Online porn was an occasional guilty secret for me before I started investing in pleasure. I’d cue up PornHub or another tube site and scroll through for a scene that piqued my interests without seeming too fake or degrading. The quick hit of free smut always did the trick for me, orgasmically speaking, but it still left me feeling unclean in the way that, say, using a truck stop bathroom did. I was always left wondering if the female performers I’d just gotten off to had been mistreated behind the scenes.

It’s hard to resist the lure of free content, which is why the male-centered PornHub is one of the top 20 most-trafficked websites in the U.S. Even after I’d decided it was probably not worth the guilt, I still returned to the tube sites sporadically, not really satisfied but also not bold enough to research other options.

Then I read Emily Witt’s Future Sex, which took me inside a live porn shoot in San Francisco filmed by kink.com. After the scene Ms. Witt interviewed the blond star, Penny Pax, and asked if she’d experienced any “moments of genuine pleasure.”

“Yeah. Like, the whole thing!” Pax told her. (Penny Pax has since become one of my favorite performers.)

Curious, I put the book down and cued up kink.com, where a brand new BDSM world awaited me. Other than some light spanking, I’d never ventured into rough play before, but I was starting to realize I enjoyed being dominated—and seeing it happen to others in a situation that I knew was safe.

What Kink offered was an entire fantasy universe, a place where imagination reigned supreme was treated as a key aspect of porn and where consent was built into every video. Kink let me watch a few 45-second trailers for free—just enough to whet my appetite for the full menu—and then told me I needed to pony up and become a paying member.

So for the first time in my life, I got out my credit card and bought a subscription. I justified the monthly cost as a kind of gym membership, except it was working out a very specific set of muscles. And let’s just say that once I was liberated from guilt and determined to get my money’s worth, I definitely got into shape.

After I made the consumer leap, I tried out Lust Cinema and The Crash Pad too—although I kept coming back to Kink for its efficient format, smart sense of humor, and unique before-and-after interviews in which female performers name their safewords, list the sex acts they won’t do, and (afterward) say what they liked best about filming the scene. On all three sites, I could search for my particular turn-ons and enjoy great aesthetic value, especially when I compared it to the seedy porn tubes I used to frequent.

Paying for porn is not only the best way to get the hottest content and satisfy your specific interests; it’s also an ethical choice. According to adult entertainment journalist and Glamour contributor Lynsey G (who chronicles her years writing about the industry in a new memoir, Watching Porn), paying is the only way to guarantee that you’re not accidentally endorsing exploitation. You want to support a company that pays its actors fairly, treats them well on set, and always prioritizes consent. Think of it like the locavore movement for sex: It’s better to know where your content comes from before you consume it.