The Archive

I was exactly the kind of guy who met women only on screens: coder, gamer, the type who’d rather spend fourteen hours optimizing someone else’s website than actually talk to people. So naturally my sexual education came from Tumblr, which back then was essentially an endless, meticulously organized library of pornography.

There were thousands of blogs dedicated to specific obsessions. Each had its own aesthetic, its own strange logic. Some were crude about it, just stated plainly what they were. Others attempted artistry with fuzzy lighting and pretentious names. Most didn’t bother trying. You could spend entire evenings jumping between them, following chains of preferences, getting lost in someone else’s taxonomy of desire. The weird part was how you’d organize it like a hobby, give it structure and levels, as if that made it something other than compulsive scrolling. But having the framework helped. If you could systematize your hunger, make it taxonomic, maybe it wasn’t just need. Maybe it was a project, a hobby, something respectable.

That whole era of the internet is gone now. Tumblr purged the adult content, the blogs vanished, and the digital world I lived in for years just ceased to exist like it was never there. It’s strange how thoroughly the internet can erase itself. I don’t particularly miss it, though I remember it clearly enough—the specific texture of very late night, the glow of the screen, different image sizes and color grades bleeding into each other. I learned nothing useful. No technique, no insight into real bodies or what anyone actually wanted. But that was never really the point.

The people I knew back then—and I didn’t know many people—would have probably been horrified if they knew how much time I spent there. But then they didn’t know much about how I spent any of my time, which was mostly alone in front of a screen. You don’t tell people. You just do it, quietly, in the dark, for years.