As hosts of www.yourbrainonporn.com we see a lot of websites where men (primarily) speak freely to each other about their experiences with—and beyond—porn. For example, there are 35,000+ explorers on Reddit.com alone, the overwhelming majority of whom are young enough to have cut their teeth on today's uniquely stimulating highspeed porn.
Post-porn culture is still under the radar for the moment—because most of those affected choose to remain anonymous—but here's a preview of what is in store as these young men move into positions of influence in future professions. (Keep in mind that for them, the terms "masturbation" and "porn" are virtually synonymous, as most have only masturbated using the Internet.)
The rest of the article is quotations from different guys:
"It only becomes apparent how badly porn affects you when you begin to recover and discover that you're a much more capable and confident human being than you ever imagined."
"It’s crazy how we went from being a totally repressed puritanical society, to a completely depraved wanton society whose motto is, “If it feels good, do it.” Where is the balance??? I think in 10-20 years it’ll become mainstream knowledge that excessive wanking, especially to porn is detrimental to one's well being. Sure, porn has been around for a long time… but never until the last 10-15 years have we been exposed to so much porn. You don’t have to go to the seedy “book store” to get your fix. You don’t even have to pay for it, and can be up to your eyeballs in it immediately. That is not natural."
"At age 45 I think my recovery from 7 years of porn addiction is easier for me than it is for a 21 year old who is rebooting from 7 years of porn addiction plus hardwiring that occurred while his brain was still forming. I have a distinct memory of a time when my brain did not think sex = porn. My brain has a place to go back to."
"It was hard, but [rebooting] helped me completely change my life, to the point where I don't even recognize the insecure, scared little pr**k I used to be."
"My 86-year old granddad is rough, but honest and smart. Once, he saw me watching porn and said to me, "This is not making love to a woman. This is stupid. If you look at this, you will make your hand a p___y and your willy a fool." I did."
"My mindset has definitely shifted. I was never thinking that porn would cause problems for me but it did and quitting porn use confirmed this."
"To those who have a problem with porn's ill effects: Believe in what you can see without any third-party interference. We must disregard the phony maps we have been given of the territory, and instead make our own maps."
"I wonder how many people view porn on a daily basis and think nothing of it, constantly angry about how they're socially awkward etc. I swear I spot these people sometimes; the downcast eyes, not knowing what to do with their hands or where to stand. An epidemic of people with mental barriers."
"Porn takes away from you exactly what you need to get past it: confidence."
"Porn is nothing more than shadows in the cave, and I'm tired of it. To anyone who is thinking about using: It's just not worth it."
"Boys will be boys" doesn't exactly apply anymore. Parents need to understand it's more like "Boys will be antisocial, self-loathing, freaks who will never produce a grandchild for me."
"I'm never going back to my old habit, because now I know a terrible truth: You can fastidiously hide your wank stash in a labyrinth of folders within folders disguised as inconspicuous files; you can fap in secrecy; but when you go out and interact with your fellow humans your habits are visible. TL;DR: If you unplug from the matrix, you can see the code."
"[To a young guy] This is your relative small window in time where a multitude of nubile females are not that terribly interested in stable, nurturing relationships. They are out to explore. And you are sitting at home, strangling your snake until it cannot even puke anymore?"
I wanna go back in time and smack myself for thinking my sexuality was immune to porn.
"The more success you have socially and personally, the more you realize how you never want to go back to the way things were. When you get that compliment, or that smile from the girl you pass on the sidewalk, it's magical. You grow too big to fit back into that computer chair."
"There's no economic interest in doing a study on quitting porn. There is no product to sell and no service to be provided. The general public is not even aware of the issue at hand (pun intended) and unable to perceive it in more than undiscerning moralistic terms. This means that it is unlikely that there will be a study on the subject in the near future, and those demanding "scientific proof" before quitting are placing an easy one-way bet."
"Every. Girl. I've been with has had a load shot on her by me. Why? Because it looks like you're supposed to do it. Why do they let me? Because it looks like I'm supposed to do it. I've given girls anal strictly because of the theatrics, even though it wasn't pleasurable to EITHER of us. For many of us, porn made it so that sex is more about theatrics than the experience, when it should definitely be the other way around."
"When I was watching porn, I was a very ineffective member of society. I did not give 2 hoots about the following: Work, Family, Debt, Women's feelings, The prospect of child-rearing (it just seemed ridiculous to me - why would anyone have kids?). The dangers of addictive drugs, Voting & politics, My local community, Patriotism. I mean, I would be able to write long Reddit posts on why something was right or wrong, and philosophize endlessly. But when it came to action, I was a dead agent. If any reasonable proportion of guys are anything like I was, then we, as a civilization, are in pretty big trouble. There is a historical myth that the Roman Empire fell due to the subtle effects of lead poisoning - a side effect of their impressive new lead plumbing technology. Whether this is true or not is not relevant to the point. What is relevant is the analogy to today's computer monitors, which have plumbed their way into every home and every bedroom, pumping the Internet into brains."
"In future we will look at pornography like we do cigarettes — soo good short term (1 minute). Soo bad long term (80 years, or whatever your life expectancy is). So, be early adopter. Do something right now that everyone will do in maybe 80 years."
"It is so great not to be up past 11:00, while my family is sleeping, pursuing that relentless hunt."
"(A week into recovery) I’m looking at the world though a semitransparent layer of porn. And let me tell you, talking to somebody whose face is covered with vaginas is really disturbing."
"Porn offers the 'quarter pounder with cheese' effect. It's easily available. It's made to look good and we automatically yearn for it, but once we have it we do not feel truly 'full up' and kinda regret it...until next time we have that hunger pang."
"If I didn't have Internet access, I would have zero desire for porn."
"It's all about the hormone (dys)regulation. After three weeks of no porn/masturbation you feel clear and well. After a relapse, the world comes crashing down. Really interesting to see how your mood goes from - HELL YEAH IM GONNA ROCK" to "Excuse me for breathing air; I'm such a loser."
"Porn addiction: an inability to find, what you're looking for in life because you're in some ways numbed."
"Masturbation in moderation is ok as long as Internet porn is out of the picture. Articles on masturbation always miss out that key point."
"Oh, the good old days, when seeing up a girl's skirt on the stairs would give you a month's worth of jerk-off fuel."
"Thanks porn... you were the perverted older brother I never had!"
"I'm in my mid twenties and a sufferer of this apparent new-fangled 21st-century, broadband-driven ED disorder. I've had three chances to lose my virginity with real flesh and blood women and I've failed every time (as in, these women were in my bed and ready to go, clothes off, but I couldn't do it. I've had other chances, and even other girls sleeping in my bed, but I didn't make the move because I knew I wouldn't be able to do it... even between the ages of 18 to 22). Each time felt incredibly embarrassing, depressing and emasculating. I'm a raging heterosexual, but I simply could not have sex with these women. If I could choose one word to describe what it felt like when I tried to have sex with them, I'd use the word 'alien.' It felt artificial and foreign to me. It's like I've gotten so conditioned to sitting in front of a screen and jerking it with the death-grip all these years that my mind considers that to be normal sex instead of real, actual sex. I can get hard for porn, no problem, but not for the life of me can I get hard for a real woman."
"There are more cases of ED than ever before, for not just older guys but guys OUR age (I'm 23). First time ever in the history of the earth. And people are worried about what's better.. the i-Phone 5 or the Galaxy s3? What has happened to us? I know my dad and grand dad weren't like this. They were motivated people driven to achieve what they wanted in life."
"[Age 22] What do people do when they find something they enjoy? They just want to do it over and over again. That's what an addiction is. I didn't know better as a teen. But now I do! What about a disclaimer with the porn saying: Hey, guess what dude? This is going to seriously screw with your life. You're going to jerk off way too much and you might develop some sexual issues."
"Once I'm 100% recovered, I'm going to guard my sex drive like Fort Knox."
"There are tidbits of info out there that paint masturbation in a super-positive light—a result of the oh-so-liberated culture that has been developing. Most of it is from the same sources that will encourage readers to raise kids without a gender, encourage them to have sex early and often and with whomever, satisfy whatever weird fantasies they have, etc. No matter what your stance is on the morality of this stuff, anyone should be able to understand self-control is necessary in ALL aspects of life. I hate this culture that effectively advocates a complete lack of sexual restraint."
"I've found during this recovery that the girls that I would have classified as solid fours in my porn days have become sixes and sevens. In fact, they're all cute."
"I was convinced that I need to always have as much sexual release as possible; that it's "not cool" to not have it; and you're a loser if you don't get it. That's the messages that popular culture sends unfortunately. Really what pisses me off is that I didn't know about Internet porn being a problem AT ALL."
"I thought I was a pessimist, but really I was just an addict."
"I lay with my girlfriend and kissed her slowly and softly and for a long while. It was wonderful. How beautiful she is! This is real, this is what we need. Porn is so stupid, it is laughable! Porn sucks; what on earth were we thinking? Porn is about exploiting male sexuality, not endowing it. Ultimately that’s why I drifted away from it."
"It's nice that old enjoyments tend to return, once one gets off the gravy train."
"Times were different in the 90s. We were still sneaking around with VHS tapes, squinting at scrambled skinimax, and commuting to school on brachiosauruses. I think 10 years from now a whole generation may wake up to how they've hyper-sensitized their brains."
"Just smiling makes you open to people wanting to talk to you. It's amazing how humans rely so much on being social. It's like the best medicine and free to anyone. Internet porn/masturbation made me isolate myself from social life."
"[Thousands of men quitting] is a good sign. I see it as a revolution in human sexuality, or rather a return to normalcy. I think society scoffs at the idea of internet porn as being a real problem, which makes it all the more dangerous."
"I'm wondering, how many PMO addicts were there, before sexual revolution? Before the first magazines? How much heart disease before food modifications? How much depression before removal of frequent touch, 100% natural air and sun? How many lung cancers before cigarettes? THE thing is to realize, that world is changing too fast. In last 100 years we changed probably much more, than in last 1000+ years. And here is the schema:
1) Exciting, but bad in long-term, behavior is introduced for money
2) People get hooked
3) Precise, scientifically backed-up research takes decades to kick-in
4) Hooked people start to get educated
5) They start behavior-elimination.
Problem is that this whole cycle to damaging. Cigarettes were (widely) introduced early 20th century and took decades to regulate. We now know that certain types of foods are harmful. Yet, with food we are still in phase 2-3. Guess where we are with pornography? The useful scientific research is not even a few years old."
"Quitting PMO is wayyyy harder for me than alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, whatever! I know that's not encouraging, but it's good to know for the annals, right? Just to let the doubters know: This is a real problem!"
"Only a few generations ago we would all be like Vikings 'n' s**t, smashing other dudes' heads in with an ax. Now most guys can't even go into a frigging bar and say 'hi' to a girl. Something is very wrong."
"My best friend's dad was the neighborhood guy who distributed porn before it was readily available. I was nine years old when I was shown my first porn vid. Plus my friend and I had access to the stash. It was the equivalent to having access to Internet porn back in the day with no parent to stop you. 30 years later, I don't think it is a good thing to have the access that we have to porn then or now. It is probably way worse now because if you have children it is very difficult to shelter them from it. You can do what you can in your own home, but that's not going to stop anything."
"This is what I feel after just 28 days: My wife is multi-dimensional. So are all the lovely women I see, talk to and interact with each day. Porn had not turned me into some slobbering Neanderthal, but it definitely had maladjusted me for a full experience with people."
"You Know You're Watching Too Much Porn When...You get so bored of heterosexual porn you start viewing transsexual and then gay porn, just cause it is something new"
"The largest example of hyper-reality by far is pornography. It's sexuality, one of life's most intimate and sensory encompassing actions, being infinitely reduced to a virtual experience devoid of any sense beyond sight and sound. You are not having sex with a partner or porn star, and you are not having sex with yourself; you are running a socially-conditioned simulation of an ideal of sex, a knowingly unobtainable object of desire that you virtually become attached to until you are satisfied, after which you are sucked back into the "unsatisfactory" reality of being naked in a room, alone."
"My parents didn't really punish me when I got caught, so the incentive was to get better at hiding it. That becomes part of the thrill—feeling one step ahead of everyone else"
"Imagine all the new energy and potential we're creating [as we recover]. If it keeps growing like it has and I don't doubt that it will, we will slowly but surely create a huge wave of self-disciplined and strong men."
"The best things in life are not microwavable; recovery takes time."
"There may be cases of otherwise normal, healthy people who are held back/damaged by porn, for whom porn use represents an 'addiction,' which is the cause of their various problems. For many if not most of us, however, I think it is part of a larger picture of our generation. We have, many of us, been allowed to extend our adolescence far, far into our twenties (or even thirties!) through the general permissiveness of modern culture and parenting, and the availability of various distractions provided by our technology. We become docile and passive because we never have to fight for the right to enjoy life. Like being suspended in a tank and fed from a tube, our muscles (both actual, mental and emotional) are denied the vital stimulation they need to develop. Quitting porn is one very important step for people such as us, but it is only one step. We have to rethink what it means to live, and ask ourselves if we are truly doing so. Such introspection is painful, but necessary."
"I work with elementary kids, and it feels REALLY good not to have pornographic images playing through my mind while I teach them about gravity or whatever... last school year, [my daily porn habit] it made things REALLY WEIRD at school when I'd remember clips during moments of boredom or anxiety in the classroom. GROSSSSSS - this school year has been much better. Related: my classroom is much better managed this year... a correlation!"
"Think about it - porn, which used to be a good thing - a marital aid - is now an industry bigger than the NFL. It's piped into our homes. And to stay competitive and profitable, it pushes boundaries all the time. But take a trip in a time machine - let's go 1992. Poll 1000 adults. Ask them 'What is a facial?' A vast majority of them will refer to the beauty practice. Fast forward to today. My buddy from India was in America for about a month when we passed a salon that said "Facials." He gave me a look, and said "I can't believe you can do that here!" I clued him into what it meant really quickly and laughed. He watched porn a lot in India. The meaning of a word has radically shifted"
"The thing about porn is that you don't even need to be horny, you just need to be bored. The porn will make you horny."
"(Age 24) With the easy access to junk food and porn we are constantly feeding our emotional system with 'feel good' crap. We teach our bodies to live on fast food, and we push away the discomforts of sexual frustration with a simple click of a mouse and some lotion. At which point will you begin to take back control of your life and become the dynamic force in the environment? To become the action not the reaction? It all starts with willpower resisting reactive behavior. No longer settling for anything less than you deserve. Demanding a beautiful, live woman instead of a pixelated, airbrushed, fraud. To thrive instead of living a life of mediocrity. I haven't watched in 157 days. Now, I hardly ever even think about it. When I was at 85 days, I wrote a summary of all the superficial benefits I had received from quitting masturbation to porn. I return today to inform you that the benefit runs much deeper than what you see in your life. It runs deep down into you masculine core. Quitting porn is one of the main keys to taking back the controls. When you are no longer manipulated by sex, a new world opens up to you. You have a freedom in life that you hadn't before experienced."
"After you climax and the porn is still playing, that's when you see it for what it really is."
"All this exposure to porn and instant-gratifying masturbation had conditioned my body correlate sexual desire w/ visual & mental stimulation. When in fact, GOOD SEX, is about feeling and has nothing to do with these mental/ visual images. When you starve yourself of this level of fantasy, your body freaks out. It goes through stages of weird/unpredictable behaviors. Once it reunites with its natural way of being, all is how it should be...in life, in the world, in the bedroom. Quitting is not a magic pill. It will not solve all your problems. However, paired with a few healthy-habits, it provides an excellent foundation to a life of your own design. Nothing is more fulfilling than the feeling you get when you're actually thriving and not just surviving."
"We are encouraged (unwittingly) to throw our brains out of balance. And then, there's no satisfying them. Eventually, only the thrills offer pleasure and everything else seems bland and boring. Someday, this will become common knowledge, and we can stop all the silly discussions about morality v. sexual freedom. There is no true sexual freedom when the brain is out of balance."
"We live in a time where staying inside doped up on SSRIs, alone, having tons of imaginary fairy sex with your primal appendage is acceptable. People just label these people "shy" or "introverted", but I think we have an epidemic. This shouldn't become normal. And giving up masturbation to porn has become taboo! Everyone is starting to accept that masturbating your problems away is just "evolution" or something. I know some people that think I'm stupid for quitting, but these are also the same people that sit at home playing hours upon hours of League of Legends, whining about how they need a girlfriend, and answering with a fist full of anti-depressants. I would hate to see this become the norm, but I feel like that's where this is all headed if we don't do something about it. As much as I want to procrastinate, stay at home, and do my lonely activities, I will fight this. We're the ones who have a chance at seeing the view from the top of a mountain rather than from a camera from a plane on a synthetic screen. Or servicing our fake internet girlfriend. We'll taste, touch, smell, see, hear, and feel life"
"To 99% of human beings that ever lived, the conditions of my life would be considered unfathomable luxury and privilege (even though I grew up in a lower-middle-class home in the UK). I am incredibly lucky but it is a double-edged sword. If you subscribe to the principle of Hormetism then you will accept the idea that the human biological organism responds well to stress and deprivation, and less well to gratification and comfort. Strength training, intermittent fasting and cold showers all stress the body, inducing positive adaptation. Junk food, a sedentary lifestyle and 5 and half hours of CoD per day will weaken you and turn you into a spineless, flaccid jellyfish. For many of us, quitting is our very first experience of deprivation. It feels uncomfortable at first but more often than not induces positive adaptation."
"Lol, it's pretty silly that if someone were to ask me what the greatest accomplishment of my life has been, I'd probably have to respond honestly, "I stopped habitually watching porn and masturbating." :)
And finally, from two public commentators and YOUTube:"
"A mind originally designed to cope with little more sexually tempting than the occasional sight of a tribeswoman across the savannah is rendered helpless when bombarded by continual invitations to participate in erotic scenarios far exceeding any dreamt up by the diseased mind of the Marquis de Sade. There is nothing robust enough in our psychological make-up to compensate for developments in our technological capacities, nothing to arrest our passionate desire to renounce all other priorities for the sake of a few more minutes (which might turn out to be four hours) in the darker recesses of the web. Porn is so immediate and intense, it destroys our capacity to engage in the far more human and low-key business of actual sex. [Porn is] nice for some, but in a way that destroys things that are more than simply nice; that are essential to life." —Alain de Botton
"Today’s porn is truly a brave new world, with boundaries lasting only as long as it takes a dopamine receptor to downgrade." —D.L. Hilton, MD
The Day the Earth Stopped Masturbating (movie trailer)
Comedian Chris Rock quits porn (radio show clip)
Gary Wilson, an anatomy and physiology teacher interested in the neurochemistry of mating and bonding, is a co-author of Cupid's Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships. more...
She's successful and charming as well as ruthless and calculating.
