there something reassuring in finding that your masturbatory preference — for, say, blond, short-haired, pregnant hermaphrodites with small breasts and large nipples and painted toenails who stomp on balloons in the nude — is shared by enough other people to support a whole online industry producing material to feed it? Maybe. Is it reassuring enough that you’d want to tell anyone else in real life about it? Maybe not. After all, how could they not think of it every time they see you…?”

To read the article in full, click here.