I had a friend in high school whose dad collected pornography. This was the mid-nineties in a Canadian suburb, no internet, no phones, no algorithm quietly memorizing what we liked so it could serve us more of it. If you wanted to see a naked woman, you had to know someone whose father kept magazines in a drawer he thought was secret.

After school we’d go to her house and I’d flip through those magazines as fast as a cartoon flipbook, filing every busty woman away in my mind for later review, while my friend sat on the carpet half-watching me and half-watching the door because her dad got home at 5:30.

She was not interested. She thought I was being weird. I was being weird. I was also young and queer and having the time of my life.

I already knew I liked breasts before I ever cracked one of those magazines. I knew it from every sliver of side-boob in a PG-13 movie and every episode of “Baywatch,” from “Charlie’s Angels” and Dolly Parton and the older sister of a girl I went to summer camp with who walked into the lake in a white t-shirt and walked out of it looking like a problem I wanted to have. The magazines didn’t teach me anything. They confirmed something I already suspected about myself and handed me a more specific vocabulary for it, the way a map confirms a country you’ve already been walking around in.

This is what pornography does for most people if they’re being honest. There’s a lot of hand-wringing about the impact of porn on our psyches—and there’s some research to suggest that’s warranted. After all, porn is a much different animal now than some secreted pages in your friend’s dad’s drawer. It can influence what we think is normal, but it can also affirm.  

My friend Sarah is a graphic designer who I’ve known since we were both too young to be telling each other these things.

“Anal. First thing I ever saw,” she said about the first porn she encountered. “Pop-up on a Kazaa download, I just knew. Like immediately. That’s the one. I’ve been dealing with men acting shocked about it ever since and honestly it’s exhausting. Can you imagine asking to see the wine list and being told to lower your voice?”

Sarah did not arrive at her preference the way I arrived at mine. Sarah was minding her own business trying to download a Limp Bizkit song and got ambushed by a preference that has outlasted three relationships, a marriage, and most of her furniture. She describes it the way other women describe the first time they saw the ocean.

Most girls today see pornography for the first time before they’ve been on a date. I think about that sometimes and have complicated feelings about it, but mostly I think about what it must do to a brain to have the buffet delivered before the appetite.

A magazine is a finite object. You can flip it closed. The images in it exist in a specific quantity and when you have looked at all of them there are no more, and so you look at them again, and you notice things you didn’t notice the first time, and you start to develop a taste, the way you develop a taste for anything you’re only allowed a little of.

A phone is a river you can’t stop. It knows what you paused on and serves you 14 more of it and then 14 more, until you don’t know anymore whether you found the thing or the thing found you

My friend Daniel had this experience with MILFs.

“I thought I was into older women. For years. MILF porn, exclusively, I had the whole thing mapped out in my head. And then I actually slept with one. She was gorgeous, she was into it. I could not get it up,” he said. “Not once. I went home and I thought about it for about a week and I finally understood that I didn’t want older women. I wanted the idea of an older woman wanting me. Taking control of me. But I didn’t want that in real life. Not even a little. Which is a completely different thing.”

Daniel had been watching a movie about validation and mistaking it for a movie about sex, and his body was the first entity in his life honest enough to tell him so.

The anti-porn people say pornography rewires the brain and makes us want things we would not otherwise want. The pro-porn people say pornography is fantasy and has nothing to do with real desire. Both sides are wrong about half the time, which is the average of anyone who has ever claimed to have been certain about sex.

Sometimes the porn makes the preference. Sometimes the preference was already there. Sometimes the porn convinces you of a preference you don’t actually have, and you don’t find out until you are in bed with someone and your body votes against the story you’ve been telling.

What you saw first mattered less than you think. What you kept coming back to mattered more. And what you want now, in the dark, with an actual person whose weight is on top of you and whose breath is on your neck, is the only data worth anything at all.