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.)