I didn't draw fetishy stuff, but I drew a lot of B L O O D Y edgy, violent stuff and it frightened my Christian parents and teachers. So I learned early on to hide my artwork. This trained me from an early age to be kind of secretive about my work, and my interests in general :/ I would hide my "scariest" drawings in a journal that I kept hiddin in the back of a drawer under a bunch of other garbage.

Oh no I had a similar response re: Christian grandparents whenever I showed them my horror art. I'm sorry you felt you had to hide so much of yourself and I'm glad that you share it with us now!

Yeah like Iw as never even INTO 'normal porn', it was always weird stuff that ended up in Every Cartoon Ever that did it for me.

Yup. I've had an obsession with tickle torture (from an ep of Gummi Bears) and medieval stocks since I was about 6, and I would draw them too. Does it even count as a fetish, from someone that young?

I hid them inside a stuffed toy. It had a zip pocket thingy underneath, no idea why it had this, but that's the spot I used.

I don't think guilt/shame was a part of it, just knowing that it wasn't an interest I wanted to share, or could really explain. I didn't feel it was 'wrong' just would have been embarrassed if someone else had seen them.

I dunno if I'd call it that for when we were really little but like. SOmetimes this shit just starts REALLY EARLY and it sticks with us through adulthood. Maybe something happened to flip that switch or maybe it was just in us from the start. A MYSTERY.

I know I defiantly felt ashamed after I'd finished drawing. I went through so many lengths to hide this super benign stuff XD Inside a toy is a good spot!!

I didn't have anything like that to hide :P Though for some reason I peeved off my atheist and open family with my love for Ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica, rather than their WW2 obsession :O

GOTTA love the fam shaming kids for their interests.

They utterly adore my screaming wailing bullying brother though and whatever he likes :p Its not been a happy life. Then again maybe I am just too weird :p

I didn't hide it, then my ma got called to help explain why it wasn't appropriate to cover a binder in dismembered space Marine body parts. Then I stopped drawing.

Oh man that reminds me I got a Talking To when an older cousin found one of my very early online blogs and it it had a picture of Leatherface on it.

It never got bad I suppose, but I did learn that hiding aspects of yourself is the expected, polite thing to do.

You don't have to lie, just avoid contradicting the lie other people tell themselves about you.

That's how a spergie like myself, who's pretty much incapable of outright lying, learned how to fool people.

I only thought I was ashamed of my art when I was a kid. I mean, I knew it was really bad, as in poorly crafted, and overly exaggerated, because that's really the only way to get an erotic fantasy going when you're kind of crap at art. My mother discovered two pages of my scribblings and used them to publicly humiliate me, posting them on the refrigerator for everyone in the neighborhood to see. I began to understand the full depths of shame and self-loathing that my art could cause me. I was kind of stuck, though. Being an artist means shit that other people just fantasize about and regret gets hard copy. So I made sure that anything I created, from that day until the day I moved into my own place, hundreds of miles from my family, I burned immediately after I created it.

Even after I moved into my own place, for years after that, I kept it hidden, buried in the back of a closet. In my own house, where only I lived. Every few months I would take what pages had accumulated, wrap them in multiple layers like radioactive waste and put them in some random dumpster. It wasn't until I was in my mid-twenties that I ever thought of allowing anybody else to see it, and only then because a friend of mine showed me his stash of crazy art. I think, had it not been for him, I might never have shown it to anybody, ever.

Thank you for the question.

Oh man that's shit that your mom humiliated you like that. I relate to still hiding your stuff even though you live alone though. Just last night I had to dig my hilariously tame Secret Shit out from behind several books in a book shelf and I AM THE ONLY ONE IN THIS HOUSE. The only time anybody visits is to help with home repairs. Who am I hiding it from???

I'm glad your friend was able to help you finally share yourself.

yea, and i was drawing kink before i was even aware AT ALL what i was drawing was kink, just that it was Bad and i Shouldn't Be Doing It but wanted to anyway. i think i just threw away all of that stuff when i was done drawing it and the anxiety of someone discovering it became too overwhelming.

my mom also liked to go through my room and dig around in my stuff while i wasn't home, too, so she would've definitely found it eventually otherwise....


edit to fix my terrible writing. also like. i'm pretty sure at least some of it was very sexualized gore, which i know for a fact would've freaked out my family, especially a kid drawing stuff like that. shrug

That's how I was. I'd draw it and feel weir about it and not really know why.

Ugh, I'm sorry you didn't really have privacy. If that was my situation, I'd probably throw my art away too.