As a 12-year-old girl, I didn’t quite know what to make of the sensations that overcame me when I played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

It felt like butterflies, only they fluttered much lower in my stomach, rising like a hot wave all the way up my body. If I’d looked in the mirror, my cheeks would’ve flushed scarlet.

The Prince was my first-ever sexy male video game protagonist crush. But he was far from my last. A desire to bang virtual leading men became a common thread for most of my favorite and formative gaming experiences in girlhood.

But today, I recognize that this wasn’t just a horny young girl discovering the great and terrible power of hormones for the first time. This was how I made the hyper-masculine world of video games work for me.

My virtual thirstiness unwittingly allowed me to embed my own fantasies and desires into games, a medium otherwise dominated exclusively by the desires and fantasies of boys and men.