I might have mentioned that over the summer I bought myself a new computer. I needed one since my old one was (a) really old and (b) about to be out of support for Windows 10. I bought a Windows 11 laptop (that I’m not super-happy with, to be honest, but I’m stuck with it for a while now — the problem isn’t Windows, it’s the laptop itself) while on vacation at my parents’ house and proceeded to transfer all of my data over to it. 

Including my emotional support porn. 

I’ve been watching porn on my computer for decades now — ever since my friend Mike gave me a couple of images on a floppy disk. I have no idea where he got them from. In college my dorm complex had a LAN where you could share files, and a lot of people shared porn so I downloaded it, watched it, and either kept it or deleted it. 

In the 2000s, I got together with a friend of mine and we got into stripmining porn sites — buying a membership, downloading as much as humanly possible over the next month, and then canceling our membership. We did this with RealSpankings, ifeelmyself, and a few others I can’t remember. I’m sure that’s not how the memberships were intended to be used, but we weren’t hacking or pirating anything; we were paying for the right to download and watch what was available. 

I went through my phase of IRC and torrenting as well, but once tube sites like Pornhub became easier to use and gathered larger content libraries there was no real reason to download porn anymore. I did stripmine Ersties at the start of the pandemic, but I still haven’t gone through and watched everything. 

In the days when you had to create your own playlists on your computer, I found it easiest to classify my porn by type — spanking or non-spanking, what sex each participant was, what they were doing, and one folder of miscellaneous favorites. To this day you can still go into a specific folder on my computer and find my meticulously-organized collection. Plus, I have several CDs of archived material — stuff I obtained, watched, decided I didn’t like, but didn’t want to delete. After all, I might need it again someday. 

I have no idea where those CDs are, by the way. Somewhere in my house is the best I can do. 

I would say that over the course of this year I’ve gone into that folder once, not including the time I spent moving it from my old laptop to my new one. I watched a couple of videos, but I didn’t use them as masturbatory material. It was really more like seeing old friends and reliving the memories of when I first discovered certain videos, actors, or scenarios. These days porn is easily-available online (though in some places you need a VPN). Some of my old favorites can be found on the tube sites. On rare occasions I’ll pull one up and watch it, and maybe see what else the algorithm has to offer me. 

But for the most part I don’t even look at the porn. I just hang onto it. It’s my emotional support porn. I would feel sad if I deleted it, and it’s really not taking up that much space. My hard drive is 2TB; there’s plenty of room. I think for as long as I live there’ll be a folder on my computer with this content, and even when I’m eighty or ninety I might still open my laptop and watch one of those old videos, just for nostalgia’s sake.

And a little emotional support.