Nothing but the truth,the naked truth!!!!

The production and proliferation of internet pornography is increasing at an unprecedented rate. The internet has changed the mechanisms of content distribution more fundamentally – and, in the case of pornography and pirated content, more worryingly – than any other technology in history.The following is an interrogation I gave myself yesterday morning as I lay in bed.Q: Why do you look at porn?A: It's complicated.   It used to be about pleasure.  Now it is a compulsion that arises when I am anxious.  It makes me feel bad, but I do it anyway as a way of coping with anxiety.Q: Why do I get anxious?A: I want to achieve.  I want to do well in my profession, and I want to be a good person.  When I am not living up to my goals then I feel anxious.  Strangely, giving in to porn makes me feel like I've let myself down, and that makes me anxious.  Hence the spiral.Q: Is enjoying your life one of your goals?A: Hmm, only in the sense that achieving professional and personal goals gives me pleasure.Q: Is there anything wrong with sex?A: Not really.  Its fine.  I wouldn't say its a goal though...Q: I think there is something going on here.  What are your professional goals?  Are they at odds with enjoyment and pleasure?A: Okay, so I am a bit of a monk.  I don't really like stuff, material things.  I've devoted myself to knowledge and learning, and I suppose at some level this desire for knowledge is in opposition to "pleasures of the flesh". Q: Maybe its more about control.  Being a monk is about self control, and pleasure implies some loss of control.A: Was that a question?Q: No, just a speculation.  What do you think?A: I do agree, but perhaps it is overstating it to say I avoid pleasure.  I feel guilty when I please myself to porn. In other cases it feels natural.Q: Okay, so maybe this unhealthy obsession with porn is really a manifestation of guilt.  When you are not living up to your goals then you feel guilty, that makes you seek out porn, which covers up the guilt temporarily, but actually makes you feel worse in the long run, and then you are down the drain.A: I see.Q: And to get to the source: you need to realize that you have set an impossible goal that will always lead to failure.  You can't avoid pleasure, and by enjoying yourself you not failing yourself.  Indeed, you are failing yourself by not having some enjoyment in your life.A: Within limits of course.

This is a note I have for some time put off writing about, because it is a little embarrassing to talk about bodily functions to an anonymous audience (though hardly anyone reads this notes, and, frankly, who cares?).   Anyway, I have long recognized that there exist in me, separately, a drive for sex (or, to be more specific, the pleasure of having an orgasm) and a drive for porn.    The sex drive works like a clock: if I go four or five days without it, I get a little manic, a little irritable, a little unsettled.  If I go more than a few weeks then I really start to to climb the walls.  I have no problem with sex.  Sex used to be a problem-- when I was younger, I felt tremendous guilt about whacking off.  If anything bad happened the day after I jacked it, I would attribute it to my wicked ways.  Now I don't think that way.  I certainly have  regrets about having sex since i discovered that after ejaculation you can sleep in ice without a care.  To paraphrase Louis CK, its like a steam valve and you're just letting off steam. So, that's fine and natural and good, as long as it doesn't go overboard or get you in trouble (for example by jerking off at work or in a library, or spending an entire day jerking off just to see what happens).  even though it has happen to me often times.

 

Porn takes a different turn.  It is true that, early on, sex and porn significantly overlapped for me.  I watched porn to masturbate.  However, over time I noticed that one could exist without the other (and obviously they did before I even came across porn).  Indeed, this distinction became all the more clear when I noticed that I watched porn and did not masturbate.  Porn viewing is not significantly correlated with my sex drive. For me, porn has become something more like smoking:

marijuana or doing illicit activities an enjoyable habit, or something I turn to when I am anxious or irritated.    So, when I think of giving up porn I sometimes think its impossible because I will have to give up sex, but indeed this isn't the case.  And when I think of it this way its not so bad to get along without porn.

I have had this porn "problem" for the past 15 years, and it has brought me great shame.  I have always felt tremendous guilt after watching porn.  In my teenage I was convinced that any misfortune I experienced was a consequence of my having watched porn the previous day.  This myth took me years to overcome, and even now it persists in some form as an overriding sense that the failures of my life are due to porn.  Unfortunately, porn was for me a way to escape my feelings of shame and failure to achieve,with all this strength i posses; thus, the problem of porn became a spiral that I have been unable to break.  Well, after yesterday's debacle I am once again ashamed of myself, but I refuse to let the guilt and shame pull me under.  What has happened is part of the past, and I divorce myself from those actions.  I acknowledge that I have done wrong, but I refuse to let that shame transform itself into another source of porn viewing.  I am more courageous than that.

 

Good day!