Steeped in the unrealistic ideals 1970s family television shows, Scott Allen’s expectations of love and intimacy were severely distorted when he saw his first ‘Playboy’ at age 7.

I was not raised with much parental involvement. In fact, by today’s standards, my parents’ involvement could be considered criminal due to the level of abuse, absence, and neglect. But I did have a TV to watch, and that TV taught me all that I knew about bonding with others. However, it didn’t teach me that real relationships are not safe.

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My favorite family sitcoms in the 1970s were The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. My idea of a normal life grew into an imaginary place where love and care would always solve the simple challenges of life. But Gilligan’s Island became my fantasy escape, a paradise island with all of the necessities in life, all carved from coconut trees, and the lovely girls—dazzling Ginger and the wholesomely beautiful Mary Ann. I still think of Mary Ann in a special way. She was someone my little boy self trusted and with whom I wanted to be.

One of the more industrious of my childhood friends often dragged treasures out of the trash in the alleyways. One day at school he said that he had found a whole box of Playboys. So, after school that day we sat quietly, flipping through over a 100 Playboy magazines. That was my first exposure to pornography.

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Playboy was very crafty at the tease, luring you with images of naive sensuality and sexiness yet never quite revealing the more delicate features of the female form. Nonetheless, I never felt the same. Something deep within my seven-year-old mind had shifted. I felt different, more grown up but not comfortable, more of an edgy, uneasy feeling. I wanted to see more Playboys, that was for sure! On that day I unknowingly began a formidable journey—to know a real woman. I was armed for my quest with nearly completely dysfunctional emotions and a heavy cloak of a TV-induced sense of normalcy.

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Early in my 17th year I became acquainted with the totality of the female form without the obscured poses and unfortunate staples—I lost my virginity. I now felt like a real man without the young man’s mystery gnawing at my psyche. I felt calm, soothed, and certain. Yes, this was a good feeling, one that I intended to feel forever.

As life progressed and girlfriends came into my life with greater ease and went away with less difficulty, I enjoyed the occasional porn mags, then videos and DVDs. Commercial pornography such as Penthouse became much more explicit by the mid 1990s, and by the time internet porn hit the globe, all sense of mystery was gone, and I felt like my sense of morality was slipping away.

I felt instantly rewarded from online porn, like one of those laboratory rats pounding on a button to send a pulse through an electrode into the pleasure center of my brain. The strong, knowing, and manly sensation that I briefly felt when I was 17 had become a seductive mirage toward which I clicked more frequently and for longer visits while alone with my computer. I would never reach that ultimate sensation but only sustain more tolerance for the opiate, of which I would consume longer and nastier doses. I became addicted to this fantasy, addicted to chasing a mirage that always lured me further, as if with the next click I would reach my destiny.

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My love relationships always would become flat from silently critiquing my girlfriends and whenever possible, launching expeditions into solitary escapism. I craved the rush of new opportunity, the fuel to reach my goal, which was locked within my physical memory, trapped in blood and bones.

My body felt what it wanted and needed but could not comprehend that those drives and needs were not within the world in which I lived; they were a fantasy, and I was merely and simply the spectator of an illusion, an endless shopper. I was swept into feeling intimate bonds with total strangers who so often were exposing their sacredness in order to be paid, or even to pay their captors in some cases.

For me to awaken to this conflicting reality felt like Neo, awakening in The Matrix; my relational life was devoid of real connection. What I felt and experienced was simply an artificial reality, perpetuated by a manipulating sales campaign.

I became aware that I was leaving wreckage behind me in failed relationships and finally admitted to myself that it was me who was not present and remained shallow and critical. How could I be committed to one woman when so often I was feeling the fantasy bond of intimacy with 100s or even 1000s of others?

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I’ve been in therapy for several years now, trying to reconcile my senses and regain, or actually build, my connections to real life, uncontrollable and filled with humans who are sometimes not so accepting. I’ve realized that by being hooked on the pleasure button of porn that I was ignoring and bypassing all of the real pleasures in relational and sexual life.

Some of my guy friends, who likely are addicts themselves, say that I’m getting wimpy and sensitive, and I see them becoming less and less in touch with their wives or girlfriends, kids, and businesses. Am I delusional, or am I awakening? Too sensitive, or becoming alive?

I realize that I may have been more prone to addiction due to my unhealthy childhood, but I have become aware that the influence of porn is powerful enough to derail even those who did have healthy and truly normal childhoods, with both parents present and functional in their lives.

As I struggle to see and feel the pure beauty within a real woman-being, I am often haunted by the effects and memory of my porn use, and even still yearn for sweet Mary Ann and the innocent attractions that I felt for her. The qualities she represented to me are here with me today in the real woman that I love, along with so many more qualities, because she is real, and I am not going to click away or change this channel!

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In gratitude to Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, who died Tuesday, 7/12/11 at the age of 94.

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—Photo dierk schaefer/Flickr, Gilligan’s Island: mycotopia.net