Is it normal to read messed up erotica out of curiosity?

When I first got my own unmonitored internet access (around age 18, strict parents) I discovered written erotica and over the next couple of years I went through a phase of reading whatever I stumbled across. I never looked up illegal images or had any desire to, but I did read stories about a variety of things that would be illegal in real life (there are no laws about reading any type of story where I live). It wasn't a constant thing, more like every few weeks I'd get bored and look up erotica or type fairly ordinary sexual terms into google and every few months I'd stumble across something really extreme.

I never touched myself to anything messed up and wasn't even aroused 99% of the time, I was just seeing what was out there and how weird it got. I was still discovering my sexuality and was paranoid I might secretly have some depraved fetish I was in denial about so it was reassuring to test all the possibilities and find that I didn't enjoy anything morally reprehensible. I could tell myself "whatever weird stuff I might be into, this shows there are people out there into much worse." Overall I found it disturbing and gross but kept reading out of the same kind of morbid curiosity that led to me reading pages and pages about serial killers and unsolved murders.

Now I'm older I feel like a sicko for even looking because a lot of the subject matter was obviously highly immoral. If I found it now I would immediately exit the page and I feel like I should have done the same then. Does this fall under normal experimentation? Has anyone else done anything similar?