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Content notes: This essay discusses some of my early experiences with cybersex. I was underage at the time (probably 12-14 in most cases). All of this was consensual on my part (personally, if not legally), but if underage sexuality squicks you out, that’s understandable and please feel free to skip this one! There are also mentions of master/slave language.

Cybersex in online roleplaying games made me feel like an adult for one of the first times in my life. In some ways, no other online sexual experiences I’ve had since then have quite scratched the same itch.

I was always a sexually precocious kid, scribbling anatomically uninformed erotica in my journals and googling for lists of masturbation techniques to marvel over. Porn didn’t particularly interest me – there were few safe porn sites at the time that would neither load a virus onto our shared family computer nor crash it with pop-up ads blaring autoplay moans – but I loved to read about sex. That’s still largely how my sexuality works to this day: although I’ve gained an appreciation for some types of porn, in many cases I’d rather read someone’s detailed cunnilingus guide or a well-crafted erotic fanfiction story than ogle cumshots and gangbangs.

Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) were some of my first online social spaces, after early forays into ICQ chatrooms and TeenOpenDiary blogging. My two favorite games in this genre were Furcadia, a highly user-customizable world where everyone was an anthropomorphized animal and you had to learn a basic coding language to craft your own private rooms, and Runescape, a vast medieval fantasy world involving quests, guilds, mining, and magic. It was in these two strange universes that I began to understand the massive implications the internet had for people like me, people who were shy and reserved in the “real world” but came alive online, making friends and having adventures.

I was surely too young to be having cybersex, legally speaking. That’s the detail of this story that makes me cringe to type out. Sometimes I told other users my real age – and many of them were, or at least were pretending to be, teens as well – but sometimes I didn’t. Young people’s burgeoning sexuality is a highly controversial and fraught topic I’m probably not qualified to make any definitive statements about. But I can tell you that in my case, everything I pursued in these mediums was something I had consented to and was not traumatized by, and any time anyone made me feel at all uncomfortable, I had no qualms about closing the window or teleporting to a different corner of the virtual world I was navigating.

In Furcadia, as I mentioned, you could create your own areas – called “dreams” – by coding them yourself and then uploading them to a communal space, where others could visit them if they so chose. I have always been profoundly nerdy and was immediately interested in this aspect of the game, for the huge amount of freedom it provided. It wasn’t long before I started building myself elaborate mansions with big, ornate bedrooms, complete with doors that locked at the flip of a lever due to my careful coding. It delighted me to build secret entrances, hidden teleportation pads, dim dank dungeons no one would know about unless I showed them.

There was an 18+ area in Furcadia, where, of course, I spent a good deal of time long before turning 18. Within that area was a place called The Slave Auction. (I must note here that the language of slavery is no longer something I’m comfy playing with, in kink or otherwise, due to, y’know, centuries of systemic white supremacy and horrific violence against enslaved Black people. I’m white so that language isn’t mine to reclaim or subvert.) In that area, you could line up to be “auctioned off” to a buyer in the crowd. No money was exchanged, actual or virtual; this was all fantasy. I find it telling that this was probably the communal space where I spent the most time in my years as a Furcadia user, despite believing until about a decade later that I was vanilla and had no kinks. (Oh, precious baby Kate, there is so much you didn’t know.)

When someone “bought” me, typically I would take them back to my “dream,” lead them to the ostentatious bedroom I’d hand-coded for the occasion, and commence having cybersex.

Much like sexting today, different people had different ways of approaching cybersex. I would always click on potential partners to see the bio they’d written for themselves, and if it was a long paragraph full of big words and impeccably-employed punctuation, I knew I’d get the type of cyber-fuck I liked best: articulate, loquacious, and seductive. When I had them in my virtual bed, we’d start describing – in walls of text that took so long to type, you could be waiting 3-5 minutes between missives – removing each other’s clothes, kissing, touching, and whatever came next. My replies were probably fairly generic and naïve. I was much more interested in what the other person typed.

It’s telling, too, that I tended to guide the conversation toward cunnilingus. Being a person who’d learned to masturbate via only clitoral stimulation, and had rarely – if ever – done anything else, I found descriptions of penetrative sex boring and hard to relate to. Instead I would prompt my pixelated paramour to craft strings of sentences about going down on me, and would reply with paragraph-length descriptions of my own moaning and writhing. A pillow princess in the extreme.

There were people who, upon noticing these limitations of my lust, would vanish to another realm, leaving me alone in my abandoned dream. That is fair enough. But there were also people who would stick around the whole time, giving me what I obviously wanted, and those people shaped my sexuality in ways they’ll never know. These were some of the first instances of me ever formulating a clear sexual desire and asking someone else (albeit indirectly) to fulfill it. The skills I took away from these interactions (including typing fast one-handed) would serve me for many years to come.

While some therapists and friends of mine, in the years since, have sometimes (very reasonably) expressed concern upon hearing about these youthful dalliances, for me, cybersex was never a site of victimization or violation. I know many people have had a different experience. I’m lucky enough to be able to credit those late nights of furtive typing with making me into the sexually fulfilled, adventurous, and communicative person I am today.

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.