So I’ve nearly reached the two year without pornography mark, and my life has changed drastically. My sex drive still isn’t what I feel like it should be, and given that I PMO’d for so long, I’m not sure whether it ever will be – but I don’t want to kill myself anymore so I definitely can’t complain.
A little bit of background:
The first time I ever jerked off to porn I was 9 years old and it was on the family computer. After inadvertently downloading a few Trojans and leaving Google searches for “girl tits” on the browsing history my parents confronted me and scared me off porn for a couple years, I took to jerkin it to myself in the mirror with my dick tucked between my legs and squinting so it looked like a pussy. A desperate measure, but one I wish I’d stuck with given the crux of this story. By 11 was PMOing to weird hentai flash computer games and photos of lesbians. By 12 or 13 mom had upgraded our download limit, put a computer in my room, and I had graduated to hardcore porn streaming sites.
What followed was about 9 years of PMOing and edging to 10-20 tabs of hardcore porn and increasingly crazy unnecessary shit. Anal, double penetration, double anal, pissing, gangbangs, rimming, feature length pirates of the Caribbean porn spoofs, nickelodeon porn, the list goes on. I remember loving Naruto hentai for an embarrassingly long time (shout outs to lady Tsunade with the tig bitties). I would come home from school every day and spend 30-60 minutes overstimulating my brain to capacity. The gist of what I understand now is that this was at a critical stage of my brain development, and that I was desensitizing my brain so it wasn’t stimulated by actual three-dimensional women. At 14-15 I started going to parties and making out with girls. It was around this time that I lost my virginity without a hiccup, so there wasn’t any indication that there was anything wrong. This would soon change.
When I was 16 I tried to have sex with a girl at a party but I found that my dick was too soft. After some embarrassment and a muttered accusation that she was too tight, I left the room and went back to doing shots of grain alcohol (which probably wasn’t doing my developing brain any favors either). The next day I jerked off to porn and my dick was rock hard, so I put the experience down to being too drunk. But the next time an opportunity rolled around -on a tattered mattress on the kitchen floor of a teenagers apartment (stay classy San Diego), my dick was like that weird Jerry penis slug in that episode of Rick and Morty (scared and soft). Morning erections soon became a thing of the past as well. This was pretty terrifying and depressing, and kicked off a very long and sustained period of anxiety and depression that has characterized my life since.
One bittersweet element in this story is that I’m a fairly good looking guy, so opportunities for sex (especially in high school), were very common, meaning I got to fail at sex so MANY TIMES!! FUCK!! During this time I continued watching porn and jerking off, not suspecting that there was any link. I went to a doctor who tested my testosterone, prescribed my cialis and sent me to a psychologist. The testosterone was fine, cialis worked sparingly, and the psychologist put it down to nerves and told me to relax. I had a girlfriend at the time that I avoided sex with, safe to say this didn’t last long.
That failure, along with all the other casual ones, and the fact that meds, doctors, and therapists didn’t help meant that I withdrew socially, hated myself, feared that I would never be able to live a normal life, and accepted the fact that I was probably going to end up killing myself. I’m not overstating that. Suicide became a very prominent thought in my head for a lot of years, and was often the first solution my brain offered up to me when I encountered a problem, or when I thought about sex. I would have shooting visions of stabbing myself or shooting myself or jumping in front of a car. I never planned it out or got to a point where I tried it seriously, but it wouldn’t have taken much for me to get there. At one particularly stressful time I wrapped a noose around my neck and stood there tugging on the rope listlessly – but then I got a DM on instagram, and you can’t kill yourself without checking your DMs.
Initial Rebooting and Viagra
Around four years ago I decided that porn could be a contributing factor, I had read a message board where someone had mentioned it and I thought it was worth a shot. So for three months I didn’t watch porn, but continued jerking off here and there. After not seeing any results and not knowing about all of the resources out there I started PMOing again. But it was around this time that I got my hands on some viagra. I had only had sex a handful of times in a few years (with varying degrees of success and chlamydia), but my body reacted to Viagra pretty dramatically. My dick got hard and stayed hard for the most part. So I went to the doctor and got a prescription with a bunch of repeats, and started to have a lot of drunk sex.
Side note: I haven’t researched how bad viagra is for you long term, but I can’t imagine it’s exactly a multivitamin. I’ve also had high blood pressure for a while now, which could be put down to stress and diet, but might have something to do with the large amounts of viagra I routinely put into my system for a long time. So do some research.
This boosted my confidence and reintroduced me to sex at the age of 21. I had a few flings here and there but wasn’t emotionally very involved with any of the women that I was sleeping with. It was very much just about tits and ass and pussy and fucking, which was fun, but also an impersonal element to sex, which while natural to some degree has been made worse by the pornification of our society. This kept up for about a year and a half until my anxiety and depression came back full force. My dick couldn’t get hard without a pill that was probably pretty bad for me, and my brain was yelling at me that I was still going to be a lonely little worthless loser for the rest of my life. This put me the closest to killing myself I’ve been since.
PIED Diagnosis and Recovery
And then, just as I was entering a mental health freefall I heard a comment in passing on a podcast that changed my life. A comedian was having a conversation and said something like
“…or teenagers that masturbate to porn and then can’t get hard for the real thing.” I’d seen things in passing on forums referencing this kind of thing before, but never paid it much attention because of all the misinformation and the lack of a lot of concrete information or resources, but when I heard this it clicked. After work I went home and googled the shit out of PIED. I found Yourbrainonporn, and Gary Wilson’s ted talk, I found Gabe Deem talking about it (shout outs to Gabe for being so open and unashamed about the issue, for going public with it, and for creating a platform and resource centre for people afflicted with PIED).
From that day I stopped jerking off or watching porn. Which honestly wasn’t that hard for me, because after so many years of watching porn, my dick was half soft when i was watching porn, and my natural sex drive had been at 0 for a very long time. I noticed an initial desire to masturbate and preoccupation with porn-fantasy (leftovers from a habitual porn habit), but then I entered a flatline. After a month of this I entered a casual relationship and continued having sex with viagra for 5 months or so. After this I didn’t have sex or masturbate for over three months. With no sexual stimulus or cumming I started having wet dreams. I started jerking off at age fucking 9 so I had never had enough excess cum to warrant a wet dream. Shout outs to wet dreams they fucking rule but can also be super weird and gross. I remember having one where I was fucking a a weird opening in a pillar made of alien flesh. Not something I would jerk off to but probably already a genre of porn.
After that 3 month period I got another girlfriend and have been dating her since. Miraculously I managed to hide this whole embarrassing escapade from her. I used viagra with her for about 9 months. Towards the start of the year I started panicking that I couldn’t get hard without it and had a few failures. But she was really understanding about it and didn’t seem to care. And I stopped putting so much pressure on myself to be able to perform. We have sex 2-3 times a week now, and I’ve stopped using viagra completely. I have no trouble getting hard and we have a good sex life. Sometimes staying hard with a condom on can be an issue. When that happens I just go down on her and usually just finish without a condom (risky, but she’s on the pill, and we don’t have sex without one if I’ve already cum). Like I said at the start of this long ass post, my sex drive still isn’t where I think it should be, but I have a loving relationship built on trust and acceptance so I’m not going to start bitching.
My (Basic) Advice
My advice would be to never watch porn again in your whole god forsaken life. Try and go as long as you can on hard mode (no porn no masturbation), and seek out a relationship when you start to feel more confident. Be honest with your partner if you can – I navigated the initial stages by using viagra, and I would probably do it again because it would have been difficult for me to tell her straight away, and sex bonded us initially and helped us feel closer to each other. But it would have saved me some anxiety if I had just told her that “sometimes I have trouble getting hard because I used to watch a lot of porn, but it’s getting better slowly and I really care about you, so is it ok if you’re patient with me for a while?” 99% of the time I’m sure it will be fine. If it’s not then they’re probably not someone you need to be dating.
This struggle has been a major undercurrent in my life for a long fucking time, and it’s also something I repressed the whole time, and continued to repress as it got better. At the end of the day men don’t want to talk about not being able to get hard. It’s so tied in with virility and masculinity that it’s humiliating to admit you can’t get hard. And bottling something like this up ends with you stewing in negativity and cortisol for years and years and years. I’ve found most of the pain I experience in life is caused by trying to bury and repress problems and pain. When you confront it and look it in the face, become unashamed of it, feel it fully, a lot of the time it becomes much less terrifying.
Remember that you’re not going through this alone. You probably know a lot of people going through the exact same thing, but not talking about it. If you feel like there’s no hope, remember that I was watching lady Tsunade get DP’d by Sasuke and Naruto when I was 12, and now I have a girlfriend. Be patient and replace your shitty habits with productive ones. Think about where you want to be in 5 years and start building towards that. Stay in good shape, eat well. Seek out real friendships and relationships. Get off your computer, fuck off into nature. Cliche advice, yes, but you’ll find most cliché advice actually works.
Peace out my dudes.
LINK – 2 year success story- Substantially less suicidey
BY – booter
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