I used to use internet porn once or twice a day. For about a month I have been cold turkey. This, after wanting to kick this addiction for years and not being able to. Having done it, I feel immensely better. I am also a better lover, even in the strictest physical sense (reading Pornified could have told me that I would be). In the hope that others can have the same feeling, here are my suggestions.
1. Forget feminism. Forget Andrea Dworkin. You're not using porn because you love objectifying women or seek dominance. You are using porn because it makes you feel sexual pleasure, and because you like to look at beautiful women, and because you like to fantasize about having sex with beautiful women. The trouble with trying to kick your porn habit through understanding that porn is sexist is that the effect is to make you feel bad and ashamed. Feeling bad and ashamed, you will turn to something that makes you feel better and gives you pleasure and doesn't make you feel bad and ashamed. That is to say, you will shut your door, mute your speakers, and fire up the porn sites. (On the other hand, it was watching "The Price of Pleasure", definitely a feminist film about porn, that started me thinking about trying to kick this habit in the first place).
2. Forget religion. Forget religious injunctions to avoid temptation. You're not using porn because you hate spirituality or ethics or trying to grapple with the big questions. You're using porn because of the power of its images and the pleasure it makes you feel. Like feminism, the trouble with trying to use religion to resist is that you will feel like a failure when it turns out to not be strong enough. You will then doubt your religion and feel even worse about that. That will make you turn to something to make you feel better, and you're back into the porn.
The feeling you are waiting for - and you'll know it when it happens, and you should know that it will happen - is that you just won't feel compelled to do it any more. My third girlfriend was a cutter. She cut herself. She bit her knuckles. She would feel suicidal and cut herself so she wouldn't have to kill herself, is how she explained it to me. That was 15 years ago. If you ask her about it now, she can't remember the feelings. All she knows is she doesn't have to do it any more. People who have compulsions just stop having them. There are ways to speed this up, and ways to slow it down: the point for you is to know that they can stop and, in your case, they will stop.
3. Try a distraction. Norman Doidge's book "The Brain that Changes Itself" has a chapter about porn addiction. He advises his clients to distract themselves with something else they want to do for 15 minutes when they feel the compulsion coming on. If you can distract yourself for that long, you'll get into a different groove. There are lots of things you like to do besides look at porn. When you consider that you can only look at porn when you have privacy and a computer, you realize that that kind of time is a rare gift. Try using it for something else - look something up you haven't looked up, pick up a musical instrument, do some push ups or chin ups, or, hell, write a blog entry or journal entry.
There is more to porn than just the images. Porn is a fantasy world. In that fantasy world you can be with beautiful women without any fear of rejection. They are prizes, you are a consumer. The trouble with the fantasy is this: the deeper you get into the fantasy world, the farther you get from the reality of it. They really are inverse. In reality you will be with beautiful women to the extent that you are attractive and to the extent that you aren't devastated by rejection. That means looks, success, confidence, verbal and emotional and social and physical and, yes, sexual skills. And even when you've got those, you are going to get rejected soooo much more often than not that you have to approach so much that you realize that rejection is not such a big deal.
The time and more importantly the energy that goes into porn use and fantasy is lost for self-improvement. It really is lost. If you were reading literature or watching movies or watching television, playing golf or even drinking beer with the guys, you would not be losing time the same way. Each of these things either gives you something you can connect with another human being on or gives you an actual connection, and nothing helps you connect like connections. Which takes us to our next suggestion.
4. Improve yourself. When you find yourself reaching for the porn, try some kind of self-improvement activity as a distraction: exercise or use a skill. What's good about that you can get better at things. The reward of getting better at something is qualitatively different from the pleasure kick that porn (or most drugs) give. You're trying to retrain your brain to seek that feeling instead of the empty pleasure feeling. It really is a better feeling.
5. Pick up. This was actually a key point for me. The minute I started to think of my love life in terms of skills I could get better at, I had already won a major battle against porn addiction. I could go for the empty pleasure, or I could go for the real thing. And the real thing is both different and better. But to go for the real thing means getting clothes that fit me, working out so my body is nice to look at, becoming a good conversationalist and a good listener and reader of people, and practicing talking to girls at all times, the more scared I feel the more important it is to do. There is a reason they call it "game": because if it's just a game, then it is not you that is on the line and it is not you that is getting rejected. It was your play that didn't work: you're going to lose more plays than you win in this game, but the wins are very rewarding and your porn use is keeping you out of the game and keeping you from getting better at it.
6. Don't be ashamed to be sexual. This takes us back to the point about forgetting feminism and religion. Both of these systems of thought can leave you feeling bad for being a male who is sexually attracted to females. But you are male and females are sexually attracted to you too (or could be, if you worked on yourself). If you approach a girl with shame in your heart, it will show in your body and it will make you unattractive. Shame is as repulsive as confidence is attractive. And that might be the biggest reason to leave porn behind. I am miles more confident now that I am not using porn than I was when I was using it. There is no confidence like feeling like you have absolutely nothing to hide. Anyone with a compulsion feels like a fugitive about to get caught, and that feeling reinforces the compulsion. You can be a free man, a prize that any woman would have fun talking to and take great pleasure from spending a night with. You can spend the next 20 minutes using porn, or you can spend it taking the next little step towards becoming that man.
The most effective distraction for me has actually been to look at men (I'm not gay - if I was bisexual or sexually attracted to men this would probably not be effective... I don't know if all these principles apply to queer or bi males). Looking at music videos with super hot women in them can generate the same kind of longing and inadequacy that long-term porn use leaves me with. But if I look at men who women like, I can learn something - body language, posture, verbal skill. I once told a friend who was nervous on dates that he should stop thinking about how he was doing and start thinking about whether he liked the girl in front of him. But kudos to him, he was out in the world and making things happen. For the porn user, the advise is the opposite: stop looking at what you want sexually and start putting energy into becoming desirable. The results will please you, and quite possibly please a real woman too.
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