Not so long ago, those of us with unusual tastes labored in obscurity, sometimes unsure whether anyone in the world shared our interests. Those of us with unusual sexual tastes were particularly stuck—unless you knew a mail-order place with particular specialties, or were lucky enough to be located somewhere with a concentration of folks who liked the same thing (and somehow managed to find them). Now, everything’s changed: Any fetish is just a smart Google search away. But is that a good thing?

Sometimes it feels like all the information in the world has always been at our fingertips; we’ve always been able to settle a bet, double-check our spelling, and find porn to our tastes in seconds. The ready availability of all kinds of information has snuck into our daily lives so slowly and so surely that we don’t even realize how it’s changed our lives.

If you have the skills to watch a video on YouTube, you have the skills to watch pretty much any kind of porn you want, for free and at will. A huge number of X-rated YouTube-like sites have built empires on the back roads of the information superhighway, many of them allowing unlimited free viewing if you’re savvy enough to navigate the content and avoid the advertisements cleverly disguised as content. This is great for pornographers like myself who used to come by their “research” with quite a bit more difficulty, but it’s also an enormous game-changer for fetishists.

We all know the story of struggling to access adult content as young adults (or older shy adults)—mustering up the guts to ask for a behind-the-counter magazine or slip into a toyshop. It was even harder for those with niche interests. (If it was hard to buy a straight-up traditional porn DVD, it was even harder to ask whether there were any latex fetish videos in the back.) You might have found something fringe-y in an “adult catalog,” if you were lucky enough to figure out how the heck to get those sent to your house (and didn’t mind the “discreet” but actually extremely obvious plain brown wrapper showing up on your kitchen table).

Even in metropolitan areas with better access to more porn with less shame, fetish representation was still marginal. You might’ve been in heaven if your fetish was one of the major half-dozen that started showing up on shelves, but past that, you were still stuck. You might not even have any idea that anyone else had the same fetish at all!

Enter a few porntrepeneurs and Internet speeds capable of streaming video. Suddenly, you don’t just have to fantasize about being a dog, you can find video of other people doing the same. If you always thought priest porn was pretty cool, but didn't know how to ask at your local Porn-O-Mart because you were afraid people wouldn’t get the difference between fetishizing priests and endorsing breaking chastity vows, no problem—somewhere on the Internet, someone had uploaded Vatican-style porn from the 1990s (with dialogue in Italian and no English subtitles, but you don’t care… You’re not watching for the story). The Internet democratized “special interest” porn. What was once exotic and outrageous became one click away from any computer without a filter on it.

While this may sound like a horndog’s utopia, there is an argument to be made for the downside of instantly accessible fetish content. There is a school of thought that says access quickly equals boredom, and that humans tend to respond to boredom by seeking out more and more extreme experiences. In the case of porn, the argument goes that if you originally seek out an unlimited supply of straightforward mainstream porn, which is the hottest thing you can imagine at the moment, you’ll quickly tire of witnessing the old in-out and move on to more “taboo” topics (whatever your idea of “taboo” is), always with the potential that you’ll finally dead-end in snuff films and kiddie porn and end up kidnapping and torturing dozens of people to feel edgy enough to get your rocks off.

Hopefully, dear readers, you know me well enough by now to assume that I’m no fan of the “free porn leads to serial murder” concept. However, there are plenty of other unexpected downsides to the availability of fetish porn that seem a little more grounded in reality.

Say you know a kinky person. (It happens.) Your pal eventually mentions that they’re submissive and involved in a relationship with a dominant. It feels too weird to you to ask a lot of questions of your friend about that, so you get on your favorite free porn site and search for “submissive,” figuring you’re doing the porn equivalent of Googling or looking something up on Wikipedia. You end up with a clip of an anguished-looking lady with a bit-gag in her mouth and her mascara running while a shaven-headed dude slaps her breasts and calls her names.

This disturbs you, and you resolve to change the subject anytime your friend brings up the whole submission thing again. The problem here is that perhaps your friend is a “service sub,” the kind that makes a bad porn subject. You’ll never know that they happily spend their days washing dishes and polishing boots with nary a mascara run or degrading word, all due to substituting porn for real life—which is a problem no matter what your sexual proclivities.

A less severe and more esoteric downside to availability is that ubiquitousness also removes the excitement borne of scarcity. I mentioned earlier that not being able to find the porn for your kink is a frustrating thing, but the flipside to that is that when your kind of porn is so hard to find, there’s a certain glee in finally tracking down good stuff. Think of the difference between digging through record shop after record shop to find that rare album on decent vinyl, versus firing up your laptop and locating a torrent of anything, anytime, in hand in five minutes. Instant gratification is great, but working hard to get something has its own allure, even in porn.

All of this most likely doesn’t outweigh the most important positive aspect of the instant fetish age: people who labored for years under the misconception that they were sick, or at the very least unique, now know that whatever they’re into, they aren’t alone. After so many years of pent-up worry implicit in the way society and technology works, it’s worth losing the sheen off the novelty to remind all of us, even in some small way, that we’re never as oddball as we think we are.