25
votes
Men quitting masturbation: "Porn addiction" support groups reinforce damaging gender stereotypes
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- Title
- The Truth About Men Who Are Obsessed With Quitting Masturbation
- Authors
- Kelsy Burke
- Published
- May 18 2020
- Word count
- 2437 words
This whole culture of people quitting porn always seemed to me to be more about guilt than addiction. I believe you can have an unhealthy, addictive, relationship with anything. But I suspect most people involved with porn addiction aren't really addicted.
I'm curious what problems most of these people see porn causing in their lives. Porn could easily just be a phony scapegoat. Your sex life isn't going so well? You don't really appreciate your romantic partner as much as you feel you should? It's not your relationship with them. Your biology has been hacked by porn! If people didn't feel so uncomfortable about sex they'd be just as ready to blame their relationship problems on addiction to social media.
I think it's definitely more guilt than addiction -- although I'm sure porn addicts exist. It's interesting in how hardwired guilt can be in someone's brain with a religious upbringing to the point that it's impossible to understand their rationale.
I will say that it does seem the parents of the last 10 years may have done a poor job in preventing their children from accessing pornography judging from what I have observed being said online. Addiction or not, porn cannot be healthy for a developing brain and I wonder if that can explain some of the non-religious parts of this 'movement.'
Yeah, a friend mentioned having read an article that said that doctors are seeing a huge (whatever that means) upswing in young men with erectile disfunction. Some are attributing it to easy access to porn. When you can easily fulfill your wildest fantasy at a click of a mouse button, reality isn't as thrilling, apparently.
However, I don't know that the science backs that up. According to this article, 40% of men under 60 have some form of ED and in their discussion of the causes they don't mention porn or masturbation once. So I'm skeptical that my friend's source was correct.
Porn often gets scapegoated for this, but ask any urologist or male health specialist, and they'll tell you that prevalence rates of secondary hypogonadism and low testosterone have been on the rise for the last few decades. There's a variety of potential causes but frankly we have very little comprehensive literature on this because we still do a poor job of testing the testosterone levels of young adults.
Combine this with other health issues which are tied to erectile dysfunction as discussed in the article (raising levels of obesity, type 2 diabetes, decreasing amounts of exercise, etc.) and you're going to end up with a lot of people with erectile dysfunction.
Yep, that's sounds much more likely to me than "too much porn".
Maybe, just as people are more comfortable seeking mental health support more than they were 30 years ago, men are less shameful of erectile dysfunction now and more are seeking help for that than before.
Yeah, I hope that's the case. I hope all diseases are becoming less stigmatized as time goes on.
Guilty undoubtedly has a role in this, and the basis for these movements are unscientific.
I do see benefits in avoiding masturbation and porn as a consequence. The habit of masturbation skews or difficult the access to my emotions towards women. I’m also not a young man anymore and take psychiatric medications, so when I’m sexually involved with someone I must save all my energy to showtime.
Addictions frequently are phony scapegoats, one might say that’s one of their defining characteristics. Mental illnesses don’t exist in a vacuum.
Regarding porn addiction, AFAIK any stimuli can be addictive. So I don’t see why that could not be the case, potentially at least.
But I understand this is very personal, and the moralistic preachiness is unhelpful.
Yes, absolutely! If you enjoy sex more than porn, as most people do, then it's not a worthy trade-off when you only have so much libido to spend.
That's a good point. I don't know how best to describe addiction, but I'd assume that an addiction would need to be not just distracting, but destructive.
I’m not a doctor but an experienced patient: the criteria for diagnostics (DSM) of (almost?) all mental illnesses requires them to cause substantial damage to a person’s life. In theses you can present all the symptoms in the highest degree, but if it doesn’t cause you substantial risk or distress (mental or physical) you don’t need any treatment.
I dont know about the addiction part, but I've spend a fair amount time in Nofap communities.. Most of the people I met doesn't have ongoing relationships infact most people wanted quit because they are afraid it will affect their relationships. Also how did you know relationship issues is the underlying cause? did you have any data or experience or was it just an intuition?
The situation will certainly be different for each person. I'm by no means saying that's generally the problem these people face.
I was starting to appreciate how they were handling this differently than so called "conversion therapies". Then I read below paragraphs..
I mean c'mon..
I wish I could blindly believe something like this, it must be nice to feel what you're doing will have an impact or everything will be good in the end. Atheism is not working for me, I have to formulate different strategies to cop with different problems. :(
It appears the conversation failed to be authentic earlier than your listed paragraphs.
My experience tells me there's no hard wire: everything that's more appealing that the messy reality of things is going to be immediately more appealing. Porn is very much an escapism experience, but it could be anything: food, narcotics, alcohol, extreme sports, fighting... As long as you're finding relief or satisfaction in it that's greater than what your life is able to provide, of course it's gonna be addictive.
I'm eager to believe that faith in God might help if it's genuine. Given that human beings are mostly deterministic machines, being able to put your expectations outside of yourself – like artists do when they define inspiration as coming from outside of themselves – it's going to shift the blame away and into hope, which is a more positive emotion that doesn't drain you. You can't fake that, but if you have such faith, you're better off for it.
The problem, for me, is that none of these men stop and question whether porn is really that bad a thing. This Catholic dread about one's sexuality has always baffled me. What's there to be ashamed of in seeking sexual pleasure, or enjoying another person's appealing look?
I can follow how being guided by sensations you don't quite understand – let alone control, in any meaningful way – can be frightening. I can also follow how you could seek shelter in whatever idea that grants you some form of control over this foreign thing you're shamed out of exploring... but you can't escape yourself.
We all have needs and desires that "normal people" will not forgive us. None of us is fuckin' normal: we all have kinks and idiosyncrasies of one sort or another, but following an established set of unwritten rules is easier: you don't have to delve deeper into the unknown of the self. The further you go, though, the less scary it becomes: as you accept your needs, you become liberated from the anxiety.
Maybe you're better off being liberated in this fashion because then you can serve God's will better.
I wasn't commenting on the authenticity of their approaches, Its just that their new approach seems more empathetic than their aggressive conversion therapies, to men at least.
Insightful comment nonetheless..
So true, If it wasn't late over here I would have wrote some of my personal experience of figuring out myself.
I wouldn't compare yourself against theists in this regard. It's difficult to say if each of your reported successes and failures are authentic.
Wow, the example provided for the Proud Boys rules checked a few boxes on the "Is this a cult?" questionnaire. I'm not very familiar with the structure of the Proud Boys, so I'm fascinated by the line: "no heterosexual brother..." Are there homosexual members of the Proud Boys, and if so, were they allowed to masturbate more often?