Why Animated Porn Is the Only Porn Worth Watching

When you think of cartoon or animated porn, there’s a good chance the first thing that comes to mind is a boulder-breasted anime girl or an x-rated My Little Pony. It’s also possible that when you picture the average consumer of porn like this, you imagine a basement-dwelling single dude who plays a lot of RPGs.

I am not that person, though I do almost exclusively consume animated porn. From hentai to artwork posted on sites like DeviantArt to erotic Kickstarted collections like Smut Peddler, I like smutty illustrations of all sorts—and I’m not alone!

In both 2015 and 2016, “cartoon” and “hentai” were in the top twenty most popular search terms worldwide on Pornhub’s annual Year in Review—the site’s exhaustive annual look at the internet’s porn habits. “Cartoon” was one of the U.S.’s top ten search terms both years as well.

Animated porn has a long, international history—from the erotic woodblock prints of Japan’s Heian period to some of the earliest animated erotic cartoons of the Roaring Twenties (because of course once the moving picture came along, porn came with it). So if hentai and anime communities still thrive online and there are sites dedicated to Disney-inspired porn, it seems a shame that more people don’t talk about what makes this type of erotica so great.

Clinical psychologist David Ley, PhD, author of Ethical Porn for Dicks, says that “animated erotica has been underground for a long time, largely because it’s often misunderstood.”

Not only are cartoons something we regularly associate with childhood, but the style of a lot of pornographic cartoons is such that some characters featured may appear to be under the age of consent. “Though I might question how exactly you determine the age of a fictional animated character,” Ley added in an email to Glamour.

But there’s a simple reason I like animated porn: The people in animated porn are not real.

I’m bad at turning off the realities of the real world, even when I’m horny. I watch porn with a critical eye, which isn’t a bad thing. Most of us could probably stand to hold ourselves to higher standards when it comes to porn consumption. But it got to a point where I couldn’t even enjoy the porn I watched. I’ve had orgasms ruined because as I got close—surprise!—the person I was watching got a cumshot to the face. For some people, that might come as a pleasant surprise. I am not one of them.

Rather than masturbating, I’d sit there with my Hitachi between my legs thinking things like, “Oh, I hope she wanted to do that,” or, “They do not look like they’re having a good time.”

With animated porn, you don’t have to worry about those things. Why? Because, again, they’re not real people!

It’s extremely easy to stumble across material you might find personally disturbing while looking for porn, and I had a hard time moving on when I did. But that kind of thing doesn’t really happen with animated erotica for me. I can see all sorts of fucked up things I’m not into IRL and just keep clicking by, because those fucked up things are happening to a cartoon.

(I do think it’s important to note that there are some great companies out there that make hot porn and treat their actors well. But ethically consuming porn also means actually paying for it, and—let’s be real—for plenty of people, jack-off material is not always in the budget.)

I also use animated erotica to indulge the darker side of what gets me off. Plenty of us have them: Those fantasies that would be impossible or illegal to act out in real life. The question is whether or not we allow ourselves to explore them—I’m talking about things like the very commonly-held rape fantasy, but also exotic flavors, like tentacle porn.

To some people, even acknowledging these desires is a kind of taboo act, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t totally healthy and appropriate ways to do so. Writer and therapist Dr. Meg-John Barker says that if we want to explore those types of fantasies, “It’s important to find ways of experiencing them which aren’t unethical or non-consensual.” You can satisfy desires of all sorts because—one more time!—people and scenarios in animated porn are not real. You are not actually looking at a guy being fucked by a unicorn because not only is that not a real guy, but unicorns don’t even exist! (Sadly.)

A friend of mine once told me that she’d never been triggered by a cartoon, and it got me thinking. Could animated erotica be a way to offer arousing stimuli to someone who is negatively affected by most live-action porn? Dr. Ley thinks so. “I’ve had several patients with trauma histories where this was their erotica of choice,” he says. “It’s a good example of the diversity of human sexuality, and the ways we each adapt our sexuality to fit our needs and personalities.”

OK, and sometimes it might just be about seeing our favorite childhood characters having sex. Which is totally fine! “For a lot of people,” says LCSW and Certified Sex Therapist Melissa Novak, “their first memories are of being turned on by Beauty and the Beast or Snow White, and with animated porn you actually get to [as an adult] play out those childhood fantasies that you didn’t understand.”

Also guilty. I mean, have you seen those three sisters who totally had the hots for Gaston? No? Just me? Moving on, then.

But no matter what kind you’re into, animated porn is just a depiction of a sexual fantasy that can’t be explored in real life. While it’s not for everyone, it’s something that’s been great for me. A lot of the images are really beautiful (even if they’re also occasionally kind of twisted). Even better, masturbating is less of a chore because looking for porn is genuinely fun now. Because, really, what’s better at the end of a long day than being able to sit back, relax, and look at pretty pictures that also get me off?

This article is part of Summer of Sex, our 12-week long exploration of how women are having sex in 2017.

More Summer of Sex:

—Why Women Like Getting Off to Gifs, Thanks to Tumblr
—Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Sex in Space
—Is It Cheating If You F*ck a Robot?