How to use porn safely (or not at all)
Some say it's harmless. Some say it's harmful. Both camps are wrong.
📷 Firstly: People forget that a photograph is not a video
People commonly make the mistake of ranting about “pornography” without realizing that there is a big difference between:
Sexy/sensual/artistic photographs of beautiful women.
Explicit videos depicting a couple having sex (potentially hardcore).
For example: On the left is a photograph from Playboy. On the right is a single frame from a 10-minute video of a couple having “rough sex” (according to the title).
Clearly these are not in the same category and cannot be criticized together as if they are the same evil or dangerous thing called “pornography”. However, when people get emotional about the depravity or dangers of pornography, they often rant as if photographs and videos are the same thing, when clearly they are not.
The photograph on the left is not a sex scene. A man is not even present!
The video on the right does show an act of sex, and it includes both a man and a woman.
The photograph on the left counts as artwork (if Picasso's garbage is considered to be artwork, then this photograph must also be artwork).
🏛️ The Internet did not invent pornography
A common human behavior is to choose a scapegoat to blame for everything that is broken in society. Sometimes the chosen scapegoat is pornography. The argument goes like this:
“When the Internet invented pornography, it ruined men. Now all they want to do is the sick things that they see in porn on the Internet. Porn should be banned. Men behaved much better before porn was invented.”
The World Wide Web (WWW) was first published in 1991. The Playboy magazine was founded in 1953 by Hugh Hefner, funded in part by a loan from Hefner's mother.
Humans have a very long history of creating pornography. For example, the following photograph shows a Roman sculpture that is over two thousand years old, depicting sex between Pan (a god) and a goat. 🤢🤮
Was Pan the original pansexual? 🤣 In addition, there are paintings of a swan having sex with a Spartan queen called Leda, and so forth.
I am pretty sure that the ancient Romans had no Internet access. Do we really need to debate whether the evidence of Roman computers vanished because their computers were made of wood? And why wood? Why not stone?
Clearly, erotic art is not a recent invention that has corrupted society. Erotic art is as old as art itself. Some cultures also had wild fertility festivals and/or fertility rites. Today people may watch a video recording of sex, whereas in the past, people (including young people) watched it happening in real life.
📈 How to use porn to enhance sex with your partner
I find most free porn videos boring (they are mostly made for male viewers), but theoretically I could be watching a better porn video that excites me. In the following three scenarios, I watch the video alone.
Scenario #1: By the time the video finishes playback, I am as randy as a she-goat during the rut. I had no orgasm. I go to my partner and invite him to mount me in goat-style position. Most men would be happy with this result.
Scenario #2: By the time the video finishes playback, I am as randy as a tigress in heat. I had no orgasm (intentionally). I go to my partner and tell him to strip, because I am conducting a strip-search. I push him onto the bed, and I ride him wildly in the woman-on-top position. Most men would be happy with this result.
Scenario #3: I use a vibrator while watching the porn video. I set the vibrator to “Turbo” for several minutes, and finally I set it to “Bull enraged by matador”. I scream so loudly during my orgasm that the neighbors on both sides become intensely envious. Afterwards, I go to my partner in the bedroom, and I say, “Goodnight, my love”, and I immediately fall asleep next to him in bed, because I am exhausted from my tsunami-like orgasm. Few men would be happy with this result. Very few men. Like really hardly any at all.
Therefore, my recommendation is to perform scenario #1 or #2 and avoid #3. Avoid using porn in a manner that is good for one partner and bad for the other partner. Consider watching porn videos together rather than alone.
📉 Orgasming with porn degrades your performance and drive
Every time a person orgasms while watching porn and masturbating, it partially or fully satiates him/her. In effect, it reduces his/her libido. The desire to have real sex disappears for some time. Regardless of whether you are in a relationship, the reduction of your libido is counterproductive:
If you are in a relationship: Weak or absent libido reduces the number of opportunities to have passionate lustful intimacy with your partner. Most women like a male partner better when he has a strong libido, not only moderate libido.
If you are not in a relationship: Excessive porgasms (orgasms from porn) lead to weak or absent libido, and this reduces (or even eliminates) your motivation to make the effort to find a partner and establish a relationship.
Therefore, if you want to maximize your sex-drive, passion, and motivation, it is best to avoid orgasming via porn, and instead choose to orgasm primarily or exclusively with a real person.
If you find yourself completely unable to cut back on the number of porgasms, I don't believe you, but anyway, a solution exists, and I'm happy to help you execute it:
🤸🏼♂️ Tantric semen retention and ridiculous exaggerations
If you have heard of “tantric semen retention”, you may have found it off-putting, because of the talk about “chakras” and spirituality. Indeed, a number of movies have made fun of unhinged characters that believe in chakras, auras, gurus, etc. However, if you delete the delusional parts of tantric semen retention, the rest of it is actually quite beneficial for men.
The goal of tantric semen retention is to practice the control and delay of ejaculation. You may masturbate, and you may bring yourself very close to orgasming, and then you stop before triggering your orgasm. Allegedly this will channel sexual energy upwards through the body's “energy channels” and “chakras”.
Obviously the “chakras” are part of an elaborate sexual fantasy and not real. Some people really struggle with telling the difference between their sexual fantasies and real-life experiences.
The purported benefits of tantric semen retention are:
Increased productivity and professional success.
Enhanced focus and heightened mental clarity.
Increased stamina.
Increased energy and conservation of vital energy.
Increased creativity.
Improved mood and emotional stability.
Increased vitality.
Enhanced physical wellbeing.
❌ Enhanced spiritual connection and spiritual wellbeing.
❌ Connection to higher spiritual dimensions.
❌ Spiritual transformation.
❌ Discovery of your true spiritual source.
The purported benefits are miraculous and exaggerated. In reality, you can expect to receive moderate benefits that are certainly worthwhile according to men who are experienced with this technique.
🚢 Ensure that the captain of your ship is yourself
For both men and women: Porn can be harmful if you relinquish control and allow a porn website to choose for you and determine which videos you watch. If you watch whatever the website chooses, and if you masturbate to orgasm, then the website may gradually train you to enjoy a large amount of garbage and unhealthy activities.
Most porn is poor quality, especially if it is free. Furthermore, some pornographic material depicts abusive, sadistic, masochistic, degrading, or humiliating scenarios that are not mentally healthy to enjoy.
Thus, it is important to ensure that you stay in control of your porn consumption. You need to be the captain of your pornographic cruise, and you need to steer it in the direction that you want, not in any perverse direction that a porn website might steer you.
Be selective and picky. It is wise to develop a habit of thinking critically about the quality and sanity of each piece of porn that you review. If it is bad or insane, interrupt the playback and switch to something better.
Another good idea is assessing the aesthetic/artistic value of each pornographic picture. You see a photograph, and then you decide: Is it aesthetic, artistic, stylish, tasteful, sexy? Or is it disgusting, repulsive, or depraved?
Imagine that you are visiting an art gallery with a sexy friend. Do you want to be known as somebody that admires high-quality artwork or trashy artwork? You have the choice.
🔗 Preventing a disconnect between the genders
Pornographic material is nearly always created to maximize the enjoyment of one gender or the other, not both genders simultaneously. It is rarely a compromise, because compromises are unprofitable.
Most porn is designed for men. However, men and women have different sexual preferences. When porn is created to maximize the enjoyment of male customers, it does not depict the activities that women most enjoy.
Most porn does not teach a person to know or like what the other gender likes. Therefore, each and every person needs to personally take responsibility for ensuring that porn is not his/her only source of sexual education. Men need to learn how to sexually excite and arouse women, and this knowledge is usually not found in porn, rather it is found in reading material.
A common problem is that a man wishes that the woman would behave like a man. He wants her to be sexually aggressive and take the active role. This creates an incompatibility, because most women want the man to take the active role. Women want the man to be a man, meaning that he should engage in a strong masculine style of sexuality.
A surprisingly large number of men unconsciously wish to behave in a feminine manner in the bedroom. They do not even realize that they are doing it. Obviously the sex fails (or is only weakly enjoyable) when the man and the woman both wish to behave in a feminine manner at the same time, because then both are passive/receptive, and nobody is enthusiastically taking the active role.
Some porn videos depict women behaving in a masculine manner (the woman initiates sex and performs most of the movements while the man passively receives). This can be very enjoyable for male viewers, but if men enjoy it too much or too often, it can contribute to incompatibility when trying to have real sex as a heterosexual couple.
💊 Is it possible to get addicted to porn?
The American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5 and the World Health Organization's ICD-11 (2022) do not recognize the existence of “pornography addiction”.
It is very unlikely that porn addiction exists in reality, but even if it does exist, it certainly does not affect everybody. In an experiment, millions of people could be required to watch 12 hours of porn per day for 3 months, and they still would not develop an addiction. The opposite would occur: They would be sick of porn, and they would not want to see any more porn for the rest of the year.
Sometimes a so-called “porn addiction” is actually a drug addiction. If a person uses an addictive drug at the same time as watching porn videos, then it is possible that he/she could develop a compulsive sexual habit that looks like an addiction to porn. However, this compulsive habit is caused by the addictive drug(s), not by the porn.
If a person has a porn/drug addiction, he/she would be behaving very badly if he/she demonizes porn and rants as if everybody can get addicted to porn, when in fact nearly everyone is immune to any possible porn addiction (provided they do not consume addictive drugs).
Note that the nicotine in cigarettes/tobacco is a highly addictive drug. Nicotine, cannabis/marijuana, and cocaine often influence, disrupt, or interfere with sexual activity.
A so-called “porn addict” is likely to be a drug addict in reality.
🐐 Scapegoating: “It's not my fault! The goat made my penis floppy!”
Consider the case of a fictional man who is extremely overweight. He has dangerously high blood-pressure, early-stage pre-diabetes, and erectile dysfunction. Which of the following things is the cause of his inability to get or maintain an erection?
“The secret undetectable vaccines that the devil (Bill Gates) put in the drinking water supply.”
Pornographic photographs.
Pornographic videos.
Being an absolute whale of a fatso with heart disease.
Obviously his erectile dysfunction is caused by his obesity. However, instead of taking responsibility for his own bad decisions, he prefers to blame “Satan” (“Bill Gates”) or the government or pornography or anything other than admitting that his erectile dysfunction is self-inflicted.
Scapegoating is a popular activity among humans. It begins in childhood, and then it ends when a person matures into an adult (meaning it hardly ever ends prior to death).
Meanwhile in the real world, the most common causes of erectile dysfunction and low libido are:
The end of the honeymoon period (1-3 years) after the beginning of a relationship.
Aging (including a natural decline in hormone production).
Being overweight.
Doing insufficient exercise/sport.
Doing only cardiovascular exercise or resistance training and not both.
A stressful job or lifestyle.
Less than eight weeks of vacation per year. Insufficient rest and relaxation.
Insufficient sleep.
High blood-pressure.
Early-stage pre-diabetes.
Certain medications such as SSRI antidepressants, antihistamines, etc.
If you have any health issues (including erectile dysfunction or otherwise), then it is important to visit a qualified medical doctor and get professional advice for your individual situation.
🧙 Regularly remind yourself that porn is not real
Porn for men most commonly depicts the woman as being easily persuaded to have sex, easily aroused, easily pleased, easily pleasured, and easily brought to orgasm. This is quite unrealistic.
A wise man makes a habit of regularly reminding himself that porn is only entertainment and not real. Think of porn like a fantasy movie. You know that movies are not real. Many movies are deliberately unrealistic in an honest manner. For example, a movie with witches and wizards that have magical powers.
Porn videos should be viewed/treated similar to fantasy movies. You can safely enjoy them provided you make an effort to never forget the differences between the fantasy and the reality. Never forget that female porn-stars frequently behave/respond quite differently than real-life women.
🧚 Regularly fantasize about sex with your partner
Normally, when people fantasize while masturbating, they fantasize about having sex with a favorite actor/actress, or an attractive character from a movie, or a particular porn-star, etc. Anybody other than their own partner.
It seems counterintuitive to fantasize about having sex with your own partner. Why should you fantasize about having sex with a person that you can have in real life? People presume that there is no need to fantasize about their partner.
However, it is beneficial to fantasize about having hot/passionate/exciting sex with your partner, especially if the sexual activity in your relationship is beginning to fail over time.
Many couples in long-term relationships experience the phenomenon where the sex is great during the first 1-3 years of the relationship (“the honeymoon period/years”), and then the sex partially or fully fails sometime thereafter, even if the couple still love each other very much. (Love and sex are separate.)
To keep sex alive in long-term relationships, the solution is a recipe with multiple ingredients. One of those ingredients is fantasizing about having sex with your partner. While you fantasize about your partner, masturbate and bring yourself to your orgasm. When repeated often enough, this activity has the following effects:
Strengthens your sexual attraction to your partner.
Strengthens your sexual desire for your partner.
Serves as a counterbalance to porn (if you use porn).
Leads to better sex with your partner.
A good idea is to modify your favorite fantasies to include your partner. You could make an alternate ending or otherwise arrange for your partner to arrive at some point in the story, or to replace a pre-existing character.