Today I woke to find a snake coiled at the bottom of my bedside water glass. It was past 10 and the only thing that propelled me awake was the promise of fresh, Monday content on the Internet. My mouth was dry, my head wrapped in a towel of sleepy anxiety, so I did not notice the beast from my hunched position in my bed. Lifting the glass up to my mouth I finally saw the grey serpent at the bottom, wedged in the lower third. The water it displaced was sullied a sort of yellow and smelled. Disgusted, I simply put the glass back down on my nightstand. The snake writhed.

I went about my mid-day routine, forgetting the snake as I brushed my teeth and made my bed. Once or twice I heard the snake spasm at the bottom of the glass, but ultimately paid it little attention. As I ate my microwave lunch at my desk, I looked at the glass just in time to see it sputtered and die.

Over the course of the afternoon, the snake decomposed – the flakes of dead skin and muscle tearing and rising to the surface. By evening my room reeked of wet, fallen leaves and I decided to finally throw the snake out. The sun down, I took the glass into the kitchen and dumped the white, dead snake into the sink and went back into my room.

Do you remember how you felt when you were seven and you saw your first porn? That afternoon you were walking in the woods near your house when you found a porn video lying on the leafy ground. You knelt down and poked its large and colorful cardboard case with a stick. What the movie was called you don’t remember, but you do remember the shock you felt when you turned it over and saw the many new angles on female anatomy the video’s back cover revealed.

Penises you’d seen before (you had one, after all). But vaginas were mysterious things. You had seen a few in real life when you were younger, when boys and girls shared the same bathroom in pre-school. Girls were gross enough already, but you were baffled when they told you they didn’t have a penis. You recall pulling your pants down while a girl pulled her skirt up to compare the differences. It was all harmless of course, just as it was all hairless, and you came away with the conclusion that “girls had nothing while boys had something”.

But the vaginas on the video box weren’t anything like those simple examples. They were creatures of their own – hairy and red, mean. You backed away from the box like you had discovered a dead body and ran right home.

You told you mother about the video and she sighed and asked, “Where is it again?” She took ten minutes and went to the woods to deal with the offending item. When she returned, she told you that she had thrown it into the nearby pond. “That stuff was filthy. You did the right thing by telling me,” she said. You were proud of yourself.

For a couple of years after you were happy to think that you would never look at pornography. Not only was it disgusting, but also you were sure that one day your pornographic abstinence and respect toward women would win over your equally pure wife-to-be.

But then, like a bar fight breaks out in a Western, puberty broke out in you. All of a sudden you were noticing and comparing the breasts on every girl you saw: big ones, small ones, young ones, old ones. “I must study them,” your body cried, as if to say, “They are the key to why hair is growing in weird places.”

At the same time you were picking up on words like “clitoris” on TV or in movies, words you had never heard before or had thought were just made-up. You felt guilty asking your dad what “fellatio” meant, but the word burned hard inside you – clearly it was essential that you know what it meant. You cornered him, and when you got your answer (“It’s an action, like a verb.”) you stewed all weekend trying to figure out what that meant.

“The Talk” followed soon after, your father concisely explaining the basics of the reproductive process. Penis, vagina, eggs, sperm, it was all a tapestry. “So there is something to these vaginas after all,” you thought, vowing to look further into it.

You sought everything you could find on sex, with the premium cable channels becoming your most valuable resource on the subject. Any and every movie or program with a “Nudity” disclaimer before it demanded your attention. Most of what you wound up watching were boring detective films with terrible acting and fake sex. Every time you watched one of these movies you cursed yourself for letting that forest porn go. “There it was, right before me and I just turned away,” you lamented.

But then one Thursday when you had a substitute in math class, Andrew Fortunato changed everything

“Where did find that,” all the boys clamored at the back of the classroom. “Look at those boobs!”

“I got it off the internet,” Andrew Fortunato said. He swatted hands away from the piece of paper he was holding and you finally caught a good glimpse of what was on it. It was a picture of a man and woman having sex. Though poorly printed, it was a graphic meshing of genitals, just like what you had seen in the woods years earlier.

All of the boys in that class were inspired to go home and use the Internet for dirty means. The girls on the other side of the room all sighed, sparking a feeling of guilt in your loins. Weren’t you betraying your old promise to be clean for all of womankind?

Regardless, you were huddled over your family’s computer, slowly but determinedly downloading pictures over the modem, looking over your shoulder the whole time. You cribbed whatever hardcore pornography you could find from free the corners of the Internet, which was not so easy as your classmate made it seem. Following his example, however, you found yourself printing out what you found so that you could study it elsewhere in greater privacy.

This system worked well, but you feared your mother finding any trace of you dragging your depraved puberty across the house. Imagined outbursts of “How could you look at this on the family computer” or “This is so degrading to women” went through your head anytime you erased the soiled Internet history or hid away your nest of printed pictures. Every now and then the guilt would bubble up and tempt you to do something rash like get rid of everything you had collected. But the urge to see the porn would always return, and the cycle would start over again.

You were doing pretty well until that one day you got home from school. Entering the kitchen you saw that old backpack you were keeping your pornography in on the kitchen counter. You pulse quickened, you knew your mom had found your stash. You’d been found out and you’d be scarred with embarrassment and parent’s disapproval for the rest of your days.

You contemplated running, or taking the item and hiding it away again, as if by doing so you could avoid any discussion before it began. But before you could do anything you heard your mother approaching you from behind.

“So I was looking for an old blanket in your closet and I found your little stash,” she said, “stash” piercing in to your stomach. You gritted your teeth.

“I’m really disappointed in you,” she continued. “Do you have any idea how degrading that trash is for women?” The berating continued for dozens of minutes before ending with her dismissal.

“I’m not even going to touch it, it’s so disgusting. Go wait in your room until your father gets home, he can throw it away then.” And he did, the only defense-of-being-male he offered being a secret shrug behind his wagging finger.

That night you couldn’t sleep. Doused in embarrassment, your thoughts ran. “How could I have been so careless?” you pondered, pushing your palms into your eyes. Above your head the faces of disappointed women floated, but as the sleepless night ground on their expressions turn coy. Your embarrassment turned frustration turned arousal.

You sulked for a few days after, upset at not being able to gaze upon any bare breasts or bums. For sustenance you watched rap videos on MTV, eating up the bouncing, sweaty goods on display among the quick, syncopated cuts. But despite the exceptionally curvy women and exciting beats, you failed to reach those delirious heights of titillation that the porn allowed.

It was hard to concentrate on rap videos, let alone anything else on TV or the computer as your mother seemed to burst into the room every half hour or so. Instinct told your hand to immediately change channel or close the browser – even if you were watching something innocuous like the History Channel and even with the parental installed internet safety blocks on the internet. She, with her eagle eyes, would notice this of course and demand to know “What were you looking at just now?”

These were tough times for you, a young man just blossoming in his pants. But where would you be if things had any different? Without printed-out women your interaction with the opposite sex became limited to the actual real-life kind. If you could have stayed at home ogling paper cut outs of women lying naked in beds would you have gone to the school dance that Friday night? No.

There you were, lined up against the wall with your friends, all in button-down shirts open over t-shirts, with awkward slacks. Your pimpled faces staring at the girls in their tight jeans clustered in the middle of the gym, which seemed cavernous in the dark of the dance compared to the brightness of the day.

Julie Murray came forward, out of the twirling colored light and towards you.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” you said. You looked Julie up and down, your eyes staying on her shoes when they got there. She was cute enough, with a nice smile among her brown hair, though definitely on the chubbier side. You had known her for years, but had only this year had a class with her, where you chatted occasionally and nervously.

“Want to dance?” she asked.

“Yeah,” you replied, following her out onto the dance floor just as a slow song began to play. She faced you, smiled, and put her arms around your shoulders. You put yours around her shoulders before correcting them at her waist.

The two of you swayed back and forth, she looking to her right and you to yours for the whole four and a half minutes. In that time you thought about the vaginas you’d seen, on paper, on screen, and the vagina that was there in front of you. You’d never thought about Julie Murray’s vagina before, but now that it was so close it was all you could think of.

The music swelled as you did and just as you went to press against her –giving into your frenzied erection – the song shifted and she broke her arms off from around you.

“Well, thanks,” she smiled and trotted off to her group of friends, leaving you on the floor as a Nelly song blared.

You slowly walked backwards, then turned to look at your friends who were still against the gym wall, sans women.

“Shit, awesome,” said one friend, and another slapped you on the back.

“Yeah, it was,” you said. And you knew it was awesome, and you’d remember how you felt the first time you danced with a girl.