I don't know what I am. I'm scared, and need advice.

This is something that I feel has been building for a number of years, which culminated in a minor breakdown this morning after a night of drinking (the drinking is unrelated/a non issue, it was a friend's birthday, not a regular thing).

Sorry if this ends up being horribly long, but I really do need advice on if what I have planned will help me.

Background:
Since about 13, now nearly 23, I've been delving more and more into different types of porn. It started out normal enough as any male teenager, finding pictures of nude women online. But I always seemed to need more as things got "stale". This led me down a path of a variety of things from viewing bestiality to eventual interest in illustrated, cartoon pornography of children of various ages. However, before I go any further, I should say that "real" CP was never something I tried to seek out, with the exception of stumbling across a few nudist websites.

To this day, real CP and any kind of actions with children in real life is not something I've come close to doing, despite the occasional fantasy in the back of my head. However, in recent years, I've joined an online community of fetish and kink roleplayers. These roleplays can vary from vanilla to those of extreme "ageplay" as it's called. Since discovering it, I've engaged in many dozens, possibly hundreds, of these roleplays with other adults in which fantasy scenes are constructed and acted out in text based role play, more often than not also featuring cartoon depictions of underage characters. Those more versed in internet subcultures might know the phrase Furry Fandom. Most of these roleplays I collaborated in primarily featured anthropomorphisized "furry" underage characters, or "cubs" as the fandom refers to them.

Question:
My confusion lies with whether or not I have an actual attraction to children, or if it's the taboo which I find desirable. Often in these roleplays, the focus would be on the taboo of the action, and I would typically discuss with my partner what would be the most socially unacceptable type of scene to play. Some of them seem, to me at least, essentially harmless as the scenes that were written featured adults, or fantasy creatures that were "of age". Often times however, children or minors would be included to emphasize the taboo of the situation.

I am still fully sexually attracted to adult females, and adult males. I currently have a boyfriend I met through this community, who shares this same time of taboo attraction to underage characters (though to a lesser degree than myself). I have yet to bring up said breakdown I've had with him, but I am confident he will be someone I can safely talk to given the situation.

My plan:
I spent the better part of the evening considering where to go from here. I want this fantasizing and using the idea of children as a taboo to stop, even if it's only with these "cartoon" characters. I've come to realize how horrible it truly is, and that it means something more sinister may be deeper inside of me, and I want to know if what I have planned will help me.

• I want to accept these desires as something I am stuck with, and suppress them. I want to move on and continue to engage in sexual activity/role play so as not to suffocate myself sexually, but remove any influences that may bring about temptations of including underage characters.

• I will be deleting the profiles I've created on this community that feature underage characters. I've saved most of these fantasy text role plays along with cartoon images featuring with both underage and adult characters them to my hard drive. As a result, I'm choosing to destroy these drives and start fresh.

• I will try to keep a private, encrypted journal of my daily or weekly progress, any temptations I feel, and how I overcame them or ignored them.

• Convince my partner to do all of the same. I feel that if I have someone that can go through this with me, who has similar impulses to my own, we'll find support in each other.

If you read all of that, thank you. Simply typing this is a load of my chest after being up all night with it in my head.

I believe it's the taboo-ness that turns you on, and that it's a product of too much porn at a young age.

Here's how it works: Porn acts exactly like a drug, triggering addictive 'feel-good' chemicals in the brain. After a while, the brain becomes desensitised to what you've been looking at and the addiction drives you to seek out more extreme stimuli.

Needless to say, it's a downward spiral that can potentially be very dangerous with certain personality types, but you seem to be getting a grip on yourself. Keep posting and let us know how you're doing. There's plenty of understanding folks on here who've been through similar, and can give you great support with this sort of thing.

Since about 12 hours ago when I wrote the first post, the online accounts have been wiped clean and deleted, broke off contact with everyone who enjoyed role playing ageplay in any way. Feeling much better already by simply doing this. Many contacts were kept who did not enjoy age-play, and understand my reasoning for wanting to stop and are extremely supportive. Having multiple people to talk to about it is a tremendous help.

I talked to my partner, and he was upset, but understanding. He's going to be there to support. He however is choosing to continue his fantasy writing with young characters. In his defense, though, a talking, magical fantasy animal is far less... damning than the role-plays I was engaging in. It's likely less harmful, if at all.

Preparing to save some data from my hard drive and totally nuke it all to hell. I'm doing this just to reinforce the whole "fresh start" idea as the computer really is most of my life. So deleting everything will hopefully put me in this frame of mind.

On a semi-related note, what is the legality of text-based role play involving fictional, fantasy creatures that are "underage", and accompanying cartoon porn? Everywhere I look seems to make this sound like a grey area.

I don't know of any laws against roleplay, whether text based or in person, but many countries have laws against cartoon porn where the characters appear to be underage. The grey area is how the police and courts will see the pictures in question. You may get away with non-human characters, but personally, I wouldn't like to have anything remotely like it on my hard drive or internet history.

Good luck with the fresh start. It's something I've attempted myself, even leaving this forum for a time. I think it's good that you've kept the contacts who don't enjoy the things you want to get away from.