The first time I knew my relationship to porn had killed my libido and sex life was when I was in bed with a hot girl and I couldn’t get it up. I’m too young to have erectile dysfunction so I always chalked it up to having too much to drink or being too tired. I could get a semi but not much more, or when I did get a huge wood it would still take me a long time to climax and I could only get there if I replayed some porn scenario in my head. The girl wasn’t getting me hard or getting me off. The porn images in my head were.
I saw my first porn at 12 when I used to rummage through my dad’s things while he was at work. I found a secret VHS with an explosive title in one of his drawers and I was curious about what was on it. Seconds later I saw huge cocks doing things to faces, vaginas and being shaken really fast. Until then I’d never seen anybody else’s dick but my own.
For a while I didn’t realize my libido problem was related to my porn habits. I’ve masturbated to porn nearly every single day for years, and on those really horny days I’ve managed to squeeze out two loads to my porn of choice. Porn, like anything, is cool in moderation, but it’s when your relationship to sex on screen is the only sex or interaction you have with another person that you really start to see your libido and hard-ons suffer. You develop porn-induced performance anxiety.
I never watched anything too elaborate or crazy, just regular sex. But I’d bounce around from window to window because sometimes you can only watch 30 seconds or two minutes of a video at a time, and I’d constantly scroll through searching for the next two minutes or the next five minutes. I’d do this for 45 minutes to an hour, edging myself, and I can’t even imagine what that adds up to in terms of the porn-induced damage I’ve done to my brain.
I didn’t realize my real life sex life was suffering until after the last time I tried to have sex with a girl and I couldn’t come or get hard—even when she was giving me a blowjob. I realized if my porn was on I could get hard and come, and I didn’t want to be a slave to porn anymore.
The day after I’d failed sex with that girl I went home and tried to masturbate without porn. I didn’t think any sexual thoughts at all, trying to focus on how good just masturbating felt. The whole thing took maybe 10 minutes and there were times when I started going soft, but I kept at it, focusing on the feeling, and I had one of the strongest orgasms in a long time.
After some online searching I discovered there’s a way to “reboot” your brain and “retrain” it to ditch the pornographic images you’ve built up in your mind over the years. As with any addiction you have to completely stop watching porn but you also need to stop masturbating and having orgasms for an extended period of time. So far it’s been a week that I haven’t seen a pornographic image and have had no desire to even open up a porn website.
Sometimes it’s hard to quit things cold turkey, but I don’t want to be the 29-year-old guy whose brain is so ruined by porn that he can’t get it up. Porn is great as an occasional stimulant, but there’s nothing better than enjoying sex as a real life connection between people and not as a high-speed connection you and your laptop.