While in high school and early college, I was fairly sexually repressed (right-wing, Bible-belt upbringing), so I used online chatrooms to explore my sexual curiosity. I would find random pictures of people on the internet, normal and nude, and send them to others, pretending to be the people in the photos. I used both male and female “identities,” as the gender wasn’t really what turned me on—it was the exhibitionist nature of sharing photos, even if they weren’t mine. I only traded with others claiming to be 18-plus, and I never met anyone. It was all seemingly harmless internet fun.
Now I’m a 23-year-old heterosexual male, and I just began dating a girl that I like a lot. The problem is that now I seem to have recurring negative feelings about those online experiences. Part of me feels like it was a terrible thing to do, and I’m an awful...