Porn Forgotten

Two Years Later

2007-12-28T10:40:00.001-05:00

I have not posted to this blog in over a year, but a recent discussion with friends prompted me to reexamine some of my notes here because I have a great deal to say in retrospect, and it seems there are a few readers who still stumble upon this blog and write in their thanks.

First, it is worth pointing out that while writing this blog, I was still mired in depression that began for me as a freshman in college, and continued on, I'd say, until just a few months ago, as I made some great life-changing decisions at the age of 28. The degree to which a depression increases your dependence on pornography should not be understated. Just like alcohol, drugs, and even television, pornography provides stimulation to a nervous system numbed and stultified (sounds like a Mike Doughty song) by years of malaise and inwardly-focused pain. The trouble with mild/moderate depression such as I suffered for years is that you may not realize you are depressed, and since you are often still functional, friends and family may not see its outward signs (particularly if they themselves are depressed, which they probably are.)

I found out about my depression around four years ago from a doctor. I had just been dumped out of another relationship because of erectile dysfunction. I simply could not maintain an erection long enough to put a condom on, and the girl got sick of it and fled. I told the doctor I must have a low testosterone level. He checked me out and said this was incorrect. He asked: "do you have friends?" I answered that I really didn't (not true, but it felt that way). He said I didn't have ED, I was just depressed, and gave me the names of some psychotherapists. Once I found a guy I liked, my life did start to get better. I met a girl who was patient and my sexuality went from repressed to raging in about a year.

As it turns out, there was also an issue of condom size which none of my doctors ever knew about, namely, nobody makes a condom big enough to suit me, and latex does not stretch as well as the manufacturers want you to believe. For someone as physically sensitive as I, a tight condom is like a noose. It hurts, frankly. But that problem was solved with TheyFit condoms. Check them out. They saved my sex life.

In addition to depression is its close friend, poor self-esteem. I was underconfident back then, which is a shame given my talents, and it took several years of therapy, self-improvement, a great girlfriend, and social risk-taking to learn that I'm actually quite awesome and people want to talk to me. Pornography was just easier than meeting real people, who inevitably (so I believed) would not like me. Better to just look at pictures of hot girls and have a quick orgasm than put myself out there and risk being shunned once again as I had so much in the past.

Psychotherapy is a great place to start if you feel this way, but maybe you can't afford it or your health plan doesn't cover it. There are other things you can do. Self-help books, as I've said before, are a good start. Also talking to good, smart, OBJECTIVE friends, not your mother, who has an agenda for you. Be open about your problems and listen to what they say. You love and respect your friends, so maybe they're right in telling you how cool you are. Above all else, even if you can't find a way out of your depression, don't stop moving and improving. Learn new skills, travel, keep teaching yourself about the world and experiencing new things. Make yourself so awesome that you can no longer deny how awesome you are. When the depression finally lifts years later, you'll be poised to start living life on your own terms, as I have.

The porn problem will take care of itself. You won't need it because real women will start pursuing you and your awesomeness.

Fight Habits, Not Urges

2006-11-29T12:09:00.000-05:00

Pornography is not a crackrock. It can't kill you, although the many hours it can take away from your life can feel like dying slowly. What we are fighting is our urge to see a bare naked vagina. Your cerebral cortex cannot stand up to 3.7 billion years of evolution on this planet. You want sex and you will always appreciate the sight of tits, ass, and pussy. Fighting it is tilting at windmills.

Your fight in taking on a porn addiction is one of habits. And you have many:

Turning on your computer when you're bored or lonely
Searching for the perfect porn
Searching for hours
Hoarding
Constantly checking for updates

Biological urges cannot be broken (no matter what evangelicals tell you), but habits can. A dental hygienist once told me if I could make myself floss for 30 days in a row it would become a habit. I tried and it worked -- now I can't stand to not floss. The same works on porn -- if you can step away from your habits for a long enough period (30 days may not be enough for you) you may find it actually difficult to go back.

But this is an addiction, not daily hygiene, and that's a tougher nut to crack. So try to take it one habit at a time. For examle, you might erase all your porn and try to go 30 days without saving anything to your hard drive. If you do that, you've removed one of the habits, and that's a big step toward conquering the addiction.

Fight habits, not urges.

A New 30-Day Ban

2006-08-23T15:11:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted much about my habit lately. My mind has been elsewhere, and I've sort of let my habit go into autopilot. Things have been decent as far as my porn addiction is concerned -- I really haven't binged and I've been careful not to let downloading get in the way of other activities. I've also been very good about giving my girlfriend first crack at my raging boners before heading into my office to jerk off.

But I have gradually started to "think" more about porn. I was starting to worry again about missing something. I was checking for updates at my old sites a little too often, and worse, I was starting to look at porn at work, mostly because of abject boredom.

I think I've reached a nice equilibrium with the "masturbating to porn" end of things. I don't find myself doing it more than I really need for basic male functioning and maybe a little fun at times. But as far as the "downloading porn" end of things, I was starting to slip.

The solution this time is to institute a 30-day ban on all new downloads. So effectively, I can still look at porn, but I am banned from visiting my sites for 30-days. I have a small collection, mostly of pictures, on my home computer, and that's all I'll get for this month.

I think this brings up an important point in dealing with your own addiction (also in dealing with international politics, oddly enough). Don't make the punishment worse than the crime. If you're making progress toward controlling your addiction, but feel yourself slipping, don't condemn yourself to a ridiculous lifetime ban. Make a small correction, and stick to it. This way you ensure that you won't revolt against some unreasonable ruling.

A 30-day downloading ban, for me at this point, is easy. If I need to see some nudity, I have a bit of it at home. But this prevents me from downloading at work, and corrects my growing tendency toward needing my semi-daily "fix" of updates.

Stop Praying and Start Living

2006-07-20T09:59:00.000-04:00

Pornography addiction can be a real problem. You know it is a problem for you and you don't need a god to tell you that. If you associate your addictions and assorted personal problems with your faith in god, it becomes easier for you to associate your failure to correct these problems with your faith in god. Nobody, Jesus included, can fix you but you. Undue influences over the course of a life may create a person's problems, but that person is still ultimately responible for administering, and correcting, those problems.

You are not helpless. You are not powerless, as some of the religious-minded keep telling you. In fact, you have quite a wide range of control over your own behavior, and even to some extent your thoughts. Placing even a hint of control in the invisible hands of an invisible god is to relinquish the amazing powers given to you by birthright (perhaps, even, by that very same god). This is not about satisfying the values of a god, but about living your life as you would most want to -- as you would IF THERE WERE somebody watching you. Your values are already telling you that too much pornography is a bad thing. Don't pass the responsibility to somebody else, especially an entitiy who can't pat you on the back when you fix it yourself.

I don't know why we exist, nor why you exist, but I do know I exist, and that you exist, and that each of us can, if we want, control our own destiny. We control whether we pursue good acts or fallacious acts. I think even most religious men would agree with that.

So get off your damn knees and get out into the world and do something real. Stop acting so pathetic and weak. You're in control!

Porn and Your Girlfriend

2006-07-20T09:20:00.000-04:00

I have noticed a surprising interest in quitting porn addiction by guys who already have girlfriends.

Or perhaps this is not so surprising. When we're on our own, pornography is a respite from our loneliness, and our horniness. But with a girlfriend, our loneliness (hopefully) should not be an issue any longer. Horniness, on the other hand, may still be an issue, probably depending on what stage you find yourself in with the girlfried. Or maybe it doesn't matter. You're just horny all the time.

A few guys may find themselves with very oversexed girls who are always willing to please. But I'm betting that the majority of guys, at any stage of their relationship, would place "better sex life" at the top of their list of wants. It's just the way we are. And how can we not be when surrounded by a constant media stream of sexual images and messages? Turn on the television for five seconds and you get a boner (hopefully not while watching Animal Planet).

Men worry about how their fixation on pornography is affecting their relationship. I have no doubt that an addiction to almost anything has some effect on your relationships, but we tend to feel porn addiction is a particularly troublesome one, and with good cause.

The first question you should ask is how your girlfriend would feel if she found out the time and energy you spent on pornography. Most of you have indicated that she would be very very hurt, maybe irreversibly so. My girlfriend was a little hurt when I confessed to the problem, but eventually saw that it was a real issue and that I was seriously trying to deal with it. I'd like to say that it's an important test of the solidity of your relationship that you admit your problem to her, to see if she flees or embraces you more closely, but I imagine a lot of you, because of poor self-image or a variety of reasons, fear the loss of your girlfriend to such a degree that you would never come forward with the truth. I encourage all men to admit their addictions to their girlfriends and spouses, but for some I know this will never happen, so we need to find another angle.

The real meat of the problem here, as I see it, is that pornography is easy and relationships are hard. When our girlfriends aren't blowing us twice a day (as we wish they would) we resign ourselves to our computers and find some simulation of what it is we crave. But if what you're looking for is more sex, and better sex, from the one you're with, you have to make an effort. This can mean a number of things, from doing all those romantic things we used to do, down to just initiating sexual contact more often, and in new places. You may find that even just doing chores will guilt your girlfriend into doing something nice for you. Women get hornier the more they have sex, so the more sex you give them, the more sex they will return.

If you want more from the girl you're with, you can't get lazy. Many girls are just happy to relieve a throbbing hard-on, even if they themselves are not horny. Of course, if your sex life turns out to be so much of a problem, you can always dump her.

So whether you admit to your addiction or not, part of your recovery should be to put more into your sexual relationship. Nothing will change for your sexual life if you're locked in your office jerking it to pictures. Go do something nice for her. Right now. Then bed that woman, damnit.

Erectile Dysfunction (E.D.)

2006-07-17T15:28:00.000-04:00

I have seen comments by a few men who have experienced erectile dysfunction and who believe porn is partly or wholly to blame. As someone who has dealt with a lot of ED, in spite of being only 27, I think I can say a lot about the subject.

(Before I go any further, do yourself a huge favor and go size yourself for a TheyFit condom. They come in 70 sizes from tiny to huge. A properly-fitting condom will do wonders for your sex life and your confidence -- more on this later.)

First, to young men out there who have experienced ED firsthand: shame is normal, but so is ED. Any decent doctor will tell you that pretty much every guy has it at one time or another. I, for one, lost two relationships to hot, oversexed girls because of it. I couldn't get it up, and pretty soon they lost interest. After the second one, I went to a doctor.

The reasons ED happens vary from guy to guy, but it usually comes down to performance anxiety (also excruciatingly tight condoms, more on this below.) Doctors and psychotherapists use this phrase a lot, but it doesn't make any difference to your hard-on. You can't just will anxiety away. It can, however, be gradually corrected.

I had a rotten sex life for most of my young years. I lost my virginity at 17, but back then I wasn't as interested in sex as I later became (a lot of my physical properties matured later than other guys.) In college, I couldn't even get a date. I went 7 years between any sexual encounters at all. That much time spent in loneliness and in confinement does a lot of damage to the male mind. But it is not irreversible, and I hardly see how pornography could really be to blame for your problems except in the most extreme of circumstances.

The doctor I went to pointed out that, at the time, I really didn't have friends. I didn't go out much. He said I was probably depressed and just didn't realize it. He also recommended therapy. I read some self-help books, and started going to therapy (with some financial help from the folks, fortunately.) All this was good stuff, but what finally cured my ED was meeting a caring, patient girlfriend.

Now, about the condom stuff.
When I was in college there was a vending machine in our dorm that sold condoms. Of course, it was the average "one size fits all" condom. Curious, I bought one to try it on. It was so tight I could barely get it on, and it hurt to wear. I just figured condoms were shitty. That's what I get for growing up in the "abstinence-educated" south. Years later, I saw an article in a men's magazine that said if you couldn't fit your erect penis into a toilet-paper tube, you needed a bigger condom. "Great," I thought. I went and bought some MAGNUMS. They were a little better but still very uncomfortable. Whenever I put one on, in a matter of a few moments it would choke off my erection without constant-stimulation.

Getting back to the patient girlfriend.
This girlfriend, who was (and is) intelligent and patient, recognized immediately that I was quite large down there. None of the previous women I had been with (or tried to be with) had said a damn thing about it. She downloaded the fit kit from Condomania, sized me up, and we ordered some proper condoms. And boy did they fit. They slipped right on snugly but not tightly, and let the blood flow to my penis properly. The sensation was so much better, at times I had to check that it hadn't slipped off.

Problem solved? No. But getting a properly-fitting condom was huge. Once that was taken care of, I had a lot of emotional issues to work on. Again, this is where the patient girlfriend who loves me came in.

At times I could get so wound up, be ready to go, put on those nice big condoms, and then everything fell apart. She would kiss me, relax me, and oftentimes I'd pop right back up. Sometimes I didn't, though, but that was okay. We kept working at it. I would say that it took a full year after I started using TheyFit condoms that I had completely stopped worrying about my ED.

These days, it is no longer a problem, but every now and then, things just don't work, and that's why it's nice to have long, dexterous fingers.

So that's my story. It had almost nothing to do with porn. Maybe your ED does, but I'm betting that your porn addiction and your ED are actually both symptoms of a single beast: poor self-worth and insecurity. Go get your head fixed first. Go meet some nice girls, not those drunken sluts you've been chasing. Your penis will follow suit with time. Once you start hammering bikini supermodels of questionable virtue, the ED will disappear completely. Or just do like I did and find a nice girl who loves you for you. Either way.

You Need Sports and Martial Arts

2006-07-17T10:44:00.000-04:00

I have said this several times before, but I think it deserves its very own post. If you have any real intention of quitting or cutting back your consumption of pornography, you need more sports and martial arts.

Porn may have interrupted or interfered with your work in the past, but how many of you can say that porn has wrecked a softball game, a round of golf, or a belt rating test? You like sports and you like kicking ass, and I bet if you put them side-by-side, you'd take them over porn. Scheduling regular weekly games of football or basketball or tennis, or even ping-pong, will get you out of the house, away from your computer and the dangers within it, and get you doing something you love to do.

You may have been late for work because of porn, but I bet you wouldn't be late for a football game where you're the star receiver. You hate work, so you can justify missing it. But you won't miss something you love.

A few of you may balk at the concept of involving yourself in sport. Perhaps you're fat, or weak, or you were picked on in junior high and the very thought of sports makes you cringe. That is all the more reason to get out there. Start slowly if you need to. Find a friend you can meet once or twice a week to kick a soccer ball around. The point is it's a scheduled event that's out of doors, it's fun, it's healthy, and you'll drop whatever you're doing at home to get out there.

There was once a time when men were called upon to do great things every day. We risked our lives to fight great battles. We were great predators and stalked game through the forest. Our bodies and minds are largely the same these days. But now we sit at desks clackclackclacking away. We chat on the phone to clients. Our battles are social battles, and business battles. The only game we have left to stalk is money, and money never runs or eviscerates us with teeth and claws.

Some of you might notice a hint of Fight Club in what I am saying, and there's no doubt Tyler Durden's words are coming out of my mouth a little. Fortunately, you don't have to get your teeth kicked through your cheek to feel alive again. You just need to expend some energy in a stressful (but controlled) environment. I did Krav Maga, a martial art that mimics the adrenaline dump and the panic of a real fight. I started playing pickup football, which fuels my desire for competition. I'm playing tennis again, which is still my favorite way to battle someone psychologically.

The more you do, the less you'll do the things you don't want to do.

Welcome to Our Newest Quitter

2006-07-17T10:37:00.000-04:00

Blind Tomorrow has started his own blog to document his own experiences with porn addiction. Check him out at Heat of the Moment.

I Have Not Binged

2006-06-23T14:42:00.000-04:00

Although I am currently allowing myself to view porn, I have been startled at how disinterested I have been with it. I have, in fact, spent some time with porn since my 30 day fast expired, but it has been under my control and has only occuppied a tiny fraction of my time. Granted, I haven't been that aroused lately anyway, possibly due to some medication I'm taking at the moment. But a large part of the addiction was just the compulsion of seeking and downloading, and so far I've pretty much avoided it. I'm starting to face up to the reality that, at least for myself, I may be able to live responsibly with a bit of pornography. Time will tell. I have my day-counting jar ready if things get out of hand again.

I have not yet mentioned that a unique effect of avoiding porn for a significant period of time is that you begin more than ever to notice how ridiculous porn looks, specifically hardcore porn, compared to actual sex. The way porn stars act, the way they talk -- it is all so staged and phony, and rarely erotic. You begin to notice how few of these women are actually enjoying the sexual act, and instead just doing their job. There are exceptions, but you can exhaust your day sifting through the boring stuff to find anything truly arousing. I'm old enough to know what a penis in a vagina looks like, so arousal comes down to eroticism, not just imagery. And that's what most hardcore pornography is.

This just drives home the point that sex and pornography have very little to do with one another, at least in my world.

I Was Disappointed

2006-06-12T08:33:00.000-04:00

I had worried that, with the fast expired, I might find myself bingeing on porn this weekend. In fact, I had looked forward to masturbating to a little porn, which I had not done in a month. Instead, I was pleasantly interrupted by sex and cuddling with my girlfriend, and the masturbation never materialized. I know, I know, it's a damn shame. I swear I'll try to masturbate to porn this week.

I did poke around some porn, though, to see what I might have missed in the last 30 days, but for the most part, I was disappointed. I had expected to be overwhelmed by the volume of great porn. And while I did find bits and pieces, I was overall not so impressed. When you've been away from it, it starts to all look the same. I guess only when you're downloading porn nonstop do you gain the discernment to seperate the porn into little categories. For me, this weekend, it was a few sexy photos and a whole lot of boring naked girls -- something I've seen plenty of.

This in no way signifies that my addiction is over, but it is very encouraging that I could come back to porn and not go nuts over it. Of course, a horny girlfriend always helps that situation, so I suppose some thanks go to her.

The Final Days of the Fast

2006-06-09T12:36:00.000-04:00

I am nearing the end of my 30-day porn fast. Some thoughts:

First, this was not a perfect fast. I did not actually go all this time without seeing a picture of a nude woman. There were times when I gave in to the temptation to click a link and maybe saw some nudity or sex. But I avoided my usual porn websites and never once masturbated to pornography. Nor did I ever give into the temptation to delve deeper into those links to find more. Nor did I go checking up on certain models "just to see what they've been doing."

Second, with the extra time gained, I took up the piano, began playing tennis again for the first time in a year, and started training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. These are all wholesome, social activities that I plan to continue regardless of the situation with my porn addiction. Once you've had enough practice taking your mind off pornography, you tend to think more and more about other things you'd like to do with your time. I now look forward to these activities and hobbies, whereas before much of my anticipation was taken up by pornography. I worry less about what I might be missing, and worry more about having some real fun.

These activities will, in their own right, prevent me from spending too much time on porn. If I'm due to be somewhere, I can't get caught up with pornography.

One huge uncertainty that is looming: what will happen this Saturday, and beyond? I will definitely give myself some liberty on Saturday to check out some porn. Beyond that I cannot say. I found out from my first fast, back in January, that the self-control gained from it helped me avoid porn to some degree for weeks after I quit the fast. Eventually, however, my old habits crept in. I imagine the same may occur after this fast, but probably on a longer timeline. I felt more in control during this fast than the first, and I feel like I am reaching a new, stable equilibrium.

Eventually, though, I will probably find myself once again looking at too much porn. Keep in mind, though, that my standards have changed. In the past I was looking at porn every day and didn't really consider it to be "too much." Now I consider anything more than once every few days to be "too much."

When things do get a little out of hand, though, I will once again initiate a fast, and make further progress to total self-control.

The Exposure Theory of Pornography

2006-06-02T08:47:00.000-04:00

Several months ago, I outlined a technique for fantasizing that I had hoped could replace pornography completely. I called it Random Walk Masturbation. Since then, I have used it regularly. But I have found it has limitations. From session to session, I am faced with fantasizing about the same women, in often the same fantasies. I have tried to work out new fantasies, and use wholly imagined women, but the fantasies are too cumbersome to maintain in my mind. Worse, my imagination has not grown any more vivid or profound than it was before I abstained from porn, as I hoped it would. I have simply grown frustrated and want the quick, efficient release that porn affords me (that is, when my girlfriend isn't available).

The human body is much the same as it was hundreds of thousands of years ago, when man lived in tiny hunter-gatherer societies. Back then, I imagine, sex was only sparsely available. People were hairier, and stinkier, and most of us men probably spent the greater part of our days hunting or fishing or warring with other men (and maybe fucking other men, even). I don't know how sexuality was arranged in these times, be it like grey wolves, where only the alpha male and female mate, and the rest of the pack simply supports their pups, or more like a free-for-all, where people just had sex whenever possible. Regardless, I imagine that in these times, people were spending much of their time just trying to survive. Sex came after food.

Today, sex is everywhere. I walk down the street and there's cleavage and skin and gorgeous hair on every corner. There's sex in film and on television. I can't browse the internet without seeing a banner ad with tits in my face. Were hypersaturated with sexuality, and it's no wonder we're horny all the time. Surrounded by all these beautiful women on display for us, our tiny primitive brains assume we are the alpha males, and that we deserve all the hot sex that being an alpha affords us. Having many sexual partners over the course of one's life is considered the norm.

We cannot avoid all this sex without becoming hermits. And we shouldn't, because sex is fun and amazing. We crave it all the time, and we need release from it. I believe that in our modern culture, pornography provides this release when one's imagination does not suffice. It is my Exposure Theory of Pornography.

This is not to excuse us addicts from our compulsions. We all know that exposure to pornography itself simply furthers our horniness, and can become an end in itself. But in proper doses, porn provides quick, painless, effective relief from our hyperstimulated sex glands.

As we've discussed, some addicts may not be able to sustain any consumption of porn without their compulsions getting once again out of control. But even these people will need to find sexual relief from somewhere (or become hermits). For those of us with only minor addictions, I believe there is middle ground -- that porn can be consumed in resonable amounts, while we maintain control of our impulses for more. This is what I aim to accomplish for myself.

9 Days to Go

2006-06-01T09:36:00.000-04:00

I have nine days left on my 30-day porn fast, and it seems like I will make it. In these thirty days I have resumed playing the piano every day, and am getting back into tennis. In fact, I look forward now to playing the piano when I arrive home from work, whereas in the past I would often look forward to pornography.

My goal, as I've stated in the past, is not to eliminate pornography from my life completely. While this may be necessary for some, I feel that with practice I can learn enough self-discipline to limit my consumption of it, to where addiction no longer lives -- to where the use of pornography represents no more a vice than spending an hour watching a baseball game.

I have handled this fast pretty well, I think. And though I have been tempted to break the fast and fill my mind with numbing naked ladies, I have had only sparse and meager slip-ups, which I have succeeded in promptly closing before they grew into full-scale binges. I must admit, however, that I am looking forward to a bit of excess. We the pornography addicts are fortunate that our drug allows a level of liberty that could hospitalize others, or send them to jail. We don't have to worry about getting drunk and running over a pack of pedestrians, and there is no way (so far as we know) to overdose on porn. I think that if you can handle it, and not allow things to truly leave the circle of your control, that temporary allowances are okay. We're all human here.

Two Weeks in the Books

2006-05-25T09:31:00.000-04:00

I have successfully completed two weeks of my thirty-day fast without significant slippage. Praise be to Jesus Christ for helping me. Because without his awesome love, I am powerless to even tie my own shoes. I can't even fart without Jesus's love.

Just kidding. Jesus is no help. It's all me and I know it.

This two weeks has been annoying, but so far I haven't suffered the withdrawal pains I did the first time around. I think it's helping that I'm on loratadine (aka Claritin), which I'm convinced slows down my sexual behavior (and gives me coital headaches -- a real piece of shit if you've ever had one). My girlfriend was especially confused when I didn't feel like having sex, but admitted I wanted to look at porn. I wasn't horny, but it didn't matter. It's the nature of addiction. When you're a food addict (or just really fat) you don't need to be hungry to eat. When you're a cokehead, you don't need to be an international supermodel to want a snootfull.

Porn exists because of our sexuality, but once you've become addicted to it, it also exists on its own. You want to see it just like you need to see a televised baseball game. It may not enhance your life all that much, but if you're bored, it occupies your time well. Although, to be fair, no pro baseball game has ever given me a throbbing boner, but I'll keep watching just in case something changes. The key is getting yourself involved in some real activities. Why watch baseball when you can play baseball? Why watch porn when you can LIVE it?

(I have to admit, though, I am looking forward to a bit of indulgence when my thirty days is up, but that doesn't mean the fight is over. It just needs a pit stop.)

11-Days of Fasting

2006-05-22T13:16:00.000-04:00

Eleven days into my 30-day fast (like Ramadan, except with porno) and it feels like it has been ages since I last experienced porn. This is one way to tell that your addiction is still very present. Time drags horribly. Three days feels like a week, a week feels like a month, and anything beyond that feels like years. I am not cringing to see pornography, but I could certainly go for a nice dose of unrestricted sexiness. And as all us addicts know, all sexy roads lead to porn.

Stay away, stay in control. Prove to yourself that you can say no when necessary.

An Addict Forever

2006-05-20T12:19:00.000-04:00

Carbon1 at Trying Bloody Hard made an important point about addiction, specifically whether or not an addict can ever truly declare himself "free" of his addiction (Flatulence2 at Never Give Up also gave his two cents on the issue.) Carbon1 feels certain that porn addiction will probably always be a problem for him, and avoiding pornography is necessary to maintain his abstention. I, on the other hand, feel that it is possible to learn a level of self-control to where pornography can exist peacefully in one's life, without getting out of hand.

Whether one must choose the path of cold turkey forever, or find a way to learn better self control, is completely up to the individual. It will come down to how one was raised, how content one is with the rest of his life, and a variety of other personal factors. When I began this blog back in January, I was convinced that I needed to push pornography out of my life completely, maybe forever. I quickly saw tangible benefits to quitting and thought I was on the right path. Eventually, though, I also began to see that pornography has real value in my life, and that I have enough self-control already built up that I can live with a little porn. I found that I am fully capable of going long periods of time without it (which I am currently in the midst of doing, very successfully). I believe that, with practice, I can once again reach a mindset in which I can consume pornography at a reasonable level.

There are those addicts for whom their addictions and compulsions are truly a chronic problem. For them the advice I give, though prescient, is probably not all that helpful. They may need psychiatric help. I, on the other hand, have lived most of my life living in relative harmony with my addiction, where it only interfered with my daily living on rare occasions. I would guess that the multitude of men are in a similar situation: we just want a little more self-control, and we'd like to spend less time thinking and worrying about and focusing on pornography. Some of us may experience great positive benefits to quitting, others may notice very little change in their lives.

The path you choose will be entirely your own, and you may decide, well on your way, to change that path slightly. Whether you decide that you cannot live with pornography at all, or you decide to just cut back, the important thing is that the impetus to self-improvement always takes precedence over your petty compulsions. I think nearly every person with the intelligence to read this weblog is capable of overcoming their addiction, but you must find your own path to success, even if through trial-and-error.

A Workout Program For Self-Control

2006-05-17T20:39:00.000-04:00

Self-control works like a muscle. If it gets a lot of work, it is strong, but if left alone too long, it becomes weak. You can no sooner expect to quit pornography (or any addiction) cold turkey than you can expect yourself to lift 300 pounds off your chest without practice. It is probably just as unlikely for the common addict to go a year without porn as it is for a lazy man to run a mile in less than five minutes.

Self-control must be practiced, and if you're no good at it, you must start with small moves. If a fat man decides to get in shape, and tries to run five miles, he will find it painful and likely give up quickly. Likewise, if an addict tries to quit pornography forever, it will become too uncomfortable, and he will be right back to old habits very quickly. The fat man needs to start slowly, running short distances, and the addict needs to start with his own small goals.

I have noticed this effect in my own life. I am currently in the midst of a 30-day abstention from porn, and have found it is much easier this time around than when I decided to go "cold turkey for a year" back in January. I failed at that endeavor, but I'm very confident I will complete these 30 days. I've had practice, after all.

So here's what I think you, the common addict, need to do to improve yourself control. Get a calendar. Google has a calendar program now that can be accessed anywhere and let's you print. Put your calendar somewhere you will see it every day. Your goal should be to be able to go a month without porn by the end of 12 months.

On your calendar, start marking a couple days in the coming week in which you will go without porn. For the first month, you will just get in the habit of forcing yourself to go without for a day or two. This should not be difficult. Then, in the second month, start going three days, then four. Mark these days on the calendar, with a few days in between in which you can look at porn. By the end of a few months, you should be able to go a week without suffocating. Continue to increase the amount of time. By the end of the twelve months, you should have it marked to take a whole month off.

A year may seem like a long time to wait to beat a habit. You may not need that much time. Maybe you'll need more. But patience is crucial here. Just like that fat man trying to run, you've got to lose a lot of weight and get your muscles back in order before you can run five miles without stopping. In this case you're exercising a mental muscle. If you build up your self-control gradually, you'll hardly notice the burn. You might even find going a month to be a breeze by the end of the year.

Quitting porn should almost be a secondary goal here. Gaining self-control should be primary. Self-control is transferable to other aspects of your life, and as you improve your control over your porn viewing, you will see other areas of your life also improving.

Remember: patience is key. Challenge yourself to improve, but slowly. Give your mental muscle time to rebuild (but not too much time that it begins to atrophy.)

The Trouble With Ecstacy (is that it feels so good)

2006-05-16T10:47:00.000-04:00

Years of consumption of pornography can lead a man to levels of sexual ecstacy that he could probably never reach in the real world. Ecstacy takes practice, and it is much easier to practice on one's own than with a multitude of women, although I imagine some men pull it off. Ecstacy is your high, and you're always going to want more of it.

Hoarding and "perfect porn" and all the other barriers I've discussed which hinder quitting can all be controlled with some effort. At least for me, though, the ecstacy that comes with my attachment to porn is the hardest thing to let go. When I'm zoned in on porn during a deep binge, my bloodstream is raging with hormones and my cock is throbbing and every touch FEELS SO GOOD. There's no way to step away and stop yourself from continuing once you're deeply into it. Sexuality gets to the core of your psyche and your physicality and there seems to be little downside. When the habit is at its peak, you can dispense your testosterone in high doses, and that rush feels like real living. You may live an otherwise mundane life, free from excitement, fear, or restless appetites, but when those skin images hit your middle brain, it's like a waterpark for the mind and soul, and the orgasm several hours later is an atom bomb between your ears and another one in your balls.

This is THE hardest part about quitting -- what energy it takes to force onesself away from such powerful feeling. Once you have quit, it doesn't take long for you to start missing all that ecstacy, because chances are that feelings this strong don't exist anywhere else in your life. But that should be a motivation, not an excuse. There is a monumental canvas of emotional color out there for those that seek them. There are so many flavors of ice cream and you've been force-feeding yourself chocolate and it's making you fat. It's time to experience vanilla, and rocky road, and macadamia nut fudge praline with almonds. Shut off your computer and give yourself the time and motivation to start enjoying everything life has to offer.

That is why I have time and again encouraged those of you trying to quit to involve yourself in as much as you can away from your computer. For me there is a lot of flavor in sports and martial arts, and I try to keep several going at once if my schedule can keep them. Learn to cook, learn a language, travel, start a business, go get laid, find true love. Whatever it is to keep you busy living.

Eventually, chocolate will just be an occasional treat. Mind-numbing ecstacy will just be one of many flavors you enjoy, and when you're lying in your deathbed you'll be able to look upon your own life with pride, not contempt.

Choose: Women or Porn

2006-05-12T10:46:00.000-04:00

I am in the midst of a 30-day purge. As I mentioned at the beginning of last week, I've noticed myself slipping back into old habits, and I needed to step away from it for a bit. I'm feeling an itch to see some nudity right now (particularly problematic because I'm at work) and this is the perfect time to ask myself: what do I want? Women or porn?

Some men are able to juggle both with no trouble. But if you have proven yourself to be an addict, chances are it will be difficult for you to live a life with arousing sexual relationships completely free from porn interference. I am an addict, and if real women is what I want then porn has got to go.

I recall seeing advice somewhere that working out fantasies in your imagination is counterproductive to meeting women, because it relieves a certain urge in one's mind. Contrary to popular belief, the horny guy who doesn't hide his sexual desires is at an advantage over the average frustrated chump who stifles his. Pornography has the same effect -- you see it, you jerk off, and then you're not as horny. To successfully bed a girl, whether for a one-night-stand or for longer-term relationships, you must get physical with her quickly (by which I mean touching her in some way) so she knows you mean business, and if you're crazy with horniness you'll probably be less inhibited to do so than if your balls have been recently emptied.

As I said two days ago, choosing pornography has a guaranteed return -- you will see tits and you will have a nice orgasm. It is a conservative strategy, and not necessarily a bad one. If you choose women, however, ditching the porn, in all or in part, may be a necessary move just to put you in the right frame of mind to pursue them.

Right now I am horny: I choose women. A picture of a tit just won't cut it today.

Mormons Most Porn Addicted?

2006-05-11T15:30:00.000-04:00

According to Google Labs, those Mormons love love love their porn, but hate hate hate their addiction to it.

See for yourself.

Also, what the hell is seeping into the water supply in India?

A Few More Words on Self-Image

2006-05-11T09:01:00.000-04:00

Self-image and self-confidence with women feed off one another. If you believe yourself to be a strong person, a good person, and worthy of a sexual or loving relationship, it will make you feel more confident with women. Moreover, if you feel confident that you can talk to women, and do, you will feel that perhaps you are a good guy after all. But self-image and self-confidence can, I believe, exist independently of one another, especially in men.

I think of self-image and self-confidence as the soft and hard martial arts of interpersonal relationships, respectively. Self-image can require years to refine, and must rest on a solid psychological foundation. But thinking positively about who and what you are can be the difference between success and failure in life, as in relationships. Self-confidence, though, can be learned faster, but you have to hit the streets to learn it. That means, you've gotta talk to girls, and you've got to learn to fail gracefully.

My advice to those of you reading this blog who can relate to my last post about self-image and self-confidence goes as follows: self-improvement is a lifetime affair. There is no silver bullet, and even if you overcome your image problems, you may probably still get nervous when talking to women for the rest of your life -- some people seem to have just been born to be overconfident pricks, but you weren't. All those programs you hear and read about that teach you how to meet women, how to get laid, etc., do have value and some bits of good advice, but they can only improve your self-confidence. The bottom line with these programs is that 1) you're going to fail many times, so get used to it, and, 2) you're going to fail many times, so get used to it. If you can overcome your fear, through repetition and practice, of looking like an idiot to a girl you're trying to meet, you will be more self-confident, but you may still FEEL like an idiot, and it will start to show as soon as you start to actually have feelings for a girl. If your goal is to have more than a one-night-stand with a girl, you must concurrently focus on self-image.

Your goal should be to take baby steps. You should practice saying "hi" and smiling to women you see on the street. Just getting past that first barrier will already net you a little confidence and self-image. Meanwhile, look at your life and start fixing your shit. Ditching the porn is a nice place to start. Work on that for a few months. Enroll in a martial art and learn to fight. Then get some psychotherapy. Then quit your shitty job and go do what you want to do with your life. This process might take you years, but it's worth the trouble. Little by little, you'll realize that you're not a loser, and that you're fully in control of your own destiny. Eventually, porn will just seem to you like a waste of time.

Porn and Self-Image

2006-05-10T10:21:00.000-04:00

An area I have never remarked on in this blog is the importance of self-image as it relates to porn addiction. A person who looks at pictures of sexy women and says to himself that there is no chance of him ever actually having a sexual relationship with such a woman is going to be far more likely to fixate on these images than a person who believes they have a sporting chance. If you're fat, bald, old, lazy, or just a loser, porn is the only chance you have to see beautiful women at their sexiest moments. And the process has a feedback mechanism. The more porn you consume, and the less you get done in your real life, the less actual chance you have of making it with a gorgeous girl. And then, even if you do get that chance, you'll probably blow it because your mind is worn into certain patterns of ecstacy as a result of years of porn consumption.

Unfortunately, for many, choosing porn over real sex is not such a bad decision. A person who commits himself to a lifetime of porn consumption is guaranteed a lifetime of arousal and great orgasms. It's a conservative strategy with guaranteed returns. One could imagine someone giving up porn, going after real women, and failing repeatedly, and going years with little or no satisfaction to show for their trouble. I can hardly fault a man for going down the path of more porn and less actual women. But if you're like me, and you can look inside yourself and see a kernel of belief that you are an attractive person, you have to break out of the habit and start talking to real girls, because the potential may exist for making it work with the real thing.

Self-image, as a broad concept, must be addressed in order to overcome a porn addiction completely, I believe. It is a huge issue that can take years of therapy and personal change to turn around. When confronting one's addiction, one should always be aware of self-image, but it really cannot be sufficiently addressed until the porn is under control, in my opinion. Of course, self-control is itself a component of self-image, which only serves to complicate the matter.

Accomplishing the level of self-control and self-discipline needed to overcome a serious addiction, though, will only add to your positive self-image. And that will already make you sexier to others.

Time to Reset

2006-05-01T16:09:00.000-04:00

I always figured this would happen eventually -- that very gradual slide back to former habits. On Friday night a had a bit of a binge. Only for maybe an hour and a half, but it was late and I needed sleep. It was only the second binge I've had since I first dropped porn four months ago, which to me is pretty damn good.

But I had started up a small collection again. Nothing near what I was doing last year, but it was growing -- and I wanted to stop it before it got worse. I erased just about everything from my hard drive Friday night.

The habit, like any habit, creeps back into your life so slowly you don't even notice it happening. Especially when you get busy, as I have been recently, you tend to ignore the effects of the habit and move onto whatever else you're doing. A gentle recurrence of bad habits, I believe, deserves a gentle correction.

So I'm going to fight the urges a little in the next few weeks, and try to set myself back on the right path. I don't plan to avoid porn altogether, but to simply keep it out of my day to day life, not resorting to it out of boredom, frustration, fatigue, or obligation.

Stay tuned.

Blog to Beat Your Addiction

2006-04-04T17:46:00.000-04:00

Reading the posts over at Trying Bloody Hard reminded me of the power blogging can have over an addiction. There is very clearly a need for more secular support for addicts of all kinds, not just for porn. Every addiction has it's own unique issues, but they all have in common an uncontrollable urge to do something that negatively affects one's life. But many addicts, as I did, feel isolated, chastized, and without help. Blogging your thoughts anonymously lets the world see you, and your reader's comments can have a great affect on your confidence.

Addiction is everywhere, and I doubt anyone can make it through their lifespan and not have spent time addicted to something, be it heroin, porn, television, or Jesus's love. And I can tell you there are a lot of porn addicts out there. I have hardly done a post in the past two weeks and my site traffic has actually gone UP as a result of so many people looking for Sadie Jones and Planet Eva material.

If you decide to start a blog to quit your addiction, whatever it is, please send me a note, either in a comment or as an email, so I can link to your site and help you quit. Maybe one day we'll have a whole network of addiction blogs (addilogs? bladdictogs? I need a catchword here).

A New Quitter

2006-04-02T21:56:00.000-04:00

This is just a quick note to mention a new blog by a fellow quitter. Please pay him a visit and cheer him on. He'll need your help, just as I did.

Trying Bloody Hard

Where Am I?

2006-03-20T14:16:00.000-05:00

Where have I been? Not blogging, that's for sure. I'm trying to spend less time on my computers at work and at home, and more time on my life. And it's a sad state of affairs when turning to my life gets me so depressed. But that's for another blog.

There's very little to mention about the old porn addiction at this point. Just more of the same. Sure, I still have cravings now and then, some of which I allow, some of which I do not. It just depends on the situation. If I have other pressing business, if I need sleep, porn is a no-go. My need for porn is just background noise. It's such an insignificant part of my daily life now that I can't even see a reason to talk about it. It would be like doing a blog about clipping my toenails - sometimes I need to do it, most of the time I don't (hopefully I don't just do it out of boredom).

This is not the total end of this blog, because there may come a time in the future when I need it again, but I simply cannot maintain a post-a-day routine or even a post-every-other-day routine. It's too repetitive and I have exhausted myself discussing the subject. In a way, this is very liberating. I've told the world all I know about beating an addiction, and I hope I've helped a few people along the way. For me, the mental infrastructure is present now to help me fight what urges may arise, and blogging about it has just become a chore, not to mention a dull read.

When I set out on this journey, my goal was to make it an entire year without porn. As it turned out, that was overkill, although I think the motivation to go that long helped my staying power. Less than three months later, I consider myself changed for the better. This doesn't mean that porn addiction is gone forever from my life, or that I will never have a problem with it. I would gamble that I probably will have some trouble in the future. But I know now what I can do, and more importantly I know how much LESS porn benefits my lifestyle.

To those of you who have enjoyed my writing, as you have mentioned countless times, I wouldn't worry. You will hear from me again, although you may not realize who it is. I have many creative projects that themselves are growing in notoriety, albeit slowly, so if you hang around the internet, or other media channels long enough, you're sure to stumble across my work.

Thanks for helping me beat back this rotten addiction. I'm a better person without it.

Be seeing you...

I Should Masturbate a Bit Less

2006-03-14T09:35:00.000-05:00

I'm still fighting on with this addiction, even though it's become far easier to manage than when I began over two months ago. Quitting porn forced me to cut back on my masturbation, though, and I think the higher levels of hormones in my body contributed to a lot of creative energy during that time.

Since I've gone back to porn, even at a much smaller level, I've been having regular sexual release, and I've noticed my creative levels have plumetted. I don't know for certain if there is real causality there, but I'm certainly willing to try cutting back my masturbation a little to try it out.

Perhaps we're all masturbating just a bit too much, and maybe this can explain American's lack of productivity of late. There's just too much good porn and too many ways to lube up. Why work when you can jerk? Maybe there's more to life than sexual release, and maybe you can improve your chances of sexual release with sexy human women if you work a little. I'm going to find out.

Kicking Addiction Wears You Down

2006-03-10T11:48:00.000-05:00

Beating an addiction is exhausting, as I have found out. After you've spent a few months (or weeks or DAYS if you're really weakened) fighting with yourself nonstop over this habit, your willpower begins to wane. It almost feels physically tiring to continue to fight. This is in large part why I was unable to maintain cold turkey. At some point, my mind just couldn't take the tension and needed to relax.

As I've found out, though, if you don't restart the tension quickly, your addiction will return. There is no shame in lapsing now and then, so long as you immediately return to the fight.

Last night was a good example. I was out late at the gym and returned with the intention to masturbate. It was with great foresight that I had shut my computer down before leaving home that evening, because had it been on I may not have been able to resist internet porn. The fact was, though, that I was not that horny, and masturbation was not in any way necessary. But I wanted at least to check my email, and that meant turning the machine on. I grappled with myself briefly over whether or not to turn on my computer, and ultimately decided to do so, with the vow to only check my email and then shut it down. I had even considered doing a post on this blog to substitute for porn, but even that seemed like an invitation to start clicking around again.

I turned my computer on, checked my email, turned it off. I didn't even open my browser to check the news and weather. That's successful self-control to me. I maintained the fight.

The blog itself is a bit of a problem in this regard. In order to blog, I have to be sitting at my computer typing into my internet browser. I am one click away from mountains of pornography. Using a blog as a recovery aid is like attending an AA meeting in a bar. You don't HAVE to order a beer, but it's right there.

And yet, I've been handling it pretty well. As the days and weeks and months pass since my days of unregulated bingeing, I grow, at least on average, less and less interested in porn. My urges become easier to control, I worry less about what I might be missing, I lose my obsessions with specific superhot girls, and when I do look at pornography, I couldn't care less about trying to download it all. It has simply become another part of who I am. And that's the way it should be.

This blog has been a great tool for me. I've gotten a lot off my chest about the subject, and feeling accountable, even to a bunch of unseeable strangers, is powerful. But I wonder if it really was the "scheme" of blogging that helped (and is still helping me) beat my porn addiction, or if it was more the fact that I really meant it this time. Sure I've quit before, but maybe this time it was just a matter of sufficient willpower. Maybe I had just reached the right time in my life when porn wasn't worth the trouble it once was. Maybe I'd have been able to quit without the blog.

We'll never know.

Internet Addiction Has Its Own Consequences

2006-03-08T14:55:00.000-05:00

I am convinced that part of internet porn addiction is also a more general internet addiction.

Even though I spend very little time now looking around for internet porn, I still spend WAY too much time looking around the internet. At times I find myself STARING at my browser, trying to remember if there is anything I can look at that I might have forgotten. I scour news sites for any nuggets of news or opinion that might be even slightly interesting to me. I check my website visitor stats. This process repeats itself throughout the day. I am truly obsessed.

Just as I once would search for the "perfect porn" now I search for the "perfect news." I want a story that blows my mind, like a journalist who uncovers the truth behind the Bush presidency (e.g. Bush and Cheney drink goat's blood while sacrificing secret detainees under a full moon in a homoerotic ritual.) And just as I was once obsessed with never missing any porn, I am obsessed with never missing out on news. I want to be the first to know everything, and most of the time I am. It's an addiction to the PRESENT. I have to be in the NOW or I'll perish. Living only in a present hyperreality means you never really develop a past. Pure Baudrillard.

This is another habit I need to kick, both in the interest of keeping myself off the computer more, and away from porn, as well as for its own sake. Staring at a computer screen is no good for your brain, whether you're looking at porn or anything else. The mind needs time to do things besides staring and reading. And it doesn't help that you jump from one thing to the other, which hurts your ability to concentrate.

Staying off porn helps me think smarterer, and I have to believe spending less time online would make me totally smarterest.

Things Get Out of Hand....

2006-03-06T10:38:00.000-05:00

Things got out of hand last night. I was up late doing work on my computer (normal for a Sunday night because of deadlines) and, in spite of fatigue, I spent about an hour looking at porn. This was not porn for masturbation, but porn for its own sake, and that's a no-no. I can try to justify it by mentioning that my sexuality has been AWOL for a week, and I had had a somewhat stressful Sunday. It all adds up to porn, and jerking off felt great, but all in all I regret the time wasted on it and it could have easily been prevented, because I saw it coming.

I have chosen to live with pornography. Seven weeks attempting to live cold turkey turned out to have some disadvantages, and the reintroduction of porn to my life was not devastating to my quest to beat the addiction and for the most part I have contained what little urges to porn away the days I still have. And mistakes will happen. I am human, and unless I plan to rid myself of porn completely forever and ever I am going to trip myself up now and then, and that's okay. Instances such as last night certainly illustrate just how easy it is to fall back into old habits, in spite of my efforts to prevent them.

Because I had been so unhorny all week, I guess I let my guard down. I must have reasoned subconsciously that because I had no real interest in porn, that porn could not really infect me. I went after porn to some degree out of boredom and frustration (which I think is the translation of "ennui") which are never good reasons to turn to pornography.

So right now my ship is listing to one side, but I have the wind in my sails and only need to steer in the right direction. Even though I feel sick having binged a little last night, I know that I am now very vulnerable to further transgression. I had some files queued up in my torrent client, and a few files saved to my hard drive. That shit's gotta go, and I need to stay completely away from porn for at least a week to refocus my mind.

As I said, if I'm going to learn to live with pornography, I have to practice self-control on a regular basis. Despite last night's failure, I have been doing splendidly, I think. Now to get back on track.

It Helps if You're Never Horny

2006-03-03T14:43:00.000-05:00

I haven't touched porn since Saturday (I think). That's six days porn-free without even trying. Of course, I've also had no sex with my girlfriend. I'm just not horny. It's one of those times. My girlfriend claims I have had lulls like this in the past, but I can't believe I would have lulled for a whole week.

It seems that, were I still hooked on porn, I would have probably bounced back by now. Invariably, I would have gone looking for porn, just out of boredom and an obligation to not "miss" anything. Then I would be horny again. But here I am, not horny, and not wasting my time on pornography. That's good, I guess.

It's a moot point anyway, because I had some pretty sexual dreams last night, and I was a little randy this morning. So I guess my brain is remembering what it's there for -- to make me want sex and to think of clever new ways to get sex.

Abstaining from porn seems so effortless now, even though I am technically allowed to view it. Although I don't consider myself "in the clear" yet, I do feel like I'm on the outside looking into my addiction, not a part of it. It feels now like a different state of mind for me, and that's just not who I am anymore. If I get really horny and my girlfriend is unavailable, there's my porn. But collecting it and searching for it for hours seems like such a horrendous CHORE to me now. I don't need ten gigs of torrents. Just give me a few pictures and let me jerk off.

What did it take? Two months? And I didn't even abstain completely during that time. Shit, you should give it a try.

New NBC Story Typical of Attitude Toward Addicts

2006-03-01T11:20:00.000-05:00

MSNBC has a story (see it here) about porn addiction called "Might as Well Face It, He's Addicted to Net Porn." It details the struggle of Lance Tracy, who was so addicted as to be spending 6 to 8 hours a day on porn.

As is typical of most stories on this subject, it seems to take as a principle assumption that people who look at internet pornography too much are deviants. It notes how wives view it as a form of "cheating." Moreover, it mentions several times how effective "church support groups" are in helping an addict recover. Robert Weiss, of the Sexual Recovery Institute (check it out and judge for yourself) says, "internet pornography is the crack cocaine of sexual addiction."

How understanding and caring of him to compare me to a crack addict.

I have mentioned before that pornography is not crack. It's closer to alcohol and gambling in its severity and style. Gamblers keep rolling the dice in hopes of the big score. Porn addicts keep clicking links in search of the "perfect porn." Alcoholics don't see the harm in having one more beer. Porn addicts don't see the harm in searching through one more website.

And as I've said over and over, you don't need god to beat an addiction, and you certainly shouldn't listen to Christians on the subject (here, here, and here.) You just have to want it enough.

I'm glad to know there are intelligent people out there, intelligent addicts, too, who read this blog and understand that there is a more practical and understanding way to confront porn addiction, or any addiction. Feeling right is a great antidote to feeling ashamed.

If You Googled "Sadie Jones" You Need This Blog

2006-02-27T22:24:00.000-05:00

I've been checking my Statcounter page for this website lately and I've noticed a lot of people are reaching here from Googling "Sadie Jones," likely because I did a post or two that mentioned her by name when I started. She's getting attention because of her affiliation with Planet Eva, and the two of them recently did a set in a bubble bath. It's lame.

It scares me to think that while the average guy is just now finding out about Sadie Jones, I knew about her months before I started this blog. When you're so involved in pornography every single day, you don't miss much. And when you come across a super-hot girl you've never seen, or a website you've never visited, you say to yourself "how did I miss this?" It's almost a source of PRIDE that you never miss anything. When a girl or a website falls through the thin cracks of your search operation, it hurts your pride, and you redouble your efforts to ensure you don't miss ANYTHING. What a terrible cycle to get sucked into. I don't plan on ever letting that happen again.

Sex and Videogames

2006-02-27T13:59:00.000-05:00

I did not look at porn all weekend. In fact, I didn't even have to fight with myself over it, because I didn't feel like looking at porn. Let me repeat that a little louder in case you missed it:

I DIDN'T FEEL LIKE LOOKING AT PORN.

I don't know if this means I have turned a corner or not. But it is a very rare thing that I could go an entire weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and not even consider porn. Actually, I think I may have considered it briefly Saturday night just before I went to bed, after I had lost a heartbreaking, nailbiting game of Mario Golf (from Nintendo 64). I was very saddened and I thought tits might cheer me up. Instead I went to sleep. Good move.

My girlfriend and I had some killer drunken sex Friday night, which may have put my mind at ease for the weekend. Videogames performed masterfully in occupying spare time I might have otherwise spent on porn.

When I think of porn now it actually feels like a big hassle to me. Last Thursday when I was looking around for porn, I became so impatient with the whole process, especially looking for bittorrents, where you might have to wait hours to view the material. I can't be bothered to spend so much time digging and digging to get one orgasm. Better to have an orgasm quickly, recover, and have a SECOND orgasm later that night.

I Had Myself a Little Porn

2006-02-23T23:18:00.000-05:00

I had a little porn after work today. It sure is a lot faster and more convenient than what I was doing. Deep inside I wanted to spend all night clicking around looking for new stuff, but I just had too much to do.

I think this is one of the most effective ways to combat excessive porn downloading. If you are able to spend hours every day downloading porn, you're not busy enough. Tonight I had to make my own dinner and prepare dinner for tomorrow night (I'm cooking for my girlfriend) before going to a martial arts class at 9PM. Even if I wanted to let myself go, I just could not have without really fucking things up.

So take this as a lesson. Get yourself involved in as many things as possible. Take classes, make dates with friends, play sports, whatever. If you are still downloading porn you're still not doing enough.

Porn should always be about simple sexual release, not hoarding. Get your picture and jerk it. If you fuck around for even a few extra minutes, it may be hard to stop yourself later.

A Post Instead of Porn

2006-02-22T21:15:00.000-05:00

I could look at porn right now, but I'm really really sleepy. I want to be alert and clearheaded going into the weekend. So instead of looking at pornography and staying up another hour or so, I'm doing this quit post and then turning off my computer and going to sleep.

I'd like to look at some naked chicks. I'd like to jerk off. But I have more pressing issues to worry about.

There. That's simple self-control. Was that so painful?

Slipping Back...

2006-02-22T09:09:00.000-05:00

I'm losing my energy, and my willpower, to continue with this.

Last night my girlfriend brought it to my attention that my sexual energy has been directed far too much of late toward other women. I work at a small university, and there are hot, single, horny girls everywhere. And while my relationship with my girlfriend allows for some action on the side, ever since I cut out the porn I have been lusting constantly after other women.

This is a problem. It's not a huge problem, and were I not in a relationship like this one I'd see my lustfulness as a benefit. But I can't spend this much time pining after other women. Porn turns out to be a remarkable tool for maintaining monogamy. As I've mentioned before, I get a huge, satisfying release out of pornography that I just can't seem to generate without it. And it keeps my mind on my business.

I've also just been losing interest in this process. It's gotten boring and annoying. When my girlfriend isn't aroused, I may have work to do, but instead of spending ten minutes looking at pictures followed by a great orgasm, I have to spend 45 minutes or longer fantasizing for a shitty orgasm.

The clip from South Park I posted Monday keeps playing in my head. Stan's dad said it very bluntly. "I drank too much beer one night and drove a car. That was stupid and I'm not going to do it again." Later he said that he just needs to cut down a little. I feel this way about porn at this point. I got a little crazy, consumed too much, and let it create minor problems in my life. What I need is to just consume less, and keep things under control. I think I am fully capable of this. I am not powerless.

I'm not sure anymore if I was a true pornoholic. I certainly had my moments of weakness, and porn was getting in the way of certain aspects of my life, but it was never running my life. I never forewent sex with my girlfriend in favor of porn. I never missed work or class because of porn. I was just spending too much time on it. Big deal. People spend too much time on videogames, playing golf, watching American Idol.

And now I'm supposedly off the stuff, and I'm still not getting as much sleep as I'd like to. I'm finding other ways to waste my time, too, like playing videogames and watching Olympic curling. And in the last two weeks my creativity has sucked, in spite of the great gains I earlier attributed to cutting out pornography. I'm imperfect, and I don't fucking care.

I just need to consume less. It can't be an every day event. I can't hoard it. And I know when I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing. If it's 1:00AM and I've been downloading porn for two hours I should know I've seriously fucked up and I need to stop. The essence of mature self-control is being able to operate on the margins - to know when I've had enough. Self-control must happen every single day. I need to be able to say every time I'm looking at porn, "that's enough, stop," rather than, "that's enough, stop forever."

Abstinence like this has become such a distraction, and I've found ways to look at sexy girls anyway. I waste time on that, too. It's just all so counterproductive. I've learned a lot from this experience and now I want to focus on something else.

Some of you surely see this as a cop-out. Fine, call me a failure if it makes you feel better. I can't see what I've failed at besides a completely unreasonable goal of going a full year without seeing ANY porn. I sought to improve myself and I have. Now I want to get back to my life. I can "quit porn whenever I want to" but quitting porn is tantamount to quitting masturbation, or even quitting sex. And I'd like to think about something other than horny naked 19-year-olds in the locker room shower.

I'm not ready to give myself full-reign, though. I haven't decided yet what I want to do. I know that if I just let my guard down I will be right back where I was two months ago. I refuse to let that happen. But I want my life back, and a little pornography peppered in there is on the menu for sure.

Nonetheless, I will be keeping this weblog up to date as events unfold. Will I binge? Will I stay in control? Will I masturbate every day or just a couple times a week? I can't say. Stay tuned.

South Park Agrees With Me

2006-02-20T15:04:00.000-05:00

I think I've mentioned several times on this weblog how pathetic addiction support is in this country. Just like all the Christian websites that seek to convince you that you cannot overcome your addiction without God or Jesus, Alcoholics Anonymous has for years been doing the same thing. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, made a pretty decent joke out of it.

Watch

It is difficult for me to completely dismiss AA when so many people have successfully cleaned themselves up as a result of their program. But what I think helps AA members get through it isn't God at all, it's the understanding and support of the people they meet who are in the same situation. Christians want to isolate you, make you feel alone so that you will turn to God for help. But you aren't alone. Millions of people in the world suffer the same addiction you do, be it alcohol or porn or paint thinner. You are made to feel guilty by the very same people who are trying to help you. If you love Jesus Christ, fine. But what are the rest of us going to do?

It is possible to beat an addiction on your own, but it can be done without the aid of a higher power. Finding people who are able to accept you in spite of, or maybe even because of your problems, and who you can feel accountable to without being shamed and humiliated is a powerful thing. You might soon find that you have more power over your own actions than you knew.

Friendship and compassion is more powerful than "God." If you want to get clean, get friends. They will want to help you.

Frustration...Yeah...

2006-02-18T15:05:00.000-05:00

I cannot generate the orgasms without porn that I can with it. And this is growing increasingly frustrating to me. I try and I try and I try and I never reach that state of exploding-penis, pounding orgasms I get when there's porn involved. It is getting harder and harder to justify this kind of abstinence.

Here and there I've been sneaking a look at pornography. Just for a minute or two, but I do look. Even just that image, imprinted in my mind for a few seconds, accomplishes a greater orgasm through recall than I can create out of my own mind. When I imagine myself with a woman (or women) I do tend to concentrate on things other than just the visual aspect of it. I went into this recovery with the mindset that, with regular practice focusing on all aspects of sex, I could acheive an all-body orgasm. But the only time I ever experience this is during actual real sex with my girlfriend. When I masturbate, I just want my penis to explode. And it's not happening.

I have never so clearly been able to demark the difference between a sex orgasm and a masturbation orgasm. I always knew that masturbation orgasms were more penis-centered, but it has been illustrated to me in great detail in the last six weeks. When I have sex, I feel it all over, and I'm loud as hell about it. When I masturbate, though, I just want a HUGE physical release in my genitals. It satisfies you to the point that you won't need to touch yourself again for at least 24 hours, if not more.

On the downside, of course, these kind of orgasms, gotten through masturbating to pornography, clearly lower my sex drive. And having a better sex drive has enormous benefits. It means better sex with my girlfriend, and more interest in meeting other women for hookups (allowed to some extent in my relationship.) But when I'm busy with other things, I just want my sex drive to disappear. Porn is quick and effective, so long as, as I've said over and over again, you don't let downloading porn be about downloading porn. It has to be about getting off.

I still don't know where to go with this next. I have gotten so much better at ignoring those quiet background urges, but when I really want release, I'm just not getting enough of it. Really, though, I wish I just didn't have to think about this anymore. It's getting boring.

It's Getting Harder to Maintain a Blog

2006-02-16T15:01:00.000-05:00

The longer this battle goes on, the more habitual it becomes. I feel like I'm starting to coast. The battle is not over. In fact it may never be over. In fact I might just get fucking sick of it and give in once again.

But I'm slowly learning how not to look at pornography every day. I'm learning not to worry about satisfying every miniscule urge that comes up, and I think that's the key to a healthy level of consumption. And the longer I go, the less I think about porn. The less I think about porn, the less I feel like I need this weblog. Without getting repetitive, I think I've said almost everything I can say about porn addiction. My uncontrollable urges are less frequent, and so I don't need to post as often. The addiction has gotten easy, the weblog has become a chore.

All that said, I am very far from in the clear, if I will ever be. This weekend may be tricky as girlfriend has been under the weather, so I'm on my own sexually. It has only been four days since my last porn, but it seems like forever. And here I've got to make it 17 more days.

I must stay focused. There are too many things I need and want to do. Like my taxes. That's WAY more fun than porn.

17 days? Shit...

A Little Nausea Helps

2006-02-14T11:45:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the thought of pornography actually turned my stomach a little. This is a reaction I have experienced before on the day after a massive porn binge. Before, however, I would have had to binge for hours upon hours to actually make myself feel ill over the thought of it. Yesterday I experienced the nausea having barely binged at all the night before. I take this as a sign that my tolerance has dropped dramatically. This happened a lot faster than I expected in the course of my recovery.

Spending hours upon hours downloading porn just seems like such a horrendous use of my time now. I just can't see myself allowing it to happen again. I have way too many important things to get done and I realize that even more now that I have a little better control of my time.

One problem that is arising is that I may be replacing my porn addiction with a video game addiction. I have spent a lot of my life on video games, so this is nothing new, although it has been since GTA Vice City that I was truly hooked in. For the time being, if this keeps me off the porn I am happy to let it go, but if I wind up creating the same problems in my life with video games as I did with porn, I may have to cut myself off from that as well. But video game time is a lot easier to manage for me than porn time, so I'm not worried.

Hit the Restart Button

2006-02-13T12:01:00.000-05:00

I was gone for a few days, so avoiding porn was easy since I had none at my disposal, except for my ten years worth of Playboys stashed in my old closet at home. But looking at those is about as much of a turn-on at this point as seeing my sister naked, so not hard to resist.

Sunday was my day to look at some porn and pleasure myself to it. In spite of having sex with my girlfriend in the morning, I still had to peek around a bit and get off, just so I wouldn't miss the opportunity I had given myself for making it two weeks cleanly. It went fine; I didn't binge or anything. But then last night I took a little unfair advantage of my generous offer and went looking again late at night. It didn't get too terribly out of hand, and I pleasured myself again, but I probably could have avoided this second round without too much trouble.

Looking around the internet like this after avoiding it for over a month really sends you reeling over the magnitude of pornography on the net. There are just so many absolutely gorgeous young girls with perfect bodies willing to get naked for money, and in another month there will probably be still more. It is truly staggering, and the tendency is to want to see as much of it as you can without paying for it (at least that's how my mind works.) And when you've seen so little of it recently, it is even more arousing.

I still have yet to decide a real course of action. The year-long ban has proven to be impractical and unfavorable, but I don't feel comfortable giving myself free reign. At this point I'd like to make it three weeks without a peek, if only as punishment for overstepping my bounds last night. These urges are becoming increasingly controllable, which is good news for my penis because it has been left too often unsatisfied when there is no visual stimulation.

One final note: I am fairly convinced that over-consumption of pornography does in fact dull the other senses. After a session of porn viewing, my mind's eye is filled with images. Sexy images, of course, but it always seems to be at the expense of other senses. And I don't necessarily mean other senses as in sound, touch, smells, etc., but also the sense of a woman's sexuality. It is almost a sixth sense where one picks up on a woman's sexual signs, both subtle and overt, to sort of "feel" a woman's sexual arousal in your mind. This is at least as arousing, if not more so, than visual stimulation. Without that sense, real sex is just masturbation with a real human body instead of your hand. When I am not looking at porn, this sense is heightened significantly, and is what makes actual sex more "real."

No New Posts (or Porn) Until Sunday

2006-02-08T19:47:00.000-05:00

...have to fly out for a grieving friend. If that doesn't keep my mind of pornography, I don't know what will. See you all in a few days.

Four Weeks Gone By

2006-02-06T14:22:00.000-05:00

I've survived four weeks with only a few bumps and bruises, so I thought I'd take stock of where I am.

So far, I've given in to temptation twice. I think that's a pretty good record for the first four weeks. The first two weeks were the most stressful, and there were times at which I thought I would never survive without porn. By week three, in spite of my failure last week, things started to calm down and I began to care less and less about pornography. I then went almost the entire fourth week without masturbating (I did the deed last night.) Not because I was trying to abstain, just because I wasn't horny.

I have been more focused on my work and have noticed my creative levels rise dramatically. Sex with my girlfriend is better. Masturbation isn't as powerful to me as it once was, but I can't say I really care about that anymore. Constant exposure to T&A and consistent masturbating definitely had me locked in a never-ending cycle of desire/release. I have felt that internal pressure less and less, to the point that I don't even notice it anymore. I go about my daily business and do not feel interrupted by the need to see porn.

That's not to say I don't want to look at porn, just that it has been reduced to a very tiny need that's very easy to ignore, sort of like how I could always eat some chocolate ice cream, but I usually ignore the urge because it's just not worth it in the long run.

If any of you are still thinking about cutting yourself off, I again highly encourage you to do so. It's a tough road for the first few weeks, but it seems that if you can get through a month relatively porn-free, you will notice tremendous benefits in your daily life. After a while, you just stop thinking about it, and your mind focuses on more important issues.

I am looking forward to this weekend, when I have allowed myself a little porn, but I'm not counting down the days. It's just something I will do this weekend, and I'm not chomping at the bit to get there. It's very pleasant to feel so relaxed. You should try it.

...Since Monday

2006-02-04T16:35:00.000-05:00

Today is Saturday, and I have not masturbated since Monday evening. In fact, I haven't even tried. I've been very focused on my work and haven't been horny at all. I haven't even considered trying to pleasure myself. It's period time for my girlfriend so she's out of commission. I've gone nearly a week without masturbating, and I haven't even been trying.

I always feared that leaving pornography would adversely affect my sexuality. I enjoy masturbation and visual stimulation. I worried that without porn, I just wouldn't masturbate very much. It seems to be happening, and yet I don't care. I'm not the least bit bothered by it. I've been able to plan my days better, and sit at my desk longer, without fear of being interrupted by porn. That's pretty liberating.

And this weekend I feel the pressure off my shoulders much more in knowing that I will allow myself a little porn next weekend. When I was going by the cold turkey model it terrified me, and I broke down twice. But this weekend if an urge strikes it's easy to put those urges down by telling myself that it's coming next weekend. I think for me this is a much more viable model than straight cold turkey. But when I started this blog four weeks ago, cold turkey was what I needed to truly break my mind away from it, not just another scheme.

After next weekend I will reasses my situation. Should I go for three weeks? Four weeks? Should I just try another two weeks? We'll see.

Porn Addiction is a Secret No More

2006-02-03T12:15:00.000-05:00

Porn addicts suffer their addiction alone. There seems to be no support for porn addicts that doesn't involve worshipping Jesus Christ, and although some men may talk openly about their love of porn, or even the ridiculous amounts of time spent consuming porn, many do not see it as an addiction, and even fewer would ever take the first step and try to break away from it.

Men are the addicts here, and addicts like their addiction. Ask a heroin addict what it feels like to be on heroin, and he'll tell you it's the greatest feeling he knows. "Why give up something that makes you feel good?" an addict might say. And while porn may not cause the physical distress that heroin does, it surely has a multitude of psychological effects, in addition to time lost on it. The first lesson is never to take advice from an addict.

Porn addiction is a man problem. And men don't talk about their problems, because it makes them appear weak, and weakness means vulnerability. In any animal society, being vulnerable is a bad deal. You're likely to get deserted, mauled, eaten, or at least displaced. In human society, it can mean being deserted, overlooked, ignored, alienated, or worse. Males always must appear strong. This is the Bush/Cheney strategy - never admit fault, EVER. The second lesson, then, is to overcome our macho attitude and start talking with ourselves and with those who can help us. People are flawed, and you are flawed. Get over it and start fixing it.

Women really don't know the extent of the addiction because we lie about it. Women that do know don't understand because for most of them pornography is only a minor turn-on, if that. Many of them think it is "abnormal" for us to take such pleasure in it, just as we think of them as "abnormal" for taking so much pleasure in "Friends" and Hugh Grant films. The third lesson: don't take advice from a girl on beating porn addiction, unless she has experience beating addictions of her own.

The last, and perhaps greatest problem, is the society we live in. Judeo-Christians think porn addicts are a bunch of filthy perverts (even the ones who are themselves porn addicts.) They tell us that porn leads to child porn, or leads to child molestation, rape, murder, etc. - we feel persecuted and so don't talk about it openly. It seems ironic that I could openly tell my coworkers that I'm attempting to beat a cigarette addiction, or even that I'm trying to beat alcoholism, but to tell them or anyone who is not a very close friend that I am trying to beat pornography would invite trouble for me, and cost me respect, promotions, raises, even possibly cost me my job.

Believe it or not, though, we can change this attitude. As individuals, we are powerless to stop the unreasonable judgement, but if more of us learn to discuss it openly with others, then little by little, it will become a more "acceptable" addiction. When people come to understand that this is a problem that affects so many men, men who they know personally, they will eventually relax. Support for porn addiction recovery will rise and gradually, men will find it easier and easier to control their urges.

So I urge you, the addicts and recovering addicts, to show some courage and start talking about it with people who care about you. Admit it to your girlfriend, admit it to your friends, maybe even your mom, if you're really brave. Tell them this isn't a joke. This is a real problem and you refuse to feel guilty about it. Once you're talking about it, the boundaries of your problem will soon be clearly outlined, and the task of overcoming the addiction will seem far less daunting.

Do it. Go tell somebody. Yes, it's humiliating, but so is a lifetime of porn addiction.

The Schemes

2006-02-02T14:40:00.000-05:00

As I've mentioned before, this is not the first time I have tried to control my pornish urges. In fact, over the years I have attempted a number of schemes, all short of quitting cold turkey, with varying degrees of succes.

The oldest and most obvious scheme was to limit the amount of time I spent on porn. Without question this was the least successful idea. Several factors always conspined to break through my defenses. First, I tended to grossly underestimate the amount of time "needed" for adequate porn viewing satisfaction. So, for example, if I gave myself 30 minutes for porn, I would invariably find myself, 30 minutes later, deeply immersed in a cornucopia of porn, having not even lubed up for masturbation. Once allowed past 30 minutes, there was nothing stopping me from going 31 minutes, 32 minutes, or three hours. This scheme always failed.

A modification to this scheme was a token scheme in which a token could be traded for porn. I made a "bank" out of an empty can and employed pennies as tokens. Each penny was worth 15 minutes of porn, and I would grant myself a fixed number of pennies each week. Ideally, I could then reduce that number on subsequent weeks to lower the time spent on porn overall (this is similar to the "cap and trade" idea put forth by many economists for controlling pollution, for which it works ably.) The token scheme worked well for a time, and prevented late-night bingeing, but confounding factors again served to break it down. First, was the token just for porn downloading or for all porn viewing? What if I finished my 15 minutes on a token and still hadn't masturbated? Second, just as in the basic time scheme, once I had pushed passed the end of a token, or the end of my entire allotment, there was nothing to stop me going further. And of course, when one has been staring at a computer screen for long enough, or when one is up late and sleepy, willpower is at a minimum.

In spite of these problems, this was an excellent scheme and had I had just a touch more self-control, it likely would have worked perfectly.

Another scheme was source limits; I created a fixed list of porn sources, from which all porn must come. I was forbidden to seek porn from other channels. So, for instance, I might pick a few websites and a bittorrent site. This scheme was an abject failure. For one, sources are always changing, and by fixing your sources you invariably come upon a site or a source that cannot be avoided for its abundance of porn, and the rule is quickly broken. Secondly, this scheme leaves no control in place for bingeing. Thirdly, occasionally the sources you typically visit will seem terribly dry of porn, and in desperation you will begin to look elsewhere, into less efficient sources such as usenet and TGP sites (thumbnail gallery post, for the layman.)

The last scheme I tried, weekends only, worked remarkably well. I made sure that I was only allowed to download porn on the weekends, or even on a specific day. In this way, I ensured that no bingeing would occur on weekdays, and that I would not waste my time over-frequenting sites that really only needed to be scoured once a week at the most. I worked out of this scheme for several months toward the end of 2005. Gradually, however, I lost control. First, there was no way to prevent me from bingeing on the weekends. Second, there was no way to prevent me from bingeing on my giant stockpile of 50+ gigs of porn on weekdays. Third, I soon began to sneak a look at sites during weekdays, seeing a quick peak here and there as harmless. Of course, it wasn't, and I was soon back to old habits.

The common theme to all these schemes is that once a rule is broken, the scheme is all but destroyed. In order for any scheme to work, the rules must be followed TO THE LETTER. If one has the willpower to always stay within the boundaries of the law, failure is impossible.

Now, I'm on to another scheme - cold turkey. In spite of a few setbacks, I feel it has been enormously successful. I don't worry about the porn I am "missing out on," I don't care that I don't have six millenia worth of masturbating material on my hard drive, and I am learning (slowly) to stop myself from sneaking a peak here and there when urges strike me. Given this perspective, I believe strongly that I can one day use a combination of these schemes, along with a complete dissallowance of any hard drive saving, to consume porn in a perfectly healthy and responsible manner. I believe it can happen, and I aim to prove it to all of you some day in the future.

For now, once again, let's stick with delicious cold turkey.

Media Hyperexposure

2006-02-01T09:37:00.000-05:00

Forever Horny made an important comment worth looking into:

I myself have not specifically identified why I am so horny. I don't know why I constantly want to be sexually pleasured.

I cannot speak for all addicts, only myself. But it never ceases to amaze me how my addiction is almost identical to the addiction of others.

The question before us is: why are we always so horny?

We are men, and it's our function as men to seek out sex. And there are those of us who have a clear biological/hormonal over-imperative to need sex and masturbation all the time. If you're not one of these types, you probably knew one in college. Some guys just cannot go four hours without jerking off. I think this is an exception, though. I think men of average horniness are, like me, always ready to go if sex is available. We think about sex sometimes, but not every six seconds, as some women's magazines would have you believe. We want more sex if possible, we enjoy sex and jerking off every day if possible, and we tend to check out any decent ass that walks by.

For us, then, why does this latent background horniness so often take control of our minds, forcing us into an uncontrollable whirlwind of binging and jerking off?

I believe a major contributor is simply media saturation. We are surrounded on a daily basis by images of beauty and sexiness. It's unavoidable if you want to live a normal life in Western society. I have found over these last three weeks that I can be going along happily, not feeling uncontrollably horny. Then I see something, or I read about something. Perhaps it's Scarlett Johanssen getting her tit squeezed. Or I see Brooke Burke doing a commercial with her cleavage in my face. Whatever it is, as soon as I see cleavage, or an ass, or even a sexy stare, a chain reaction begins in which my desire for more imagery grows. So I open up my defenses a little and look for something else. Then my desire grows more. So I look for something even sexier. Before I know it, I'm right back into porn. The whole process can take place over several days. It's difficult to avoid it, because sexy imagery follows us everywhere - our PCs, our television, the movie theatre, the checkout line at the supermarket, the pornography store.

Abundance always leads to overconsumption. This is how we are wired as animals. Subconsciously our minds tell us that this abundance may not last long, so we must overconsume to prepare for the coming drought, for the unforseen. We hoard pornography on our hard drives because we worry we might need it if something goes wrong. I think this has been programmed into us since we were just single-celled organisms. Gorging is a part of life, and it's not just pornography we overconsume. Food abundance leads to obesity; financial abundance leads to giant gas-guzzling SUVs; drugs and alcohol, abundant in college, lead to drug addiction and alcoholism.

Nothing can be done to combat the abundance of sexiness in our society (unless the Christians have anything to say about it.) In my opinion, nothing should be done. It is up to us as the consumers of sexy imagery to limit our intake to healthy levels, just as we limit our intake of food to maintain healthy bodies, just as we use our financial gains to invest wisely and give generously to needy causes, just as we turn down another cheap before it makes us vomit.

Unless we go live in a cave, we will always be horny. But if an obese person can learn to live with hunger without giving in to temptation, so can we learn to live with a little horniness without giving in to a porn binge.

Better a Failure Than a Hypocrite

2006-01-31T12:59:00.000-05:00

"Better a Failure Than a Hypocrite."

That was my justification last night for admitting that I fucked up again.

Yes, once more, I masturbated to pornography. It was almost comical how quickly I went from a post about not masturbating back to old habits. When I did it last week, it felt great, and it was hard to feel remorse or regret. This time, however, I was overwhelmed with guilt.

The circumstances that led to this failure were nearly identical to those last week:

I had masturbated earlier in the day, but was left unsatisfied
I had spent a long time at my computer doing work
It was past my bedtime and I was sleepy
I was alone in my office

I had to work late last night to finish some work at my computer, and somehow the dissatisfaction with my earlier orgasm and my fatigue acted to wear down my usual defenses. I went hunting, "just to see what was going on that I was missing," and in about 30 seconds I was lubed up and going at it. It was even faster than last week - must have been a record for me. I guess I didn't want to deal with the guilt that came with once again breaking my promise to myself, so I made it quick.

My cock exploded with pleasure. It was a hard crushing, pumping shot and deeply gratifying. But that pain of remorse set in so fast. I felt truly defeated. It set my mood until I went to sleep and continued into the morning.

For a true addict, relapse is going to happen. In the past a relapse would have signalled to me that it's time to give up. But this time is different. I still think I can beat this addiction, and in many ways I already am. I've eliminated my desire to hoard, and I see little reason anymore to binge for hours. But I want to keep going and try to go further, longer. It is so hard to compete with the power of those orgasms, though. My mind just cannot conceive within itself of the unbelievable sexiness that exists in pornography.

My only question is, how many times can a person fail before they become a failure? Can a person fail on many occasions and still be a success? I certainly believe so. Maybe I just set the bar too high. Asking myself to stop looking at porn for a whole year when I am so inundated with media and computer exposure might have been too lofty a goal. I'm not sure how to adjust my goal, though, to prevent a complete relapse. At this point I think shooting for just two weeks would be a worthwhile endeavor. Perhaps I wouldn't feel so obligated to click around if I knew I would have the opportunity in two weeks instead of fifty-two.

I hope all of you can appreciate the importance of honesty when you're trying to beat addiction, or when you're trying to accomplish anything in your life. There is far too much lying and secrecy in this country. We need more openess and acceptance. I'm not perfect. I screwed up and I'm willing to share that with you because this is how real addiction is. If you hide it from yourself, if you hide it from those who care about you, you are a hypocrite, and in my books, a hypocrite is always a failure. At least an honest failure still has a chance at success.

Another Lame Orgasm

2006-01-30T18:47:00.000-05:00

I was pretty horny today. I got home, set up my shit, spent over 30 minutes arousing myself, and for all my work I got a pedestrian orgasm.

Real sex has definitely improved, but masturbation just seems much less fun to me now. Maybe that's how abstaining from porn works: once you're not exposed to nude bodies on a regular basis, you just can't get aroused for jerking off anymore. Or maybe the male body really doesn't naturally need release as often as I'm used to doing it. Maybe I shouldn't bother masturbating unless I've got an unstoppable raging boner and the girlfriend's not around to handle it.

A life without masturbation? It seems like such a shame to lose it. But I'm not 15 anymore. Could it be that I've just reached an age where I simply don't need it so much as I once did? But then, perhaps pornography keeps us artificially young. Is that good or bad? So many questions I can't answer.

I do know this: I'm going to stop planning masturbation. I will ignore the signs of arousal until my body is making it urgently obvious. No more recreational masturbation. Let's see what happens to me. I'm willing to try anything at this point.

Three Weeks on the Books

2006-01-30T09:57:00.000-05:00

I managed to get through the weekend without pornography. In fact, I don't think I was even tempted once. As refraining from pornography becomes a matter of habit, I think about it less and less. You may have noticed that I am posting shorter messages, and posting less often. It's probably the only downside to coming off the stuff - I'm simply not thinking about it as much as I was, and I am devoting most of my time and energy to other pursuits.

I also feel that sex with my girlfriend has been improved. I'm more often in the mood, quicker to get going, and feel far more passionate than I had in the past. Real sex is much much more satisfying than masturbation will ever be.

My creative levels, too, have improved, no question. And this in spite of the fact that my sleep habits haven't actually gotten much better. Somehow, though, the abstention has let my brain flow more freely and I have seen my productivity go up and up these last few weeks. I feel less stress, less anger, less fear and uncertainty. These may all be circumstantial, but they may also have cascaded from the initial effects of dropping porn.

The only effect left undetermined is whether or not I can learn to really enjoy masturbation without porn. So far it has been a slow atrophy speckled with minor windfalls. If it's going to take years to somehow reconfigure my mind to be able to effectively fantasize to reach the arousal that pornography affords, I think I'd rather just stick with porn for the sake of time savings. Maybe evolution was a pipedream. Maybe perfection is overrated.

I'll give it a few months at least.

Random Walk Expansion Pack: Clubwear

2006-01-28T00:17:00.000-05:00

Last night, having already masturbated earlier in the evening, I discovered I was feeling unsatisfied. As I mentioned in my last post, my fantasizing has been a bit unruly, and somehow I think it affects my concentration to the point that my orgasms just aren't that great.

Being sexually frustrated with masturbation is a bad bad place to be for a recovering porn addict. This is a key emotion in why we relapse, as I found out last week. I wanted to masturbate again last night but I didn't want to go through it and have a lame orgasm, or worse, no orgasm.

So I elected for a compromise, of sorts. I went shopping for women's clothing. Clothing is a huge part of a man's visual attraction to a woman, so I was going by the assumption that if I could dress my fantasy girls in an real outfit, my visualizations would feel more complete, more real.

I hit a number of sites, including Victoria's Secret, Trashy Lingerie, this site called Flirt, and another called 3 Wishes. My main focus was on clubwear, evening gowns, and some lingerie, but in future I'll also hit up swimwear and just about anything else I can find. (A lot of these sites carry costumes, but unless you're into sexy Ninja fantasies, they probably won't be all that useful.) I did get a little carried away with this, to be honest, and if you're still in the early stages of quitting you might want to wait until you're a little more in control to prevent being tempted to relapse.

For me these sites weren't tempting enough to entice me to take my browsing into actual pornography. They can be mildly visually stimulating, even when they blur all the nipples, but I kept my focus on outfits and never let it get beyond that. Victoria's Secret models have done nothing for me since I was 13. Besides, I swear Gisele is a tranny, and Adriana Lima has an ass like a ten-year-old. I think she's even dumber than Paris Hilton. Trashy lingerie has its own problems for me, being too over-the-top for my tastes. It's like clown lingerie. Trashy is good if you want your girls to look like idiots. So you're limited to Paris Hilton fantasies. Ewww...

I probably spent more time on this browsing than I should have in one sitting. But it was exciting to picture Natalie Portman, or whomever, in these outfits. Could it be construed as cheating? Probably a little. It was visual stimulation of a sexual kind, but considering I was sufficiently frustrated to let myself slip into full-on porn I consider it a victory, if a small one. Think of it as a nicotine patch.

Once I had a small library of outfits, I got ready to start jerking it. My plan had been to use those club outfits for a dance club fantasy, which is one of my favorites (probably because so few women will actually sleep with guys they meet on the dance floor.) I drew Anne Hathaway (circa 2005) and a few others from the hat, but once I picked an outfit for Anne I was pretty much focused on her.

We danced, she seduced me, we went into the VIP room, and things went smoothly from there. The effect of dressing her in a saucy club outfit was profound. Being able to lock down on a single outfit completed the person. It seemed to have freed up my mental resources to imagine both face and body at once and so create a living female in my mind.

I finished her off wearing a sexy red lace teddy with her perfect breasts hanging out, and it was intensely satisfying. I felt far more as if I had just fucked an actual person, not just myself.

So I will try this out on future fantasies and hopefully it will be sufficient to keep me off the skin pics.

Random Thoughts on a Friday Night

2006-01-27T20:24:00.000-05:00

> Visualization is still frustrating in my fantasies. While I can typically focus on one girl (or two or three; five if it's a locker room shower fantasy) I can't usually keep her in one outfit. Sometimes this can be annoying, but I'm starting to learn that these sorts of details are going to change naturally, as if they were real dreams. For some reason I always want my fantasies to have some foundation in reality. I want them to seem as real as possible. But they're fantasies - anything is allowed to happen. I can be fucking Avril Lavigne and Alizee could pop out of her vagina to suck my dick (well should could before she got pregnant.)

> The last time I pleasured myself (to some teen model whose name fails me) I was very focused on her long silky brunette hair. Hair can be very erotic but it's one of those sensations that gets lost when you're focused on pornography. It made for a much more enjoyable fantasy. Now if I could learn to imagine smells better I'd really have it good.

> I have stopped counting the days since I started this weblog. My mind is gradually shifting to a point where my life seems less about not looking at pornography and more about getting other things done. This is very satisfying, and also much more calm. Still, I have felt some cravings - most prominently today after work - if only because I wanted quick release. I didn't feel like having to go through my whole fantasy world when porn would get the job done in less that ten minutes.

A Call for Web Help

2006-01-26T22:01:00.000-05:00

I have been getting quite a few people who have left comments to the effect that my blog has inspired them to try to kick the habit. Many say that they read my blog instead of downloading porn.

First let me say that it is deeply touching to me. It is shocking that something that I have spent so many hours ruminating over, something I thought I suffered alone, could be so helpful to others. It's wonderful to know I'm doing something good for the world, that I'm inspiring others to be better people themselves. And it makes me feel more determined to succeed knowing that others are watching, and that my words are doing so much good.

But I want to get all you quitters together in some way. I would like to set up a forum that all you quitters could visit to trade stories, keep track of your progress, and most importantly to feel like you have help from actually living people (as opposed to help from God, see previous posts.) It would be a place to go when you felt those cringing pangs for porn, where you could type out your thoughts.

But I work a full-time job, a creative enterprise outside work, another blog, and a girlfriend. I just don't have time to set something up and manage it. So I'm asking if any of my readers would be willing to work together with me to set this up.

I know there are open source bulletin board software packages (yabbforum, for example), and I would think hosting a small bulletin board wouldn't be too costly. I would be willing to foot the bill for hosting if necessary.

Obviously, there is no money whatsoever in this. It's 100% volunteer work. But hey, you probably have the free time now that you're not looking at porn all day.

If you're interested, send an email to pornforgotten@gmail.com.

Best Sex Ever?

2006-01-26T14:04:00.000-05:00

My girlfriend returned from her 5-day sojourn and after about ten minutes we were going at it. It was super hot and possibly the best sex we've ever had (in a year and a half together.) It helped that we were both all horned up, so I don't want to falsely attribute anything to the lack of porn, but I'm at least sure that had I been left alone for five days with the internet free to use I would have spent a lot of it clicking around and jerking off. Instead I got to partake in something really sexy and memorable.

I'd also like to remark on an excellent comment left today by reader "dj":

Instead of saying that I don't want to look at porn, I have told myself that I am not someone who looks at porn anymore. I know that sounds subtle, but the ability to make it a part of my identity rather than just another accomplishment makes a difference for me.

The difference is subtle, but the significance is huge. Controlling our urges should not just be something we do, it should be who we are. You can either be a person who tries to control their addiction, or a person who isn't addicted. The former will always struggle, the latter will always be doing exactly what he wants to be doing.

I fucking hate that this sounds like some shitty Dr. Phil advice, but I can't say I haven't talked about the nuts and bolts of being addicted in the last two and a half weeks. So maybe a little new age voodoo indian mumbojumbo is in order.

Our perceived identities have a lot to do with our behavior and the choices we make, but our perceived identity and our true identity may not match up. If who you think you are is not who you really are, you've got work to do to change your behavior and thought patterns.

If you set out to become a former addict, you must do so from the beginning with the mindset that being an addict is not who you want to be. Otherwise, you will always be just an addict in recovery. I think that in the past when I tried to quit, it was really about bringing pornography under control. This time, I look at who I am and who I want to be and say that I don't want to be just another addict anymore.

Background Horniness

2006-01-25T09:13:00.000-05:00

One thing I am learning to do now is ignore that constant, low-volume arousal that in the past would have sent me to pornography. If my body's getting hot and my pants are starting to itch, it's time to get in there. But that mild background horniness is just a part of being a man. Imagine if your girlfriend ate a piece of chocolate every time she had a craving. She'd get huge. Instead (if she's intelligent about it) she only eats chocolate when she really wants it. The pleasure she takes from it is greater, and her health remains intact.

Pornography should not be the starting point of arousal. It should be the end point. I will look at pornography when I am horny, not look at pornography to GET horny. For today, though, I'm off the stuff completely.

At this point I don't know whether porn addiction is closer to alcohol addiction - where cold turkey is often the only way to get control - or food addiction - where moderation wins the day. But we'll never know if I don't try cold turkey first. That's what this blog is all about.

The Inner Motivation

2006-01-25T08:44:00.000-05:00

Bpopp left this comment:

If this is something you're serious about, you're really going to have to come up with some convincing reasons why you shouldn't be doing it. The religious among us have obvious demotivators (burning in hell), but if you don't believe in hell, what then? Hand cramps? Over-exposure to LCD radiation? Energy costs of cooling your apartment in spite of the 8 channel RAID of 250GB hard drives?

I feel that to say that one cannot achieve the inner motivation without a vengeful God is an excuse. For me, the inner motivation has been there for many years. I have never sought to extinguish my desire for visual stimulation. I simply want to learn to live on less of it. Ultimately I'm not worried about consuming porn LESS OFTEN, just consuming a smaller volume. Nobody in this whole world really needs 65 gigs of porn for any real reason. And as we saw the other day when I broke down and pleasured myself to porn, when you restrict the input, the value of what you do consume rises dramatically. You can click through a few pictures, find something good, and take care of business. You don't need to leave your torrent client running for 72 hours to fill up your hard drive with stuff you'll never have time to look at then spend six hours clicking through more new stuff just for one pop.

The motivation, for me, comes from a lifelong desire to improve myself. It sounds a little cheesy, but I always try to ensure I am a better person overall than I was a year ago. I look at my whole person, too. If I'm out of shape, I need to exercise more. If I'm always depressed, I may need therapy. I need martial arts to improve my self-discipline. I need to change how I talk to people. I need to be less judgemental. Whatever. We don't NEED porn to survive. It's a nice bonus so long as you don't let it grow out of proportion to the rest of your life. For me it went too far and I have enough going on in my life now where cutting back severely can be of great benefit. It also makes for some very good blogging. That's my motivation.

Cravings Creep Secretely

2006-01-24T15:48:00.000-05:00

I can feel a hint of craving creeping into my consciousness now. It's very quiet, but I can hear it back there.

This is where you cut it off. Go into the back of your mind and slay that fucking beast. Cut it in half, cut its legs out from under it. Don't even give it time to catch it's breath. Slice it in two then spit on its corpse.

Find something else to take your focus away.

Forget porn.

A Battle is Lost but the War Goes On

2006-01-24T09:00:00.000-05:00

Last night I lost one. I wanted to be secret about it. I was ashamed and I didn't want people to know I failed. It makes one feel vulnerable. But if I can't be open and honest with my blog, I can't be open and honest with myself. The fact is, I fucked up and there's no excuse for it.

After doing my post last night I sat at my computer having finished my work for the evening, but instead of turning in or sitting down to read a book, I began to click. It seemed so innocent. I thought I had control. I had none. Not a scrap of control.

It's funny to watch the human mind in this sort of situation, when you know you're doing the wrong thing but you do it anyway. In the past, I would be fighting with myself. Should I? Shouldn't I? But last night my inner mind was giving me the silent treatment.

"Isn't this cheating?" I said to myself.

No reply.

"Stop. Stop right now."

Nothing.

In about six seconds my penis was hard, and I could only throw up my arms and say, "fuck it."

So I pleasured myself to porn, and it felt great. The whole process from first click to orgasm was less than five minutes. I had pleasured myself without porn just hours before and it had been totally unsatisfying, but with porn it felt great. And that's why this remains such a difficult challenge. How do I convince my own brain to not do something that feels so good? It's not crack. It's not weed. It's not cigarettes or alcohol.

But in a way, it is. I was happy afterward. Dissappointed, but happy. I had given my pleasure center exactly what it wanted. It found a fiendish and underhanded way to trick me into giving in. I'm just an animal following hormone orders.

It is a setback, but I don't see it as two weeks lost. I went without porn for two weeks and a setback cannot take that away. I must pick myself up, dust myself off, and try even harder to abstain. I need to find out what happens to me without porn.

Great quarterbacks still throw interceptions. Great pitchers still pitch home runs. Great goalies still let the puck by sometimes. Great golfers still drop one in the drink.

Vince Lombardi said:

The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall.

So I fell. But I'm getting back up and doubling my resolve. I will drag myself through this kicking and screaming, and in the end, I will thank me.

BTW: the encouragement of my readers helps a great deal. Knowing that people are watching me makes me feel more accountable, especially when my girlfriend isn't around. Thanks to all of you who write in.

Habitual Resistance / Masturbation Gets Boring

2006-01-23T20:14:00.000-05:00

15 days through my porn abstention, but it feels like months. Somehow time slows down when you miss something. But life is returning to some sense of normalcy now.

Resisting temptation is gradually becoming habitual. I'm thinking about pornography less, on average, and I have gotten better at cutting off temptation before it gets serious. I do feel somewhat more in control now than I did, and don't feel like a bundle of hormones. This could all be temporary - it's hard to tell.

One great problem is arising though. Random Walk Masturbation, which I am still using to pleasure myself, is becoming increasingly pedantic. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to arouse myself, increasingly difficult to finish off, to visualize, to really let myself escape. This comes as a total shock to me. I had expected that with practice, my visualization would have grown STRONGER. But it almost seems that it's getting WORSE. And one unsatisfying orgasm after another has gotten me down.

I have long thought that a man's imagination is fed by what he sees daily. In high school and college, there are girls all around you; it would probably be possible to get through school without looking at pornography because there are always hot girls on your mind. But I don't have that benefit. I see a few girls where I work in town, but nothing regular, nothing I can construct fantasies around. Most of my fantasy women for the last few years have been what came over my computer screen.

I have tried, too, to create fictional women in my minds eye, but somehow I can never fixate on what they look like and eventually they blend into someone real. I think women are able to do this sort of thing - to fantasize about fictional people. But I can study a picture of a hot girl for thirty seconds and have more to work with in my mind than I could construct in an hour of brainstorming. My visual memory is so strong that with only a few good looks, it is possible to manipulate the women in whatever way I want in my mind. You can make them do ANYTHING, and you feel like you can SEE it.

Right now I'm having trouble seeing much. I try to focus on other sense fantasies - the sounds they make, the feel of their skin and their mouths, their smell. In real life these things are even more powerful than visual stimulation. But in my fantasies it just doesn't seem to work that way. I need to see what I'm doing to make shit work. Maybe, though, this is still withdrawal at work. Maybe my mind just isn't used to performing without a huge stockpile of recently viewed images.

I'll keep trying without porn, though, for the sake of the experiment. But as my cringeing need for unmitigated downloading fades, and my boredom with masturbation rises, I think more and more about returning to pornography.

When I do eventually return to porn, one rule I will institute is NO SAVING FILES. I think if I am not allowed to keep anything on my computer, I will have a tendency to take advantage of the first real good stuff I come across, instead of searching for hours for the next big thing.

I don't know when I will return to porn at this point, but 50 more weeks seems like overkill. I'm becoming detoxified pretty quickly. I may be able to cut that short and still be able to handle pornography responsibly. It's all part of the experiment.

Don't Listen to Douchebag Christians - Part II

2006-01-23T11:12:00.000-05:00

See Part I

The faith-based websites that deal with porn addiction go by the assumption that pornography is fundamentally sinful, and assume you agree with this. Not only do I disagree that porn is sinful, I feel this is a terrible way to help a real addict. Spending all day downloading porn isn't WRONG, it just gets to be a little boneheaded when you do it all the time. Dealing with something that is boneheaded is a lot easier then dealing with something that is an abomination to Jesus Christ, who isn't even real.

From Porn-Free.org:

Pornography promotes destructive practices and can lead to progressive addiction. For example, porn sites routinely link viewers to depictions of every type of sexual perversion imaginable, such as child porn, homosexuality, bestiality, necrophilia (sexual interest in corpses), masochism (pleasure from abuse or suffering), rape and sadism (gratification from inflicting physical or mental pain on others). The viewer's exposure to such themes naturally increases the likelihood that they may attempt to act out what they've viewed. This can lead to sexual crimes, a la the late Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway (The Green River Killer).

Aside from the fact that in all my years of dealing I have never seen sites "routinely" linking to child porn, bestiality, necrophilia, or rape, there is no logic given for why looking at a naked woman will cause you to murder people and eat them - it's just assumed.

All Christian websites seem convinced that pornography leads to sexual violence and rape, or even murder. They justify their logic through circumstantial evidence and specious reasoning. They quote "statistics" about how "50% of rapists viewed pornography before attacking their victims." By this reasoning, I could say that breakfast causes rape - because 70% of rapists had breakfast before they attacked a victim. They'll tell you that 70% of convicted child molesters had pornography at home, without mentioning that 85% of all men have pornography at home (I'm making these numbers up for the sake of the argument.) It's all very transparent.

They cite more circumstantial evidence to show how pornography and sex addiction leads to depression and suicide, never asking whether other factors may have been the cause of their problems. And it's all a little ironic that they attempt to use "scientific evidence" to prove why you need Jesus Christ.

You can never expect to help an addict by telling him he is a potential rapist for looking at pictures of naked women - he knows himself better and therefore tunes you right out. And telling him he's eventually going to kill himself because of pornography is even more innocuous.

It is a blind, judgemental, and uncaring way to deal with addiction. Pornography is not a question of right versus wrong, but a question of how you value your time. It is a question of who you are versus who you want to be.

A Note on Physical Fitness

2006-01-21T15:45:00.000-05:00

I have received a number of comments about how I might benefit from exercise of some kind. I've grown increasingly annoyed with these comments, even though I know the intentions are good, because they seem to go by the assumption that I'm a fat lazy nerd who's never run a mile or lifted a dumbell. Quite the opposite is true. I am well-versed in the benefits of physical fitness, including running, lifting weights, and playing sports. I do all three as often as my time and patience will allow, and am skilled at tennis, football, softball, and golf. I also ski and windsurf when possible.

I would tell all of you, though, that these activities pale in comparison to Krav Maga, a martial art that essentially teaches you how to win or get out of a street fight. Nothing builds confidence, self-discipline, and fitness better than learning how to protect yourself and beat people up. I lift weights every week, but compared to a good martial art, it almost seems gay (in the colloquial sense.)

So while I appreciate the suggestions and I know you mean well, I hope you will all understand that porn addiction has existed comfortably alongside many types of fitness in my life. All us nerds can benefit incredibly from more exercise, but for me it has had little effect on my porn consumption, and doesn't help me when I'm at work for nine hours a day.

If someone out there has quit their addiction and would like to blog about how fitness got them through it, please send me the link so I can put it up for everyone. But for me, it's just not an issue.

Week Two Summary - Benefits Rising

2006-01-21T13:16:00.000-05:00

Despite my excurciatingly terrible pain and suffering at not being able to see naked chicks, I notice unusual changes to my physiology and psyche every day, some definitely good, some which I have yet to understand. I document them here:

Sex with my girlfriend is better. I am much more physically aroused and sensitive during intercourse. My girlfriend even said I gave her the best head I ever have. I can't really explain that, but female readers of this blog might make a note of it.
My laziness has declined. Although I have accomplished a lot in my short time alive, I have always considered myself pretty lazy. My girlfriend would probably agree. I have noticed myself taking better care of my shit, and procrastinating less.
I have an electric energy. I believe that quitting porn has caused a significant hormonal shift in my body, which has led me to feel stronger and more "present." When I do anything, I feel like I'm doing it with more authority and confidence.
I am more boisterous in public. Although always confident, I am typically quiet around others. Not out of shyness, but more out of the understanding that I tend to ruin common conversation with too much intelligence. Now, when around even strangers, I kind of want to just be funny and worry less about trying to be cool. This, of course, makes me truly cool, because I don't care what people think.
I feel more sociable. Somehow, perhaps because of the hormones again, I feel closer to other people and feel more interested in meeting and talking to them.
I'm more confident around women. Although never a terrible problem for me, I now feel my goals with a beautiful woman are a little clearer, that I know what I want and I'm not afraid to show it.

All this stuff adds up to me being a better person, and if nothing else, making more real friends. More friends are always better. I think were I not in a relationship this would surely make me more attractive to women.

I wonder, too, how this hormone shift affects my involuntary response to women (or just people in general.) How might it affect my body language, my posture, the motion of my eyes, and most importantly, my pheremones? Will increased levels of these hormones make me smell sexier?

I can only speculate, but it all seems like a distinct possibility. If quitting pornography has somehow made me more attractive, I can think of no reason NOT to give up pornography.

I would be interested to hear if others have experienced these same sorts of effects when they quit.

Full Disclosure Time

2006-01-21T12:51:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was ugly. And I cheated a bit. While at work I looked at a few videos, one of Keyra Agustina (or whatever her name is this week) and a few others. None of it was actually porn, or even nudity, just sexy dancing, etc.

I tell my readers this because being open and honest is crucial to addiction recovery. I'm not perfect and sometimes my passions get the best of me. It also doesn't help that I work in my own private office facing a computer all day, and that I haven't had much work to do recently. Because of the nature of my career and my interests, I tend to click around the net a lot, and inevitably stumble upon sexy girls. I have resisted far more clicks than I have succumbed to.

Seeing some skin certainly gave me temporary relief yesterday, when my body really disagreed with my decision to abstain, but before long I was craving more skin. By then, fortunately, it was time to walk home. My body was all abuzz like I had drunk too much coffee. I got home, pleasured myself (to visions of Keyra's ass, of course) and started to calm down.

Today I woke up feeling much better. I even got in a great quickie with the girlfriend before she departed for a three day business trip. I am now sitting at my computer and don't feel the temptation that I did yesterday.

Some of you doubters may see this as the beginning of the end for me, but at this point I disagree. In spite of the withdrawal symptoms, I have started noticing unusual and surprising benefits to my quitting. I will discuss those later today.

I Just Want to Ball Up and Cry

2006-01-20T11:29:00.000-05:00

I am a pretty emotional guy, and I don't try to hide that so much from others. Right now all this confusion is nearly bringing me to tears.

I feel so much lust right now. And it's not just horniness. In fact, I don't even have a hard-on. I just want sex badly. I want women. And pornography at this point would be a fine substitute.

What am I to make of this? Is it just a withdrawal symptom? Is it my real sexual state? Even when I turn away from my computer and forget this blog and this whole abstention all I can think about is the burning in my crotch and the tension all over my body. Is it because I didn't get release yesterday?

On the one hand it is so wonderful to feel this kind of passion again. It has honestly been many years since I felt such uncontrolable urges. Just feeling is such a wonderful rush. My heart races, my head swells up, I get dizzy, I feel every tiny sensation in my body. It's like being a teenager again, and that feels pretty cool.

But this desire makes concentrating on anything else next to impossible - and I'm at work, so masturbation is out of the question. I don't want to live a life of unmitigated desire, unless it's possible to satisfy that desire in a real way. I worry that all this is just going to backfire - that I will be so filled with lustfulness all the time that my girlfriend will no longer be enough for me. Polyamory is on the table but for me that is uncharted territory, and I don't know how it will play out. But maybe this is just my brain trying to justify the addiction once again. I can't even tell what's true and what isn't.

The Buddhists say a life of happiness and enlightenment is only achieved by removing desire. But there is no way in hell meditation is going to remove the desire for sex, because in the end that's all our DNA is good for. As much as I like Buddhism, there is no way to remove that potent sexual desire without shutting yourself off from the world, which is just as crazy to me as getting addicted to pornography. And I bet if you real dug deep enough you'd find out all those Shaolin Monks were just a bunch of flaming homosexuals.

Maybe I just need more kung-fu in my life.

I'm Still Not Convinced

2006-01-20T10:28:00.000-05:00

Not seeing women has started to depress me lately.

While I have stayed away from pornography, I have found excuses to see images of beautiful and sexy women while watching television and browsing the internet. It's not pornography in the strictest sense, but part of this experiment was to see the effects of dropping wholesale visual stimulation from my life. But considering how media-exposed I am (and how it relates to my career) it seems that trying to avoid images of beauty is an act of futility. Avoiding every single thumbnail of a hot celebrity I come across only serves to depress me.

Moreover, I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that occasional overexposure to many beautiful women is in fact envigorating to the male psyche. We certainly don't deny ourselves the pleasure of delicious foods, unless overexposure to them is creating health issues. It must create some kind of chemical chain reaction that motivates you to be a better, stronger, more intelligent person, so that, in the prehistoric sense, you will be highly prized by females and given ample chances to mate. To live in a world where few women, or few young, healthy women exist is to live in a world without real motivation. To live in a world where beautiful women abound is to live in a world where a little motivation nets you many of the ladies. Or is this all just my mind trying to justify the addiction?

I feel a tangible sense of loss at not being able to click around looking for women on the internet. But I am hypersensitive right now, and even non-nude photos and videos charge me up sexually. On the few occasions where I have stumbled upon nude photos by accident (honestly), the reaction in my body was one of shock and awe - like how one felt when first looking at pornography as a child.

If I were to allow myself free reign to look at whatever I liked right now, I know I would binge. And that's how I know I don't deserve visual stimulation like that. If I knew that ten minutes on the internet was all I needed for total arousal I would not hesitate. But I can sense that deep inside, I want to look at anything and everything nonstop for an entire weekend. And it's hard not to let myself.

Living without pornography, if nothing else, has been strange. I find myself more lustful when in public, staring any moderately attractive woman down. It makes me want to be a seducer, a rake, to ravish any woman I can get your hands on. In one sense this a good thing because it means my passion is increasing, but on the other hand it makes me feel a loss of control over my passion, which certainly would make a loving relationship difficult to maintain - and love is crucial to my happiness.

The benefits, if any, are difficult to pinpoint. And this worries me. Without measurable results of some kind it is hard to find the motivation to stay off the stuff. If I can't see how living without porn is of benefit to me, how do I even know there are real benefits? How do I know I'm not actually better off with a little porn?

I am really tremendously down about all this right now. At times like these it feels as though my head is clouded with frustration and sadness, and only naked girls could clear my mind. Sigh.

Don't Listen to Douchebag Christians - Part I

2006-01-19T11:27:00.000-05:00

When it comes to pornography addiction, Christians are the last people you should ask for help. Yet if you type "porn addiction" into Google you get one listing after another of sites that spend as much time talking about God and Jesus as they do talking about the details of the addiction. As I've mentioned before, you don't need God to beat a bad habit.

To be addicted to pornography is to have accepted that you are a sexual being. Christianity, typically, attempts to deny you your sexuality. You should no more heed the words of a Christian on sexual matters than you would an Amish man on how to format your hard drive. That goes especially for the Pope.

This quote, from Firesofdarkness.com, is all you need to hear:

Do not try to depend on your own strength and wisdom. You do not have what it takes, on your own. With the strength of God and by the blood of Jesus, you can do it, though!

As I mentioned before, Christians want you to believe you do not have the strength within you to overcome your problems. They say Jesus suffered the sins of the world and died on the cross so that you could be redeemed. How convenient for them that you can't fix anything wrong in your life without Christ. So you become dependent on the church, which is what they really wanted. It is all just an ego trip and a cash grab for those already on their side. It is not about helping you, but about forcing you from one fantasy world to a new fantasy world that the church can more easily control.

Another striking thing about the many Christian anti-porn sites are the testimonials (some great examples here.) It is unnerving to hear of the troubles these people go through as a result of addiction - divorce, sexual assault and abuse, loss of job and family. Few atheists can hold a candle to the shit Christians get themselves into. I think perhaps many Christians, growing up in a judgemental, sterilized, and repressive environment are simply overwhelmed by the power of sex, masturbation, and pornography. Shame and secrecy ensure they can never discuss these things openly, and so don't understand the real consequences until it is too late. And as always, they turn to the church to help them back out.

Christians also routinely tie porn addiction to sex addiction and masturbation addiction, and once again call you a sinner. There is no caring or understanding, only shame. They hyperexaggerate every negative aspect of sex and sexuality, sneer at any and all alternative types of sexuality, and then scare your simple mind shitless with images of fire and damnation. Only Jesus can stop this.

It is a brilliant powerplay, but an absolute load.

If you want to worship something, worship a real woman. At least she can cook you a nice meal and suck you off now and then. Jesus would never, ever do that (although a priest might.)

Further Notes on Random Walk Masturbation

2006-01-18T12:26:00.000-05:00

Last night I got another opportunity to try out my newly discovered Random Walk Masturbation (See my previous post.) I won't go into explicit detail, except for the part where I exploded in Scarlett Johansson's mouth while Jessica Simpson dildo-fucked her (which is an unusual fantasy for me because I'm not so into blondes, but those were the girls I drew from the hat.)

Going into this fantasy I was a bit frustrated not being able to just look at a few pictures and get off. It seemed so much more convenient. But as I relaxed and the fantasy world developed I really got into the detail of it all. When I was finished I felt completely satisfied. One of the surprising consequences of pleasuring myself this way, as opposed to using pornography, is that afterwards I don't feel sick about myself. In fact, I feel a mild sense of euphoria. Completing these fantasies seems to impart some sense of accomplishment and conquest, and immediately sets me into an alarmingly good mood, instead of the ennui I typically felt after masturbating to porn.

Another interesting side effect is how these fantasies remain in memory. Whereas with porn I would often forget a whole evening of downloading and pleasuring, with Random Walk Masturbation I can easily recall the whole affair days on. They occur in my memory not quite as strongly as reality, but as very vivid dreams.

To me, a long life is built upon strong memories, so this is an exciting development - that my fantasies could extend my experience of lifespan, rather than steal away time as pornography once did.

I once again encourage all you addicts and fellow quitters to give Random Walk Masturbation a try for a few days and see how well it improves your mood.

Pornography is a Lonely Hobby

2006-01-17T12:47:00.000-05:00

A number of individuals have commented that my girlfriend is of great benefit to kicking my habit, and that pornography, for them, is a salve for loneliness. Having been through a seven-year period of loneliness, I feel I can say a few things about it.

I, like many American men, fell madly in love with a girl in high school, and thought we would be together forever. Like almost as many men, I was dumped ruthlessly in my freshman year of college (1997). I did not fully recover for three years. Two years after that I left for home having never so much as kissed a girl in college. You might be thinking I'm 5'3" and 350 pounds. Not so. I'm tall, well dressed, well-spoken, thin, in good health - you might be shocked to hear I spent so long without a girlfriend. Of course, it never helped that I attended one of the ugliest colleges in America. After so long without love or sex, I just eventually assumed I was ugly and unbearable to be around.

I had tried dating when the opportunity arose, but I rarely got along with the women I most desired, and those were typically who I was asking out.

But in spite of occasional bravery with women I'd never met, I was generally less social than my peers. When the weekend rolled around, I found it much easier to bury myself in my pornography than to actually go out and take a chance talking to real women. It also didn't help that I rarely drank, which in college is how nine out of ten relationships probably start. So I missed out on an important part of college - or so my dick's been telling me.

In those days, pornography almost seemed like a friend. Even if it couldn't provide anything like the services a real girlfriend could, it was always there to take my mind off my problems. If nothing else, it captured my attention well enough to distract me from the rest of my sorry life.

It wasn't until 2003 that I realized I had grown listless and uninterested in everything, and thanks to my parents' financial help, found a therapist who diagnosed me with moderate depression. From there I found martial arts - specifically Krav Maga, which did great things for my bruised self-comfidence and self-image.

But even after I found myself in a healthy, loving relationship in 2004, I was still in need of pornography several times a week, if not daily. The addiction was still present, even with loneliness vanquished.

I believe loneliness is just another crutch in a bevy of crutches that junkies like me have used to justify our addiction. Feeling alone and unloved, I can say from experience, is just about as bad as life can get in the developed world, short of a brain tumor or your penis rotting off. And having used porn as one more distraction for getting through seven years of loneliness, I cannot fault anyone for doing so themselves.

I do hope, however, that you understand the caveats: first that by taking in porn daily, you may be wearing in pleasure channels in your mind that will become difficult to break out of in the future. Even if your loneliness comes to an end, you may not be able to stop. Second, you must recognize what you are sacrificing by commiting yourself to pornography. If pornography is simply a way to avoid uncomfortable social interaction, or if you feel you lack the confidence to send yourself out into the world, you may be setting yourself up for a lifetime of social misfortune. Life is, at times, uncomfortable. Either you tolerate this fact or you become a hermit.

Without social and sexo-social interaction, you may find it difficult to ever attain a real palpable happiness. If this describes you and your attachment to pornography, please seek help as I did - therapy, sports, martial arts, whatever it takes. There are many many great books on loneliness and depression that can be found at Amazon.com or any local bookstore. They are a great place to start your mental recovery, as I did two years ago.

Random Walk Masturbation

2006-01-16T15:08:00.000-05:00

One of my difficulties in trying to masturbate away from pornography has often been that my imagination simply could not keep pace with the porn I was looking at. Today as I was sitting in my apartment alone I realized I needed a list of women to draw upon while I was fantasizing. I wrote a few out that I knew then pulled some from Freeones.com that I had forgotten (without clicking the links.) As I was writing the list I came upon a fantastic idea.

Part of what makes pornography (as well as real-life fantasies) exciting is its unpredictability. In porn, as in real life, you never know exactly what is beyond the next click. So I needed to add a degree of randomness to my fantasies.

I typed all my girls into a spreadsheet, about three dozen in all, printed it out, and cut each listing seperately then dropped them into a cup. Then I did the same thing with a list of places for my fantasies (hot tub, tropical island, etc) or people I could be (college professor, club DJ, etc.)

I sat down with my masturbation kit and my two cups. First I pulled out the fantasy - I got "Lingerie Store" (yeah yeah, go ahead and laugh, but it was HOT.) I closed my eyes, relaxed, and really pictured myself THERE. Why I was in there, what it looked like, what it smelled like, even what time it was (closing time, duh.) Then I reached into my other cup for a girl. The first clerk was Kate's Playground. I got warmed up on that idea. Then the second clerk comes up from the back (draw from my cup) - Allie Sin. Keep going. Out of one of the changing rooms comes Ivy Summer in a pink nighty and cotton panties. Then Kate's Playground has to try something on for me, Allie Sin strips nude and sucks my dick, etc. By the time I made it into the changing room with the three of them I was done.

It was very very hot and great sex. I had no trouble imagining the girls - after all, I have years of images stored in my head.

To all of you out there who doubt you can survive without porn, I highly advise you give this a try. The very element of random chance makes the fantasy far more arousing than my mind could be on it's own. And you don't even have to leave all your favorite porn stars and nude teen models behind.

Drop me a comment if you try this out or if you have any suggestions on how to improve upon the idea.

(For information on what I mean by "random walk" go here.)

Never Stop Masturbating

2006-01-16T09:16:00.000-05:00

A reader commented on my last post with the following:

in this week did you masturbate without watching porn? Or does your therapy include an abandonment of masturbation?

I have abandoned pornography, but by no means have I abandoned masturbation. I was able to masturbate without pornography twice last week in addition to whatever went on with my girlfriend. The first time, as I documented here, was actually surprisingly difficult, and took a fantasy involving five celebrities at once as well as a Fleshlight to complete. I say surprisingly because I have pleasured myself without pornography many times in the past year. I also did the deed yesterday with much greater efficacy, without the Fleshlight.

I have no intention of refraining from masturbation. In fact, I wish I could masturbate more, but it's clear that even just getting a boner on my own can be difficult without porn. I assume, however, that as time goes by I will find it easier. Ultimately I hope to rediscover the imagination I had in junior high school, to the point where pornography seems second best. Pornography may be able to provide visual and aural stimulation beyond the realm of my own mind, but it cannot substitute (at least, not yet) for taste, smell, and touch. Porn is also a poor substitute for the overall effect - the blending of all five senses - of a real sexual encounter. And that is a powerful thing.

A Biological Urge to Porn Away the Days

2006-01-15T21:00:00.000-05:00

A few people have noted to me that sexuality is a biological urge that should be satisfied. We also seem to have a "biological urge" to eat chocolate and Quarter Pounders with Cheese. Those among us who cannot control that urge grow fat and weak with diabetes and high blood pressure.

Porn may not be quite as destructive to our physical health, but the longer I go the more I see how powerful its effect is on our mental health. It is Sunday night and I need porn. I'm not even thinking of real women. My desire right now seems to be geared more toward looking at pictures than actual sex with actual females. That seems very backward to me. Our biological urge is to reproduce, and our sexual wants should be centered around sex, not just excessive visual stimulation and masturbation. Masturbation should simulate sex, but porn just simulates more porn.

Pornography was with me step-for-step through my adolescent sexual development and into my adult years. Disentangling porn from modern sexuality seems utterly impossible, and it seems like many are totally accepting of this. I am experiencing periods of great tension currently. As the days pass I wonder if this experiment will even prove worthwhile.

But I have to keep my eyes on the goal: not to remove pornography from my life completely forever, but to learn to appreciate it in smaller doses as I once did as a teenager. Before I can be reunited with pornography, I must learn not to miss it. And right now I miss it terribly. It's as if a part of me has died and is never coming back. It will be a while before I can allow myself to look upon the glory that is porn again.

What a stupid addiction. Why couldn't I have been an alcoholic or a pothead like my friends in college? At least they got laid a lot because of it.

Week One Done

2006-01-15T12:58:00.000-05:00

It's been one week since I last looked at pornography, and I'm still thinking about it.

Last night my girlfriend went out and I was left home alone with the Denver-New England game on and nothing else to do. Traditionally that is primetime for porn. Instead I cleaned my office - something I NEVER would have done before. Even had I tried before, I would have eventually become too distracted by my downloading to finish. But here I am sitting in a nice tidy office. I feel like such a tool, but I didn't know what else to do.

I'm just dying to look at some naked bodies. I'll take anything at this point - I just crave any skin I can get my eyes on, almost as if I can feel it, or taste it. There is a slowly simmering horniness deep inside me that is constantly present, but which I cannot bring to the surface without pornography. I wonder if this will eventually dissipate or if it will just transform into a more general horniness. I have never been one to masturbate THAT much. But I fear without porn for temperance, I will become sex-crazed and start masturbating three times a day, which might even be worse than a porn addiction like the one I had.

Still, it hasn't happened yet. I must say that I have gotten a lot done this past week, and have been sleeping very soundly. My dreams are becoming increasingly sexual, which is enjoyable to watch. And while I am still suffering some annoying withdrawal symptoms, it hasn't been terrible to deal with and I can only assume it will become easier as time goes on. I've certainly suffered worse pain than this.

Pornography and Technology

2006-01-14T16:20:00.000-05:00

When I was 10 years old, I got ahold of my father's Playboys. In high school I discovered pornography on the internet. In college I gained access to broadband and discovered even more pornography on the internet. Then came Usenet, then P2P, then internet forums, then bittorrent. Then I got a set of Fleshlights. Most recently it has been games that have captured my imagination - first came 3D Sex Villa and then Sexy Beach 2 (both of which I pleasured myself to repeatedly).

In my opinion games are the future of porn. As graphics engines and graphics cards grow faster and more robust, the games will only grow increasingly detailed and more elaborate.

Technology is always moving forward, and pornographers are always finding new ways to exploit that technology. It happened with VHS, it happened with DVDs, and by god it happened to the Nth degree with the internet. I have been fascinated with RealDoll since Howard Stern ordered one in 1997. We'll soon see porn on our iPods.

In the television show Futurama, Fry downloads a robot Lucy Liu that is programmed to spend most of the day making out with him. His friends, sensing the danger, show him a campy public announcement film about dating robots. In it, the main character gets hold of a Marilyn Monroebot. Because she is only programmed to make out with him, he begins ignoring all his responsibilities, as well as his girlfriend Mavis. Because he and everyone in the world are busy making out with their robots, society crumbles, and aliens destroy the planet.

The show's writers took a bit of artistic license in predicting that robot lovers would lead directly to the downfall of civilization, but it illustrates my point nicely. As technology moves forward, the pornography that goes with it becomes more and more specialized, more and more enticing. As it inches closer to more perfectly simulating real sexual encounters, our minds will be increasingly fixated on it. It is as if pornography is becoming increasingly pure. And so, it is becoming increasingly addictive.

Personally, I hope I live to see the day when sex can be perfectly simulated by a machine. What could be better than living out your fantasy in real-time? It was the only good part of that piece of crap film Minority Report, after all. You can bet I'd be first in line for it.

But at what point do we as men look at ourselves and realize that pornography is simply another drug? And at what point does pornographic simulation become truly damaging to our mental health? When do we finally put our foot down and admit that pornography is TOO good, that we cannot resist it any longer?

I am not advocating against pornography or future technologies in any way. Far from it. I believe every effort should be made to make porn better as the technology evolves to support it. But attention must be drawn to the fact that many of us have great difficulty in resisting it. As technology gets closer to perfectly exploiting the pleasure centers of our mind, we must grow increasingly vigilant of its pitfalls. We should be aware of what happens when millions of antisocial nerds, like me, start spending more time involved with pornography than with our jobs and our studies. Perhaps it even prevents us from spreading our genius nerd seed around - I can only speculate here.

I don't think we have reached a point where pornography is having a detrimental effect on the world, but the question needs to be asked: is it possible for pornography to be TOO good for our own good? And if so, how do we help people control their urge to spend all their time with it? In this regard it is very similar to alcohol. There is nothing inherently wrong with it, and in measured doses it is good for you and wildly entertaining. But when too many people spend too much time with it, you get a nation of alcoholics such as Russia, where the average lifespan is just 58 years for males - in large part because so many die of alcohol poisoning.

As a child, Playboy magazine was the best pornographic technology I had access to. It was incredibly arousing. But now we have interactive DVDs, HDTV, and computer simulators. There was a time when pornography served to enhance my real-world fantasies. Now, for me, it seems to be an end in itself. It's just so good I can't control myself around it anymore. I had to kick the habit before I wound up behind a dumpster turning tricks for a single stillframe of Sadie Jones being penetrated.

Day Seven - Dream Sex and Dream Sex

2006-01-14T11:29:00.000-05:00

Day seven and still completely porn-free. Last night my girlfriend and I got in some vein-popping sex. I don't know if it was the lack of porn or just being backed up, but I actually felt a little sick from the pounding and my explosion afterward - and that's definitely a good thing.

Last night I also experienced a wet dream like I have not had since junior high school. In it, I was back in school and wildly enamoured of one of my teachers (this never happened in reality.) She was blonde and tall and significantly older but predictably very very confident. She tried to get me to admit that I was in love with her, but I kept denying. Next thing she was lying back in a bubble bath, and brought my hands to her breasts. I toyed with them gently for a moment then dropped one hand down the length of her navel. She began sucking me vigorously and stroking me wildly until I erupted straight into the air like Mount Penistubo (I thought of that after I woke up). The semen flew across the room landing on my hardwood floors. She disappeared and I was left to clean up the cum, which it turns out is very difficult to remove from old wood floors.

When I awoke, like any wet dream, my hand flew to my underwear looking for a slimy wet spot, but there was nothing there. I have not had a dream like that in years. Maybe it was merely coincidence that I quit porn just last week, but somehow I think not.

I feel my sexuality growing in the real world. I have a passion this morning that I know will only be satisfied by a real woman, not by my hand and a picture.

Yow!

More later today.

The Fleshbot Factor

2006-01-14T11:20:00.000-05:00

It is amazing to me how quickly an upstart weblog can turn into a smashing success. I submitted this blog address to Fleshbot a few days ago, and today they posted a link back here. Saying:

We have nothing but sympathy for those who are going through the painful process of overcoming a porn addiction—although we have to say that the descriptions in this blog make porn seem like something worth getting addicted to in the first place.

Of course, if you read an objective description of heroin, it sounds like something worth getting addicted to as well.

Predictably, the stats have absolutely rocketed up and the weblog is less than a week old.

Thanks to Fleshbot for the post, and I hope my words here will inspire some of you newcomers to take action against your own addictions and compulsions. With enough men turning down the volume on their porn and getting back to living their lives, we could probably right the world economy.

Pornography and Compulsive Hoarding

2006-01-13T09:20:00.000-05:00

A typical question a porn addict might hear from friends and girlfriends is, "why do you need so much porn?" For most of us, pornography is measured only in gigabytes. For a select few, terabytes. When I erased everything six days ago, I had around 65 gigs on my hard drive. By some measures, this is a paltry sum.

Why do we keep so much porn around? While we might flip through a lot of it, when it comes time to ejaculate, we're usually fixated on a single photograph or film. You don't need 65 gigs just to get off. Yet for many of us, to be asked to erase all, or even most of our porn, sends us into a panic. We can't get rid of it because it is special to us, and we might need it someday.

There is a term for this behavior in psychiatric medicine: compulsive hoarding.

Probably your only exposure to compulsive hoarding is local news stories about cat ladies - women (because typically it is older women) who keep dozens or hundreds of cats, or other animals, locked in unsanitary conditions in a single house or apartment. I used to work in Beacon Hill in Boston, where a cat lady became a local oddity after being busted TWICE with an apartment full of sick, dying persians living in shit. Her freezer was full of dead kittens.

More commonly though, hoarding involves the collection of things that have little or no real value, such as shopping lists and bits of string or wire. The belief is either that they are somehow a part of your life, like a memento, or that you may some day need them. At its worst the clutter can take over people's lives.

WebMD has this great overview of hoarding. A few notable quotes:

Hoarders may become anxious and angry at the mere suggestion of getting rid of items that they've held onto for years. They often say that if they throw something away, they may need it someday when it will be impossible to retrieve.
...
In most cases, hoarders rarely look at the possessions they've saved, ... Nevertheless, they feel some sense of security knowing that these items are there "just in case."
Steketee has treated people who have refused to part with old sales slips "because they represent a day in their lives, even though they have no idea what they bought. Somehow, the fact that it has a date on it, and that it belonged to them, it becomes important."

The space that exists on our hard-drives is like a virtual home. The things we keep there can seem uniquely ours. I remember a time when I would refuse to delete old porn because I had pleasured myself to it once, as if it represented a happy memory for me. I would also keep any porn around that was remotely arousing, even if I knew I would never masturbate to it.

I have heard many porn addicts express fear at deleting their porn. They actually feel that they might suffer some future catastrophe without it on their hard drive. Some are shocked that I would even THINK about deleting 65 gigs of pornography. Some people, in fact, collect porn like action figurines. They aren't satisfied until they've collected all the photos in a set. On usenet they use special text files called CSV's (comma-separated values) to keep track of their collections.

But it isn't just limited to the internet. People hoard magazines, VHS casettes, and DVDs. They talk of having a closet full of porn. I myself still have all those old Playboys I stole from my father, at least a decade's worth from 1991 on, buried in my closet back at my parents' house. I've wanted to dispose of them for years. In fact, shortly after I began stealing my father's Playboys, I tried to burn them because I feared I was becoming obsessed with masturbation (Playboys, it turns out, do not burn easily, hmmm.) But now I keep them because they seem like real mementos to me, even though it's just ancient soft-core pornography I have no intention of ever touching again.

I think a good test of whether or not you are a porn hoarder is how you would feel if your friends, girlfriend, or mother found the porn on your computer. If my friends or girlfriend or even mother came across, say, ten to twenty megs of porn, they'd probably just find it amusing. But for them to come across 65 gigs, which is what I had when I erased everything last week, would be humiliating to me.

The only cure is to dispose of it as I did. If you are not ready to part with all of it, set a ceiling, say 2 gigs. Later you can lower that ceiling. Considering how accessible porn is on the internet, do you really need more than that?

Day Six - Change or Coincidence?

2006-01-13T08:53:00.000-05:00

Just six days into my vow of porn chastity, I'm starting to feel some unusual effects. However, seeing as it is so early on in this quest, I can't yet tell whether I'm experiencing real changes or if I just tend to attribute everything going on to my lack of porn. I have certainly gone longer than six days without porn in the past without ill effects, but I wonder if the quasi-finality of this hasn't started to sink in.

In spite of yesterday's frustration, I remain porn free. Moreover, today I feel like a care a little less about seeing Sadie Jones get a stab than I did yesterday. This seems to bring me to a more serene state of mind. I somehow feel more present, more in control, as if the fist in my head has begun to clench tightly after years of hanging loose. My laziness seems to be dropping a little, and my creativity seems to be growing quickly. This is all, of course, just speculative at this point.

I have noticed that, when in my apartment, I feel a little less drawn to my computer and the internet, as well as television. I have long felt that in addition to my porn addiction I also had an internet addiction. But perhaps porn acted as a fuel for the other. Perhaps my mind had grown so accustomed to this pleasurable aspect of the internet that it transposed the pleasure into all areas of internet use. Now my only real attachment is blogging - which I guess is a bit ironic. But that's probably an addiction I can live with and control more easily.

On the downside, though, I felt incredibly agitated last night, almost to the point of violence. I had trouble concentrating on my work. This may have just been circumstantial, but I can't rule out that it was a withdrawal symptom. I'm just not sure. This morning, however, I woke up feeling fine.

I have, in the last few days, been leaning a little too heavily on my girlfriend for sexual release, which she noted to me and I apologized. She has also been a bit overwhelmed to find out how much of a problem this is for me, and that she never really knew about it. But she has been wonderfully supportive (and even commented here) and let me talk about it at length without complaint. I suppose, though, that it's time to relax at home and let the weblog do the talking.

So I still have a lot of questions left unanswered, but hopefully the weekend will begin to reveal more of what's to come of my psychological health.

Lastly: thanks to all of you who have voiced your support. It makes me feel very good about what I am doing to learn that this problem is so widespread, and yet so rarely discussed at length as I have done here. If any of you decide to start a blog to try to quit pornography, or any addiction, let me know and I will put a link on my sidebar immediately.

Coming later today: a post about porn collecting and hoarding.

Sadie Jones Does B/G - I'm Going to Kill Myself

2006-01-12T12:50:00.000-05:00

According to an anonymous commenter, Sadie Jones, my most recent internet infatuation, has gone hardcore. When I read that I nearly broke down. I was pacing around my office, my fingers twitching uncontrollably. My blood was boiling and my adrenaline was flowing.

Had I waited one week to quit, just one fucking week, I could have seen it. And a part of me keeps telling me to just look. "Just look at this one thing. It can't hurt you to look at one thing. Then you can quit pornography happy." And I almost went looking for it.

But I know what would happen. Then I'd want to see Planet Eva hardcore. Then I'd want to see Real Peachez on a Sybian. Then I'd want to see Kate's Playground's bare hoof. There will always be something to pull me back in. There will always be a new young hot model with an ugly disfigurement that I'm just dying to see get naked and get fucked.

Fortunately I was due to meet my girlfriend for lunch so I could get out of the office. I was still agitated to all holy hell when we met up. I told her the whole matter and she thought it was "silly." The more I thought about it, the more I agreed. It is silly. And I started to calm down.

How is it that I have such a powerful physiological reaction to not seeing a hot girl get dicked? I've seen that, it seems, almost every day for the past six or seven years. Sometimes it's even my dick. But I did not realize what a serious issue this was until today. I was really emotionally and physically bothered.

So it may be a long time before I get to see the Sadie Jones hardcore. Maybe I'll never see it. But god damnit motherfucker shit fuck shit piss cocksucker FUUUUUCK I want to SO BADLY! AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGH!!!

In Search of the "Perfect Porn"

2006-01-12T09:42:00.000-05:00

I have tried to make it clear on this weblog that I am not opposed to pornography, but the way in which I consumed it. I have been living with pornography in my life since I first began looking through my father's Playboys in 1989 when I was ten years old. Those were the days of the Van Breeschooten twins, Lisa Matthews, and a young Pam Anderson. The issue pictured here was the first I ever stole, out of the garbage, from my father. I later became infatuated with Corinna Harney, Anna Nicole Smith, and Stephanie Seymore. I have strong memories of the Tai Collins pictorial, which is kind of weird to me now. But I was a horny adolescent and any hot girl got me off.

Playboys carried me through junior high, high school, and even into college in spite of access to broadband. But the internet offered a whole new level of pornographic consumption. In high school I was stuck at home with dial-up, and so it was just an occasional hobby. But In college I gained a broadband connection, and things started to change. Over the course of a lonely five years there, my attachment grew and grew. After all that time, and several years more after college, sex was something I only did at my desk, alone.

And it gradually became systematized and predictable. Even through a few short relationships and into my current one, I became more and more desensitized. But perhaps more importantly, I found that by spending hours at a time sifting through picture after picture, and film after film, all whilst stroking myself, I could achieve levels of arousal simply unheard of without porn. I could become so aroused that by the end nothing could stop the impending orgasm. A picture of the fattest woman alive swimming in the world's biggest pile of shit wouldn't even have stopped me.

But during those binges, I could have easily gotten myself off in the first few minutes, but instead kept looking until I reached that ultimate state of sexual arousal. Somehow I believed that there was always better porn right around the corner if I kept looking for it. Sure, this or that picture might be unbelievably hot, but maybe there was something better. It was the search for the "Perfect Porn." The picture so sexy I would come just by looking at it.

There is, of course, no such thing. It was an illusion. An imaginary carrot held out in front of me by the tiny sub-brain at the top of my spine.

The process eventually became the end in itself, and so there was no limit to how long I could go. The arousal was stronger and the orgasms deeper than any sex I have ever had with a woman. I looked forward to pornography - I looked forward to a simulation even when the real thing was available. But meeting girls is hard, pornography is easy. So night after night I took the easy way out, and in the long run, my self-satisfaction sufferered, and with it my career, my relationships, and my dreams.

But maybe I was not searching for the perfect porn. Maybe I was searching for more reality. Pornography is a first-order simulation (read your Baudrillard), and when you're in the midst of a porn binge, when you are really turned on, it feels as if reality is right in front of you, ready to be touched. With each click of the mouse you see another tiny slice of what you believe is reality.

Hyperstimulation is great. It was my drug. But I'm almost 27 years old. I can't keep doing this forever. If I ever want to achieve my dream of having a five-girl harem (One blonde, two redheads, and two brunettes) I have to stop the porn and get busy living.

The Celebrity Reverse Gangbang Fantasy

2006-01-12T08:54:00.000-05:00

Last night I needed release. A single picture of just about any girl in a bathing suit, a one-piece bathing suit, would probably have been enough to get me off. But the point of this whole enterprise is NO VISUAL STIMULATION. At least not for a long time.

So I was stuck with my brain. I sat at my desk and started thinking. I had read something about Jessica Simpson earlier in the day and she was on my mind, so I started getting a blowjob from Jessica Simpson. But it wasn't working so I brought Jessica Alba over and did the two of them between their tits while they made out. Then I started fingering Avril Lavigne and Jennifer Love Hewitt. It was getting me pretty hot, but it wasn't until Gwen Stefani bent over my desk and I took her roughly that I was able to finish off.

It was pretty good sex and I accomplished it with just my mind. So I guess I can call that progress. At least today I don't feel as agitated as I did the last two days.

Still, I wish I could just go look at some pictures of Gwen Stefani -- anything. But my girlfriend agrees that probably the best thing for me is to avoid all sexo-visual stimulation, because even a simple celebrity picture can act as a gateway. I'd look at celebs for a while, saying "this is okay because it's not really pornography." Then I'd look at some breasts while saying "this is okay because it's just nudity, not pornography." And before you know it I'd be looking at teen anal bukkake fisting videos.

But how can I fantasize about women I never get to see? Well, as my girlfriend says, I have a lifetime of pornographic images stored in my mind. I should be able to pull those up if I really need to. That's true.

So life carries on here in day five and I'm still clean. My focus on my work seems to be slowly improving, if only because I have some extra time to spare now that pornography occupies none of my time. The weekend will be the real test, however, because that is traditionally when I have done the most bingeing.

Day Four - I Survived Not Masturbating

2006-01-11T09:19:00.000-05:00

My girlfriend was in an understandably bad mood last night, so unfortunately she was a no-go for coitus. But I could still feel that heat in my crotch, the one that says to me "I need to see soft velvety tits and pouty lips RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!" It also says "get that muthafuckin' hand down here and take care of your business, you asshole!" My dick is very angry with me right now.

In spite of it all, I just wasn't aroused. That channel between desire and actual tangible horniness, absent abundant visual stimulation, was closed tight, which is a bit disturbing. Normally, I'd be all over some nasty slutty Ann Angel, and all those cock-tease teen stars. But instead I had to search my imagination, and I could find nothing. I attempted to dust off my old underutilized fantasies, but they wouldn't budge.

So I never even made it to first base with myself. I wound up on the phone to an old friend and forgot I needed release at all.

Somehow, despite the odds, I didn't die in my sleep from not jerking off. In fact I feel quite normal, although my penis will require attention soon. But I'm not going to force it the way I did the other night. It's not worth the time and stress for an unsatisfying Fleshlight orgasm. My cock will let me know when it's ready to rock.

Forever Horny - First Spawn

2006-01-10T20:24:00.000-05:00

I have apparently inspired another to take action against his porn, and he (I assume it's a he) looks to provide good insight of his own:

Porn and self gratification can be the fast food of sexual enjoyment. They are readily available, easy, fast but in the long term have a negative impact on your health if not taken in moderation.

Please keep your eye on him, too.

Forever Horny

First Pangs

2006-01-10T16:05:00.000-05:00

I really want to look at some porn right now. I'm not sure what triggered this, but it's at the front of my mind. I need to see a nice pair of young, full breasts. I need to see some tanned ass and delicious clean shaven pink pussy. My penis feels like it's awaking from a winter of hibernation and needs to be fed right now.

I'm not going to give in, though. I just have to get over the fear.

Find something to take your mind off. If I weren't at the office I could get out but I'm stuck here in front of my computer and I'm being softly beckoned.

Stop. Control your breathing. This is not a real need. I don't need food, I'm not cold, I'm not in any real danger or pain. This is an illusion, like the Matrix. It's not porn I want, it's SEX. I want to take some college girl off the streets and throw her into my bedroom and do all sorts of horrible things to her.

Well, at least my girlfriend will have something to do besides work this evening. But seriously, I have got to get my mind on something else. Just typing this is only making it worse.

Spreadsheets. Put your nose into those spreadsheets. Straight lines parallel perpendicular. Nothing sexy about them. That's what I'll do.

Addiction or Compulsion?

2006-01-10T10:30:00.000-05:00

Someone at one of the forums argued that porn is not an addiction, but a compulsion, because it is psychological, not biological. I replied that porn is about endorphins, about testosterone, and that everything psychological is, at it's heart, biological (unless you believe you are imbued with the spirit of satan, in which case you are both an addict AND an idiot.)

We speak of "compulsive gamblers" but call the disease "gambling addiction." I knew compulsive smokers in college - people who clearly had the ability and willpower to quit, but who felt obligated to smoke for social reasons, or because of an oral fixation. One could argue that my hard-drinking upstairs neighbors are too young to be true alcohol addicts, that they are merely compulsive drinkers because they think it makes them hardcore and gives them credibility. But does that really make any difference?

The two words are definitely interchangeable at some level. That said, you probably aren't going to find too many "compulsive crackheads." ("I hate the taste, but I can't get enough of those crackpipes!")

Compulsive behavior and addiction certainly go hand-in-hand. The poison may create a physiological addiction, but the action you take in acquiring the poison is a psychological compulsion (which is, again, still biological.) The smoker may be addicted to nicotine, but she is compelled to light up and suck on that cancer stick ten times a day.

Call it what you will. I still call it a problem.

Day Three - I Dream of Eva

2006-01-10T09:08:00.000-05:00

I had a dream last night that I was looking at pornography. Spefically Eva (the Czech chick of DDF and GMP, not Planet Eva). When I first saw her on DDF years ago I was totally smitten, not just because she was young and so wretchedly adorable but also because she reminded me of a big crush from college. I dreamt I was looking at her naked once again, and I was so disappointed that I let myself slip up.

So I guess this whole quitting thing has already slipped into my subconscious. But waking up, and realizing that I was still porn-free made me feel good about myself. I know I'm doing the right thing and I hope I can keep it up.

Last night was also very productive for me. I have specific work monday nights that must be done at my computer, and it has always been a source of temptation. But because I could not look at the porn, I focused in very well on what I was supposed to do, and got a lot done. Of course, I still stayed up past my appointed bedtime, and didn't get enough sleep, but at least this time it was for something important, not for porn. It was very satisfying to actually accomplish something real.

Before I Get to Day Three...

2006-01-10T08:51:00.000-05:00

I posted over on the forums at empornium and Pure Tna and a few other places, and a lot of people have been showing up at my site.

Several of you have left comments that I have inspired you to kick the habit, so if any of you decide to start a blog like I have, don't forget to send me the address so I can put a link up on my blog. We're all friends here and should support one another.

Back on the forums, I noticed a lot of people wishing me luck with a sarcastic grin, and others who just plain doubt this can be accomplished - once a porn addict, always a porn addict. First of all, I have a very contrarian personality - that is, I define myself by how I'm different from other people. So to hear you say "you can't do it" just makes me want to try harder. Second of all, it saddens me to think that this subject - pornography addiction - is so little talked about, that there is so little real (and secular) support in this world, that you feel the task is insurmountable.

But you're looking at a real addict. There are certainly people more addicted than I was, but I know I was addicted because I tried to stop or at least cut back and I always found myself bingeing again, only to curse myself at 3AM after six hours of porn. It really fucks with your brain on that timespan, and I hated that.

I love porn, and I miss it already, but so far I haven't died. In fact, it's a minor annoyance to not see naked barely 18 tits and vagina. I once had a urinary track infection (non-STD) and that was much much worse than this, and then they stick a swab down your dick. So much worse than going cold turkey. SOOOOOO much worse. Just keeping it in perspective.

You Don't Need God

2006-01-09T18:30:00.000-05:00

Just to set the record straight, god or jesus has nothing to do with why I have quit pornography. In fact, I'm basically an atheist.

I bring this up because I was clicking around looking for other sites about pornography addiction, and like Alcoholics Anonymous, I saw a lot of reference to god, as if you can't overcome anything in your life without divine intervention.

That's retarded. I'm doing this on my own for nobody else but me and my selfish desires (maybe a little for my girlfriend, too.) I deserve all the credit for overcoming addiction and I want all the benefits of overcoming addiction.

But hey, if you need to pray to get out of something destructive, more power to you. Just don't tell me I need god to beat addiction. I'll show you that you don't! You just need a girlfriend who gives good head. That can cure you of ANYTHING, maybe even cancer.

Goodbye Bittorrent

2006-01-09T18:04:00.000-05:00

I discovered bittorrent - and how it can benefit a person in need of pornography, in late 2004. My first account was at Pure TnA, where I downloaded everything I could. I later set up an account at Empornium, which is the better of the two in terms of quantity, if not in terms of user interface.

Here are my numbers:
Pure TnA: Down: 77.34 GB // Up: 120.58 GB // Ratio: 1.559
Empornium: Down: 196.29 GB // Up: 208.45 GB // Ratio: 1.06
Total: Down: 273.63 GB // Up: 329.03 GB

That's a lot of porn. (I probably masturbated to less than 1% of that. It's not about sex, it's about hoarding and finding the "perfect" porn. But that's a subject for another day.)

When you download torrents you discriminate less than you normally would. If you see something that looks moderately decent, you grab it and let your bittorrent client do the rest. You can always delete it later. But then you have so much porno there is no way you will be able to go through and filter out the stuff you don't want. So it just piles up until you fill your hard drive and have to erase it en masse. It turns pornography into housekeeping.

My bittorrent accounts were another silly way I used to justify continued downloading of pornography. I had heard that if you don't use your account, you lose it. I racked up some great numbers and I hated to lose them. But why? It's a meaningless number that has no effect on my life in any way and only a bunch of horny men would ever see it.

So goodbye bittorrent. It was a fun year of some of the best porn in the greatest quantities that I have ever seen, that I may ever see again. But it's time to move on to more important things.

Day Two Brings Mild Temptation

2006-01-09T17:58:00.000-05:00

I was reading some of Howard Stern's first broadcast at Sirius and there was mention of several pornstars. Normally I would look them up and check out whatever I could. Today I ran a google image search and just looked at the thumbnails a brief second. I was able to refrain from pouring over them. Of course, maybe it helped they were all leathery and disgusting as many pornstars tend to be. But I resisted my better urge.

I came home to an empty apartment, which is normally prime time for porn discovery. Instead I sat down at my keyboard to practice for the first time in months, even though I suck. I'm have this lingering, latent horniness that typically is all I need to justify looking at pornography, but today it seems less than exciting.

The real test, I think, will come some time between one and two weeks after day one.

Day One Complete

2006-01-08T21:52:00.000-05:00

My girlfriend gave me a solid oral performance, but unfortunately she wore out before I was able to finish, thanks to my little size issue - or should I say, big size issue.

I needed release, though, before bed. While my girlfriend was running an errand, I took matters into my own hands. But it was tough going. I had to actually masturbate to things in my head. It's not as if I've never done this. In fact, before I moved in with my girlfriend it was not uncommon at all. But once I was living with her, I either had sex with her, or I had sex with my pornography. There was little room for my imagination.

This was always a major reason why I would not quit porn altogether - to fill the void of fantasy women in my life. After college was over, I ran out of women to fantasize about. You take it for granted when you are in school that women are all around you. In spite of going to a very unpleasant-looking college, there were still enough cute girls to keep my mind occuppied.

Celebrities, too, had worked for some time. But who is there now? The Spice Girls are ancient history, Christina Aguilera is covered with hardware, and Britney has brought new meaning to the words "vomit-inducing butt-stupid trailer trash dingbat bitch." Who the fuck is Scarlett Johannsen? She has looks but zero sex appeal.

And there are no women where I work. Well, there are women, but they are mostly 30 and 40 somethings with giant asses and chocolate obsessions. I might sleep with them if the fate of the world depended on it, and even then I would have to be really really drunk, stoned, or a corpse.

Tonight not only was I forced to masturbate to my imaginings, I had to even get myself aroused this way, and for some reason it was not working very well. I went through everyone that sprung to mind - crushes from college, old girlfriends, my favorite nude models and porn stars, Avril Lavigne and Jessica Alba. I even tried my current girlfriend but I could not get an orgasm.

Fleshlight to the rescue. Normally my speed bump model finishes me off in about negative ten seconds. But tonight I really had to work it. Maybe I just should have gone to bed and not raped myself like that. I suppose my schedule for auto-erotic behavior may slowly alter itself as well.

Day one is over.

Dani On My Mind

2006-01-08T16:14:00.000-05:00

Speaking of blowjobs - when I think of blowjobs I think about Dani Woodward. I was only on rare occasions into blowjob videos, but Dani Woodward is masterful, giving truly spirited head, and I will miss seeing them. It's these kinds of thoughts that make me feel pathetic and a little humiliated. But I think that's a good thing.

Watching and enjoying pornography, and apprecieting talented sex performers should never be humiliating - it's just part of being a man living in the technology age. But it's humiliating that relinquishing Dani Woodward, and all the rest, feels to me like a friend, or a pet, has gone away. That's the addiction at work, and that's what I have to rid myself of forever.

Day One, Part Two - Getting Itchy

2006-01-08T16:00:00.000-05:00

The first benefit I've noticed to complete porn abstention is that sitting at my computer at home is less stressful. Normally I would say I have a subconscious (and oftentimes conscious) awareness that barrels of beautiful pornography are just one click away, which is terribly distracting to whatever work I am trying to do.

Back in high school, in the mid-90's, my family had dial-up, and downloading a 100 KB photo, or a 3 MB movie, took a minute or so. In the meantime, I could read a few chapters of my school textbook. It actually proved to be an affective way to keep myself awake late into the night. And now, ten years later, I guess I still believed I could do both, but it's just impossible because there is so little lag time between when I click the link and when I see the picture or movie or whatever. Clearly, though, I could not do both and stay truly focused on my work.

I am getting pretty horny and normally would be doing the downloading thing right now, but I can't. Fortunately my girlfriend has been nice enough to offer a blowjob in support of my effort. I really don't think I could quit completely without her around. When you experience the loneliness that I have in the past, pornography is something of a friend. And in saying goodbye to it earlier today, it really felt like saying goodbye to an old friend. I haven't been more than three weeks without pornography probably since I was a sophomore or junior in high school.

So pardon me if I shed a tear for the good times I had with my hand on my schlong. It's been half a lifetime of mind-blowing orgasms.

Day One - First Withdrawal Symptoms

2006-01-08T11:21:00.000-05:00

After erasing everything last night I panicked a bit, and this morning the tension continues, not to mention fatigue and sleep-deprivation. The morning after a porn binge is not unlike a hangover.

For some reason I think specificallyabout Sadie Jones and Planet Eva and a few other stars of the web, and what they will be doing online in the next year or so. One of the exciting things about internet pornography in the last few years has been watching the actions of it's young stars. Typically, a young starlett starts out on a large site, where she does non-nude modelling only. After some time, she starts a site of her own. She starts giving some nipslips. Then comes a little of her clitoris, then full shots of her twat. Sometimes she might just go for hardcore. I think Peaches18 (aka Peaches16 aka RealPeaches) took advantage of this formula the best, although she was never one of my favorites. Sadie Jones and Planet Eva are just my most recent interests, and have shown their willingness to go down this path.

But I won't see it. It's like not being able to watch your children grow, except instead of watching them take their first step and say their first word, you get to see them do their first spread shot and first dildo action.

It's silly, but what I have to keep telling myself is that, in my world, these women do not exist. In my mind they seem very real on some level. Moreover, the internet preserves all pornography it touches, and in ten years I could come back and find pictures of them or anyone on the web somewhere.

Today I just need to stay away from my computer, spend time with my girlfriend, and watch a little football.

Step One - Erase Everything

2006-01-08T02:50:00.000-05:00

It is 3:00AM on a Saturday night. Not the worst that I stayed up an extra three hours to look at new porn while my girlfriend slept, but it's messed up my Sunday for sure.

While I do not have the worst addiction to internet porn, it has been a problem I have consistently dealt with since I first gained access to broadband in college in 1997. Since then it has evolved into a systematic bingeing that I cannot control. Tonight, for the first time, I have admitted to myself that no "scheme" will ever free me from it. So I have created this blog semi-anonymously in hopes of having an outlet for sharing the difficult times that lie ahead.

And before you snicker, understand something: this is an addiction like any other. It may not be crack or heroin, but I would peg it close to gambling or even alcoholism. It is not physically or financially destructive, but it metes out its violence against time, and against your mind. As an artist of sorts, it has a profoundly detrimental effect on my levels of creativity, and I have reached a point in my life where I cannot tolerate it anymore. Most of all, though, I'm just fucking sick of blowing my free time doing something so frivolous and unimportant, that ultimately does not contribute to happiness, but malaise.

Pornography is so widely abundant online, in such beautiful quality, that I simply cannot restrain myself and consume it in small quantities. In the coming days and weeks and maybe months, I hope to share why this is with you. But for now, let's take the first step.

Step one is to erase all the pornography from my hard drive. Over the last nine years I have periodically erased everything in fits of frustration with myself, so to any of you reading this who may also be addicts, it may seem a paltry sum. To those of you who are not addicts, you may be shocked that someone can collect so much. I would guess there is around six to eight months of accumulated pornography - from bittorrents, webforums, thumbnail galleries, games, and even the lowly old usenet.

Bittorrents: 41,686 files / 52.9 GB
Rapidshare: 3879 files / 2.32 GB
Random Pics: 5394 files / 1.29 GB
Games: 331 files / 6.1 GB
Usenet: 14,221 files / 3.33 GB

Grand Total: 65,511 files / 65.94 GB

"Do you really need that much pornography?" you may ask. No, I don't, which is why I am divesting myself of all of it. But I will explain to you in a coming post why I DID have so much.

Ultimately, I hope to remain cold turkey for at least a year. After that, I will decide if I want to attempt to reintroduce pornography slowly into by life. But that is a long way away. Today, I'm just happy to have a computer completely free of pornography.

Actually, it scares the hell out of me. Seriously. Erasing all this pornography has made me very very nervous. What if I need it?

Just like a true junkie - I am actually shaking with fear. I miss PlanetEva and Sadie Jones already. Shit.