We have response conditioned from environment, the feedback loop that does not separate us from animals but joins us to them. What separates us is how we interpret these impulses and how we act to build tools and cognitive distortions to cope with and dominate those things. Baby does not know what the result is from allowing a snake to get within a meter, or the result of touching one, and so on. Once conditioned by feedback, she will respond first with instinct (don't become dead or maimed or neutered) then with logic (can I eat it? can I kill it? can I avoid it?), and finally with action. Even baby alone on island with snake will learn this, or die.
I watched the story when I was small not long after I come to the US of a local newscaster who was parachuting as his hobby, and he fell out of the sky and died. As thinking animal, I go to library (internet was not existing) and read about this, ask grandfather who was Fallschirmjäger (paratrooper) in the war, and then we went to watch at local airfield. Fast forward and first time I was at the door to jump on my own, instinct set off alarms (you will become dead, maimed, neutered), but my logic, having seen firsthand men prepare correctly and not die, having heard my own grandfather demonstrate that this can be done without dying, and then I jump. Fast forward again to my first jump at jump school, I jump without hesitation. Is our conditioning and learned responses.
For the OP, your conditioning made the hobby a sin (can be arrested, can get disease, can be disgraced, so on) from before your first HE, is hard as an adult to unlearn these things. I hope you find your way, remember that we have the power within ourselves to be masters of our universe, in thought and word and action, but we have to first use logic to solve the problem and find the causal chain and how or why do we make this choice or that choice, and finally we discover how and why WE perceive this event to be wrong. Your victory will be either unconditioning yourself by determining that it is not, in fact, wrong, or you condition yourself that avoidance of the RESULT is your goal, and the action itself becomes easy to avoid. Best of luck!
Think carefully about "thoughts and places words and actions, thoughts and places words and actions"each of these is part of the causal chain.