Breaking pornography addiction

I happened to see this incoming link from a discussion board on no-porn.com. I had a quite a few hits from this board, so it caught my attention.

Later today or tomorrow I will try to write something specifically about porn ‘addiction’, but for now, I will leave the visitors from that board with the following links:

Articles by Robert Jensen
Articles by Diana Russell (view the book excerpt)

* * *
(28 Oct 2006) OK, here it is….

Guys, you have accidentally stumbled onto a radical feminist blog. That’s ok, don’t panic, it’s probably not as bad as you think it will be (or maybe it will be,*shrug* I make no promises).

One thing I will say, in looking at my site stats, is that, my-o-my, you are a click-happy lot with the mouse!

Firstly, to get you up to speed with rad-fems. Rad-fems look at the underlying causes at gender inequality, rather than just running around with placards demanding equal pay. We have identified pornography and prostitution (pornstitution) as two of the primary areas that contribute to the subordination of women (as a group or class of people), as well as being two areas that enable the abuse of women, both directly and indirectly. Bottom line, porn is bad.

We are not anti-porn because we are prudes, nor because ‘we can’t get a man’. Many rad-fems still do live with men. Some of us (now) choose to live separately from men, but do write from our past experiences. In general, we are not ‘man haters’, that is a label thrust upon us to discredit us. But we will not molly coddle men, and expect them to behave as intelligent adults.

This is a difficult post for me to write. On the one hand, I wish to applaud your efforts in stopping using pornography, and don’t want to discourage you. On the other hand, I must be firm very strict.

***WARNING***
Only those who are really serious about getting porn out of their lives should read further.

I note from viewing your discussion board, that some are Christians, some are not. To get through to the Christians, here it is. Your omniscient, omnipresent God, knows all, sees all. He (deliberate pronoun not normally used) can read your thoughts at any time of the day or night, even when you secret away to wank off with porn. Do you really think He is going to let you into fluffy-clouded Heaven with those disgusting, dirty little thoughts? Don’t count on a deathbed recantation of your sins to get you in (besides, you might pop off very suddenly and not get the opportunity). You are loosing ‘brownie’ points at a greater rate than the average sperm count.

For the rest, a bit more involved.

Firstly, I noted from reading the discussion board the way that you viewed your pornography ‘addiction’. As an addiction that you had little control over, and that it was understandable if you slipped ‘off the wagon’. Wrong. For starters, when you view the situation like that, you are setting yourself up to fail. You will either prolong your ‘recovery’ or go back to porn at the same or greater levels than before.

Lets talk about another addiction for a minute. Cigarettes. Everybody is running around saying nicotine is highly addictive and it’s so hard to give up. The last part is actually correct, but not because of the nicotine (which is addictive, but not long term). You see, you can detox and get the nicotine out of your system in about three days, after that, the ‘cravings’ that make you want to kill your best friend for a cigarette, are psychological. That’s right. All in your head. Don’t get me wrong, those feelings are strong, but they are cravings based on learned behaviour. You have to retrain your brain to think in different ways, using a variety of techniques (distraction, substitution, and reprogramming).

Back to porn ‘addiction’. There is no chemical in your body that you need to detox. Your ‘addiction’ is purely psychological - a learned reinforced behaviour pattern using the endorphins released with orgasm to reinforce the behaviour repetition. ‘Orgasm good, endorphins good, therefore must watch porn to have more orgasms.’

Simple fact: porn is not essential to have a masturbatory orgasm.
Simple fact: porn and sex are not the same thing.

At this point I will mention that with the diet of porn you have been viewing, you have been subconsciously absorbing some rather alarming messages about women, how to treat women, and lies about women’s sexuality.

Here is an extract from your discussion group, fairly much at random:

” I’ve tried to give up P[orn] numerous times in the last 10 years. I’ve been addicted longer than that—a lot longer—but before the Internet it was, if not under control, at least not completely out of control. But since I first had access to the Internet about 10 years ago, it’s been a mess. I went about 130 days without P[orn] once, but I’ve never come close to that any other time. One thing I’ve really got to get through my head is that this is an addiction and you can’t cure addictions; you can only control them. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone back to P[orn] after a couple of weeks off it because I told myself that I’d just take a quick look for 5 or 10 minutes and then I could easily stop. My father was an alcoholic…”

The points I would make are:
You can cure non-chemical ‘addictions’, and many chemical ones as well. But it does take hard work and dedication. It is not comparable to alcoholism, as in many cases alcoholism is a genetic predisposition probably relating to the metabolic conversion of alcohol. No, you cannot ‘take a quick look’ – that is the equivalent of just having one cigarette after quitting smoking – it will just get you started again.

Another extract:

“I have been struggling to come clean with my spouse. She has caught me on several occasions in our 15 year marriage but until last night she had no idea the depth of my sickness.

We’ll yesterday she was suspicious and did some investigating she noticed that my history was deleted. To keep it brief, she had nothing hard on me. I could have lied again but I decided not to. I told her the truth.

Things really went way differently than I had envisioned in the years that I’ve struggled with this. She had told me previously that she would leave me if she caught me again.

We’ll she was hurt and told me that she was a person she never thought she would be. That being one who turns her head and looks the other way. She is after all very intelligent and had much more of a clue than I’d thought.

With regard to leaving me she told me that she had thrown down the gauntlet and I had crossed over it but the fact of the matter is she loves me for so many other reasons that she could not leave me. The thing that was most touching and noticed by me is that she did not make me feel like a pervert. I feel that way all of the time and for her to assert her love for me meant everything!

She does not however “buy the addiction thing”. I could not convince her of that. I told her that I wanted her to be my accountability partner on Covenant eyes but she told me that she does “not want to be my mother”. Hopefully in time she will see that this is an awful awful addiction. I must admit that if I was on the receiving end of the news I gave her it would be easier for me emotionally if I thought it was an addiction rather than just goofing around with P[orn].”

She doesn’t buy the addiction thing, neither do I. She doesn’t want to be your mother, and I don’t blame her one little bit. Do you guys even know how much of a turn off it is when you treat your partner as your mother? Ewww for starters. You are an adult. Behave like one. Take responsibility for your actions. If you need a support/responsibility partner, then pick someone within the peer group (similar to AA). She doesn’t want to hear that you are ‘falling off the wagon to lust after some 20-something buxom blonde/brunette/whatever’. Think of her, not yourself.

Most of you guys are seeking recovery from porn because you have discovered it damages your relationships with women. That is fine for starters. Now think how your partner feels by your viewing porn. She sees it as a form of cheating on her. She feels that you think she is inadequate, and is not enough for you. And whether you know it or not, porn severs a deep emotional bond with your intimate partner. When you have that deep emotional connection, you certainly won’t need porn – it is one hell of a replacement, and much better than your old life. The reason you need so much porn is that it is never satisfying – it is like the ‘empty calories’ of a cake or sweet.

Here is the suggested Stormy porn recovery programme, distraction, substitution and reprogramming:

Firstly, if you have a partner, get her to set up the parental permissions on your computer (or do it for her, set her up as administrator, and let her change the password to lock you out). Or load on some parental control 3rd party software, again, setting her up as administrator. This is the equivalent of locking the liquor cabinet.

Distraction:
When you get the urge to look at porn, immediately think about or do something else, don’t mope about with self talk like “just 5 minutes won’t hurt”, it will. Do something like the dishes, vacuuming, wash the car, clean the attic. Just do it then and there (because if you were just about to take time out to look at porn, then you have free time). I will add to opt for the housework options first, as this may help to mend some of the broken fences in your relationship.

Substitution:
Find something else worthwhile to do with your time. You must have spent many hours per day looking at porn, focus that time onto something else like a hobby, or charity work. Build a replica aeroplane with a million tiny bits, a model railway complete with landscape, or better still, do those DIY jobs around the house that have been unfinished for the last umpteen dozen years. Learn to love a hobby, refocus obsessive thoughts into project(s). You could even choose a hobby or activity that you and your partner enjoy doing together, like horse riding, nature walks etc.

Reprogramming:
This is the most critical one. It is not enough to say ‘I want to stop looking at porn’, your brain needs reasons why this is a good thing. Give it reasons – read about the harm that pornography does. You can also use this (sometimes) as your distraction if you wish.

To start you off on anti-porn literature/websites:
Den of the Biting Beaver – a rad-fem site, includes some articles by her partner Dubhe. Read all of them.

Robert Jenson – articles on gender, sexuality and pornography.

Diana Russell – book excerpt on pornography and lowering the inhibitions to rape.

Then search for books/articles by any of the following:
Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, John Stoltenberg, Catherine Itzen, Liz Kelly.
There are more, but these were off the top of my head. If you need more, ask me, but the list I’ve given you should keep you busy for a while.

And a request is that you say, each and every morning “Today, I will NOT look at porn” (and stick to it).

I will leave you with a final bit of reprogramming. Those women you see in porn are somebody’s daughter, somebody’s friend. What if she were your daughter? How would you feel if some other dude was thinking THOSE thoughts about YOUR daughter? (If you don’t have a daughter, think of her as your mother when she was younger, or you sister, or some other woman you love and respect.)

Postscript:
For the guys that made it through this entire post, congratulations. You have high chances of recovery. It is ok to be angry and defensive at reading what I have written, but give it time to sink in – you are trying to unlearn behaviour patterns ingrained over many, many years. For the others that didn’t make it through the post, they will return back to the board whining “I’m back to Day 1″ and forever going around and around in circles.

Once you have started your reading programme, start to really ask yourself WHY you needed to look at (so much) porn. One naked body is essentially the same as the next. I’ll give you some clues. You haven’t had sex with all those women just because you have masturbated to their images, you have not ‘conquered’ her in a sexual sense. You have been reprogrammed by porn to see women as sex objects merely for your pleasure, and contributed to the subordination of women as a group. These underlying thought patterns are the reasons why you have trouble in relationships with ‘real’ women – those thought patterns manifest into your outward behaviour and treatment towards women. You have been duped by porn into believing all sorts of myths about women, and women’s sexuality. You have bought into porn’s myths that women enjoy and eroticise their own degradation. Porn lies to you. And the guys that are getting rich off the porn business don’t give a shit that it fucks up your life, or your relationships with ‘real’ women, they care about themselves, and the money. They have used YOU, just as they used the women in the making of the gazillion images of porn. Get angry at porn, it is evil, and it has fucked up your life.

See ALL women as human, and as equals to yourself. She is a thinking, caring human being, worthy of your respect. Do not walk around in your day-to-day life thinking “oh, I’d like to fuck that”, because that woman is not your plaything, sex slave or anything else. She is a person. She deserves respect.

Whilst I am not a Christian, I do follow one bit of advice “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.