Prurience taught me a lot about porn addiction. I wasn’t sure what to expect before I arrived. I thought it was perhaps more of a formal performance piece, but instead I found myself in an “alcohol anonymous” type circle, participating and confiding in the group when asked of the first time I had encountered porn. I had no idea who were the spectators and who were the performers. A number of different people stood up to give their personal accounts of their seemingly uncontrollable porn addictions. Terms like, “fucked up neurological pathways”, “reboot” and “E.D” were being thrown around, then interrupted by urgent enquiries into the meanings. As it went on it became a little more clear of who were the ‘under cover’ actors, and towards the end of the piece, only the actors were the ones participating. It all became incredibly intense, leading up to the climax where one by one the actors in the room starting singing a song that left the rest of us in the circle, the audience, in complete silence and awe. I felt a mixture of shock, sadness, and admiration, not quite knowing whether I should clap or sit in silence as the actors picked up their coats and left whilst singing.
Prurience was not only educational, but gave a fictional first hand experience of men and woman suffering with a crippling addiction. It was heart-breaking, funny, shocking, intense and incredibly moving. Previous to the performance I felt a little sickened by the predominantly male porn/ webcam audience, and although I am aware of the vast spectrum of individual cases, Prurience made me feel sympathetic for the victims of the porn industry. Porn and the webcam industry is an ever growing phenomenon, that is too easily available to watch. A lot of porn is free, with no enforced age restriction and so is easily accessed by a young audience.
A statistic that I haven’t been able to find online, was given after the performance ended. The statistic was given by Prof. Feona Attwood, who’s research specialised in male Erectile Dysfunction, (E.D). It was something along the lines of, ‘Immediately after bandwidth expanded in the UK, E.D sky rocketed.’. Giving evidence that online porn and webcamming etc, is one of the main contributors to the rising numbers in E.D.
In Layman’s terms, according to the research done by people like, Prof. Feona Attwood, the younger the man starts to watch porn, the higher the risk of suffering from E.D. This is because the brain becomes too used to following the neurological pathways that stimulate the male from a purely visual source. And so, when confronted with a real sexual encounter, the brain finds itself on foreign ground, unable to send the stimulating signals that results in E.D. The only way of reversing this is by “rebooting”. This is when one completely abstains from watching porn for a given amount of time. This is usually four months but can be longer or shorter depending on the severity of the addiction.
This has influenced my work in way that I want to educate my audience more on the topic of porn addiction. Not necessarily that it can/will cause Erectile Dysfunction, because it could start to sound like I am preaching. I think I want more people to realise how accessible it is, and that really young impressionable people are so easily accessing it. However I am aware that a lot of people watch porn, without being addicted or suffering the consequences of E.D. I still feel strongly about women being less objectified when they confront objectification with their own choice to take part. However this opinion is flawed, because even if a women on the internet who is taking part in say, violent porn and saying she wanted it, the viewer, who watches it for free on some arbitrary website, can take whatever meaning he or she wants from it. My opinion is far more nuanced now, and whilst I still believe webcam girls, and their choice to take part should not be disrespected, the availability of violent porn on the internet free of charge is a completely different topic.
Follows is a personal account of a porn addiction that I found at:
http://www.vice.com/read/i-gave-up-porn-for-a-month-294
What I Learned from Giving Up Porn for a Month
by Pieruigi Smith
Illustrations by George Heaven
I remember the moment I figured it might be time to quit watching porn. Half of my Facebook friends were sharing this story, which links out to a bunch of tests that tell you whether the amount of jerking off at a screen you’re doing is healthy. The lead image is an empty black leather couch in the middle of a room, facing a dark shiny desk. Sound familiar? If not, good for you. It rang some bells for me.
That couch is the first shot of many a porno. Generally, these videos tend to involve a woman walking in and sitting on the sofa, a seedy guy with a ponytail and big hands pretending to cast her for some photo shoot, her undressing, and the two of them eventually fucking over the desk. The article warned that if you immediately associated that black couch with porn you might have a problem.
I knew I had a problem.
Thing is, my problem wasn’t that I was watching porn every day; it’s that even if I wanted to I couldn’t use my own brain to summon up fantasies. The internet was always right there, the sirens of PornHub singing their sweet song 24/7, lulling me in with their ballads of anal beads, BDSM, and bukkake. So why bother doing all the work myself?
At New Year’s Eve, talking about resolutions, my friend Matteo said, “You know what? I’m going to stop watching porn for a while. I need to detox.” He then told me that Milan—the city where we both live—has one of the highest per capita rates of porn consumption in Europe. The thought that I was contributing to this number—to this faceless army of fervent masturbators—was a uniquely depressing one.
“I’m going to stop, too,” I said, with all the right intentions. The next day I watched some porn. However, when February rolled around I decided to start my mission in earnest.
I’d been watching porn on a very regular basis, clicking on RedTube or YouPorn or Tube8 most nights before going to sleep, or sometimes during the day if I was bored and felt like giving my wrist a bit of a workout. With that in mind, I assumed it would be hard to just cut myself off cold turkey, but for the first few days it was actually surprisingly easy. The closest thing I can equate it to is quitting smoking; not lighting up becomes a point of honor, a personal challenge, a battle you need to win in order to continue thinking of yourself as a decent human being.
This feeling—for the first couple of days, at least—was more pleasurable than the craving I’d decided to forego. I masturbated as I’d always done, and the novelty of using my mind again was exciting. I fantasized about ex-girlfriends and lovers and the things I’d always wanted to do but had been too shy to suggest. None of this was completely new, of course, but I’d never done it in such a systematic way. Now, every time I wanted to jerk off, I had to create a video of my own: concentrate, add details, flesh it out, give it a chronological order.
Feeling slightly self-righteous, I started to believe that the no-porn month laying ahead of me wasn’t going to be so hard after all.
Turns out this confidence was premature.
The first—and most troubling—problem was my imagination. My fantasies quickly became repetitive: the same scenes, same places, same people, same bodies, same sex. I was unable to stretch my inventiveness any further than it had already been stretched. Each time I tried to expand on what I had, I fell back on what I already knew, like an old married couple going through the motions: lights off, missionary, leg cramp, a glass of water, silence.
Ten days into the experiment I stopped masturbating. However, I did still feel the need to orgasm. I’d forced blue balls on myself because I didn’t want to undergo the process to achieve the end result. I soon realized—and this might seem quite bleak and obvious, but until you’ve experienced it firsthand it’s hard to empathize with the concept—that using your imagination can be a bit of a chore. A chore I wasn’t used to anymore.
I realize how lazy this sounds: a man who literally cannot be bothered to summon up a mental image of a naked woman. But the main problem I had was in synthesizing a sense of desire. I’ve been masturbating for roughly 15 years, and in this time porn has become a sad surrogate for lust—thousands of videos, most of them blurring into one image of a dick mechanically entering and exiting a vagina, helping me create what was missing. Dejected, I recognized the fact that I had rarely used my mind to orgasm in nearly a decade and a half.
Jesus, that fucking sentence.
Thankfully, this second phase slowly came to an end. The next step was a welcome return of natural desire: For the first time it was about my body, not my head. It was something I hadn’t experienced before, or at least couldn’t remember experiencing.
Before I quit watching porn, the pattern was as follows:
- I felt like jerking off.
- I went on a porn site.
- I found a video.
- I jerked off.
None of the process felt organic, which is probably because it wasn’t. The porn was just one step in a tedious, familiar plan, helping me to achieve something I’d already mapped out in my mind. Now it had gone back to some thought or image randomly awaking a sexual desire, me fantasizing about something, and then masturbating. Much better.
I also noticed that, for the first time, I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. Not the French couple, not the threesome in an Ikea-furnished bungalow, not the college orgy—rather about physical sensations and actually being able to appreciate them. It was more similar to sex than any of the many, many times I’d previously jerked off.
I shared my thoughts with a friend. She told me—and it was the most obvious thing in the world to her—that when she masturbated it was rarely to a defined set of images. That it was more about creating a sensation. She also underlined something I’d never noticed before, despite having watched thousands of porn videos throughout my life.
“In 80 percent of porn there are no hands involved,” she said.
“What do you mean no hands?”
“I mean no hands. Exactly that.”
The need to show penetration and to focus on the woman means that all the acts we associate with good sex—hands, grabbing, hugging, pulling—are eliminated in favor of getting the best angles. Sex without what makes sex great.
After that little lesson, I noticed a substantial improvement in my orgasms. Before I stopped watching porn, as I came there would be a moment when the sensation peaked, before quickly disappearing and leaving little trace. But not any more. Coming lasted for much longer. As it happened, the sensation lingered throughout my body. I felt much more involved.
If, before, I clicked on a video, skipped through it, found a scene I liked, came, and quickly closed the computer to hide my embarrassment, I was now taking my time. That sinister post-masturbatory depression was gone.
A little over a month has passed, and I’ve decided to continue with the no-porn jerking off policy. I don’t know how long I’ll last, because you can basically keep anything up for a month without it becoming too much of an issue. It’s in the post-honeymoon stage that it starts to become a little more difficult, when the novelty of the challenge wears off and the power of a well-established pattern starts playing on your mind.
I reckon I’ll be able to keep on going for a long while yet, but I’m also realistic about how easy it would be to slip back into it. I guess it’s like smoking a cigarette after you’ve quit: The first couple of drags taste awful, but give it a couple more and you’ll be hooked once again.
For me this shows how many people my be addicted to porn without even realising, and that it si having negative effects on the personal lives. This is something I think I need to address in my art.
lilyvanlennep 