After a 6-year struggle, it honestly baffles me why porn is such an accepted part of mainstream culture

I first discovered porn when I was 12. It started when I decided to look up pictures of naked girls on google images out of curiosity. After a few times doing this, I progressed to looking at hardcore stuff. I never really escalated from here, never really developed any weird fetishes, but my habits still definitely harmed my sexual health.

This started a period of almost three years where I would occasionally binge porn for a couple days at a time before feeling guilty and stopping for several months (once I went almost nine months without). Starting from the very first time I watched porn, I felt a desire to stop completely because I was a serious Christian and therefore knew it was a sin. However, the porn urge won out over and over again.

I was really sheltered growing up so I didn’t realize what masturbating was until I was almost 14. Whenever the porn urge hit I would just sit and watch videos or read erotic stories for hours on end until I got bored. I remember a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction while watching (since I wasn’t rubbing one out) but never put two and two together until much later.

About a year after I learned about masturbation, I found a porn video I really liked and decided to jack off to it. This completely changed my relationship with porn as I now became a far more compulsive user. Over the course of several years I changed from sporadically using it to jerking off to it almost daily. Also, my feelings of guilt about it changed dramatically as well.

I had always felt porn was morally wrong but only ever felt slightly remorseful for watching it. It was easy for me to decide to stop for long periods but also equally easy to fall back in.

Once I started jerking off to it regularly, I would always feel intensely guilty after finishing because I felt putting masturbation with porn made it a more serious sin than just watching porn. Eventually, the guilt I felt grew so much that I would feel like shit for several days after PMO and cried several times about it. At one point I thought if I couldn’t quit, life wouldn’t even be worth living.

Each day became a kind of daily battle between me and my urges that I lost over and over again for almost three years. This really fucked with my head and many times I told myself that I should just accept that I would always be addicted to porn forever and could never fix it. However, the powerful feeling of remorse associated with my post nut clarity always made me feel I had to try and quit.

I almost always tried to quit porn and masturbation together since they were both sins in my mind. I used a lot of different resources to help me break my addiction. I used to pray regularly and also found motivation in the NoFap subreddit and YourBrainonPorn. I got site blockers and tried mental exercises but nothing ever worked permanently.

Despite all the effort, I was getting nowhere and the most I ever lasted was 25 days (I rarely got past 4). I felt like I just didn’t have enough self control to stop PMOing and felt I was a failure compared to the people I read about on forums who’d been able to permanently quit or at least last far longer.

More recently, I drifted away from Christianity and no longer associate masturbation with any negative outcomes as long as it is done in moderation. I always felt that the negative aspects of masturbation so often emphasized on NoFap forums were definitely pseudoscience but identified with that ideology anyway because of my opposition to the act on a moral basis.

Once my mindset about masturbation shifted, I gradually came to see quitting porn without masturbation to be a more attainable goal. I made more serious efforts to stop once the coronavirus lockdowns were implemented and after about a dozen tries I’ve finally managed to go 90 days without porn for the first time since I started jerking off.

Early on in my streak, I still associated sexual urges with urges to watch porn. I needed to quickly implement site blockers before I started jerking off or else I would almost assuredly search up material.

In general, I could have normal sexual fantasies most of the time, but for some reason, when I jerked off, the only shit that could turn me on was just imagining the same type of porn I always watched. So, I made an effort to avoid thinking about anything at all when I masturbated.

After six weeks or so, I noticed that when I jerked off, I no longer felt the need to watch porn to get off. The vanilla sexual fantasies I’d always had became accessible while masturbating and I didn’t need to use site blockers to prevent relapse. This was a sign that I didn’t associate jerking off with porn anymore. Once I realized this, it brought a major sense of relief. I hadn’t felt this far removed from porn since I originally started watching it.

As I mentioned earlier, I no longer choose not to watch porn for religious reasons. Instead, I do so because of the harmful neurological outcomes associated with its habitual use. The scientific evidence against artificial sexual stimuli is overwhelming and it honestly baffles me why porn is such an accepted part of mainstream culture. I feel like many, many habitual porn users want to quit but don’t make a real effort because they’re led to believe it’s completely normal behavior.

Additionally, I see porn in the context of a romantic relationship as a kind of physical cheating even if it doesn’t involve actual sex. Although I’ve yet to have a girlfriend, I know for a fact that if I entered a relationship whilst continuing to use porn, I wouldn’t be able to live it down.

Finally, contrary to a common sentiment I see in posts on this sub and NoFap, I don’t think quitting porn will necessarily fix any of the other problems in your life. It’s certainly done nothing of the sort for me. However, if you have the willpower and determination to quit something as addicting as porn, you sure as hell have it within you to take the difficult steps to improve your life in other ways.

Damn, looking back this post got to be hella long. I had so much more to say about both my past experiences with porn and the mindset and process I used to defeat it but I didn’t want the post to be ridiculously long and rambling. If you got this far and are still reading, I’m extremely grateful to have the audience as I’ve never had the cojones to share this facet of my life with anyone I know personally.

All in all, I’m just so happy to have finally reached this milestone. After discovering porn recovery subreddits, I always told myself if I could ever reach 90 days, I’d make a post detailing my experiences and any advice I had. Honestly, it’s so surreal to finally be in this position.