DON'T Enter Mirror
My earliest memories are of a private, serene disembodiment.
It was a time in which iridescent discs were sold containing the first three-dimensional virtual worlds.
It was morning, the dawn of the silicon sun. Interactive computer entertainment had entered the third dimension.
Lacking the literacy to understand, these mysterious iridescent discs did not contain mere goal oriented toys but instead secret entrances to entire living virtual worlds. My memories of this time in my life is not that of a boy cross legged, grey controller on grey carpet, it is of myself soaring through polygonal realities of lurid, plastic beauty. Boundless, bodiless.
In video games you are often no one. You are like some kind of invisible force willing change into the universe, driving other entities, it is unclear where you begin or end. This suited me well.
In time, what I would miss most from this era was the solitude it brought. There was a serenity to having your own private virtual self in an otherwise physical world. It felt so intimate, a similarity to dreams in that they could only happen within me, not experienced or shared by anyone other than myself.
I feel grateful to have had experienced this short-lived era, yet the silicon sun continued to rise, and with my own eyes I saw the irridescent discs grow tendrils, networking into each other. The simplicity was lost, yet no longer was I alone in my virtual world, instead I shared it with every living person on the planet. It was a time of incredible change, suddenly information was democratised, the virtual worlds connected and impossibly large to comprehend. Yet now as I shared this place, now I was perceived, and therefore no longer bodiless.
It was during this time I began entering puberty. Confused of my emerging sexuality and the dissonance between myself and the expectations placed upon me I once again turned to the hall of networked mirrors for answers. I discovered many fascinating forms.
I wish to share with you now some of these early discoveries of mine...
This is mpreg, or male pregnancy. Specifically, depicting characters from the Japanese anime Dragon Ball Z, Vegeta pregnant with a child shared with Goku.
Images such as these were commonplace on (the perhaps aptly named) Deviant-Art-dot-com. Deviant Art was a kind of early social media for sharing user created artwork, probably the first website I signed up for, partially to upload my own drawings and mostly to view age restricted amateur hentai.
There are of course, countless subgenres of these communities, such as vore, unbirthing, guro, giantess, tentacles to name only a few. However there are two others in particular I wish to call attention to, two fantasies of the internet that seem to have persisted throughout the decades...
The first is the furry fandom - a subculture of anthropomorphic animal alter-egos. Furries (as they are known) maintain a unique community. Most furries have alter-egos (aka fursonas) and they socialise with other furries online on forums, chat rooms in perhaps the largest and longest ongoing LARP of all time. There is also a significant visual component to the furry community, with furry artists receiving commissions from furries to draw their fursonas. Some of it is platonic, often it is erotic.
The second form of internet fantasy is futanari, or futa. Chicks with impossibly enormous dicks splurting buckets of cum like firehoses. There was often an aspect of humiliation on the part of the futanari woman, like her horse cock was a source of great shame and embarrassment, burgeoning out of her panties as she trips in her high heels. Another trope was like a sexual aggression - although pretty, these girls were macho fuckers who always topped...
years later, I remember being about 18 years old and sheepishly entering an all-hours adult store of garish yellow painted cinderblocks with a friend who wanted to check it out.
It was not what I expected, instead of all the toys and leather I was expecting, it was instead like a hoarders room of cheaply made DVD's.
And yet there was something odd about these DVD's … Although there was a handful of the generic typical porn I was expecting, the vast majority of it was chicks with dicks. Blonde bimbos with rock hard double dees and veiny monster cocks. Somehow, the crudely drawn anime women from internet forums had become real.
I was confused as to who these people were... Was this what a drag queen was? Were they hemaphrodites, intersex people, women somehow born with a fully developed penis and an otherwise female body? This confused me due to the sheer magnitude of the DVDs, surely this kind of intersex body couldn't be this common? If it were an intersex condition, wouldn't statistically only a fraction of these people go into porn at all ? Where were all the others? Were they among us? Had I ever met a woman like this and not known it? Why had I never heard about this?
Over the years I slowly started noticing other cracks in the mirrors. These images of fantasy oozing out into the real world. Did you know annually in Berlin there is Eufurence, the largest furry convention in Europe?. For a weekend, those cartoon wolves and bears, those imagined alter egos, become real. Taking form they dance, they make friends, they fuck each other in hotel rooms. They support and validate each others inner self and for just one weekend create a new world in which they belong, before once more returning to the mirror from which they came.
This is the paart you've been waiting for, where I tell you of my breakthrough, of how I knew I had to completely change every aspect of my life, and my self.
As children, teenagers, young people, we look outward to the world for rolemodels, stories, worlds in which to find ourselves.
What do you do, and who do you become, when there was no one.
When left alone, raised by refractions of light from wolves of shimmering glass do you too, become no one, nothing at all?
To be feminine in any way was so utterly taboo that it became literally unimaginable to me.
The point I am trying to make with all this, is without the right to exist, I dove into the strange, unregulated, forgotten places of other peoples dreams and fantasies, preserved in silicon and plastic. Scavenging the detritus of fringe websites, sticky carpet adult stores and sweat and cum stained fur-suits in order to find myself.
It all makes me wonder, what else do we not know? what else is presently unimaginable, yet to be discovered in the ooze leaking out of some forgotten cracked corner... Are you even now looking at yourself through patterns of light so distorted you cannot yet recognise yourself within them.
The halls stretch infinitely and recursively, sometimes I wish I could find my way back but I know that by now I am too far gone.
I entered the mirror, and I regret nothing.