I didn’t have much contact with pornography when I was growing up. We lived in the mountains and didn’t even own a television or a video player. I saw my first Penthouse when I was ten, looking through my father’s closet for a fishing pole. It was a turn-on, for sure, but it also bothered me a little that dad had bought it and kept it hidden.
The women in the magazines seemed strange. It wasn’t their nudity—I had seen plenty of naked people. Nearly everyone in our local community would sunbathe and swim nude down at the river on real hot days. The women in the pornographic pictures just seemed unreal. They gave off a sassy energy and made fierce, intense stares. I found them attractive and sexy, but also scary. They didn’t seem happy or content with themselves like the real women I knew—my mom, my aunts, my older sister, and teachers.
In my late teens when I was still a virgin, I started looking through softcore porn magazines as a way to practice and prepare myself for having sex with a woman for the first time. Using the magazines was like using training wheels to learn to bike. I started out looking at naked women, but soon found that I could practice better with models dressed in some clothes. I am naturally attracted to women who are healthy and like the outdoors, so I looked at Lands’ End-type models instead of Victoria’s Secret.
The few times I’ve seen pornography flicks, I’ve found them disgusting. The focus on penetration and orgasm is so unsexy. Hard-core is purely animalistic and doesn’t even make me want to have sex. It doesn’t fit with my personality or my values. Friends of mine talk boldly about masturbating to hard-core pornography. I just can’t relate. If I’m going to look at porn, I prefer looking through soft-core magazines than really explicit hard-core stuff.
For a while I experimented with masturbating to hard-core porn and didn’t like it. My orgasms came relatively fast and were unsatisfying. It left me feeling empty. When I work at it and come up with my own sexual fantasies, the satisfaction I get lasts longer because it’s both physical and emotional.
I discovered that the less graphic the porn, the more it enabled my own fantasies to take flight. If you’re watching direct penetration with shaved cunts, what is there to fantasize about? So back then I would look at hardcopy images, and then once I had the images in my mind, I would project the images of real girls I had crushes on onto the pornography and masturbate to those superimposed images. In this way I personalized the pornography and made it more real to me by fantasizing about a possible future girlfriend. My porn use disappeared on its own when I entered an ongoing sexual relationship, and even though that relationship has been over for several years, I rarely look at porn now.
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fter reading his story, if you had to bet on whether Jack will go on to develop a problem with pornography down the road or stay away, what would you bet? Based on our clinical experience, we’d put our money on him staying away. His reactions to porn, the way he used it when he was involved with it, the type of porn he was turned on by, his sexual experiences, and his relationship goals just don’t seem to support his developing the need or motivation to go any further with porn than he has. Jack is probably going to settle into a long-term relationship with a woman and his relationship with pornography will most likely go by the wayside.
As Jack’s story illustrates, there are primary inhibiting factors that often contribute to a person losing interest in porn as an adult. These include:
1. Personally disliking porn
2. Having limited contact with porn
3. Feeling sexually secure and satisfied
4. Wanting to experience emotional intimacy
As we delve deeper into each of these inhibiting factors, you may want to think about how significant they are in your life and how they might be influencing your current porn relationship. Many people find that by strengthening their inhibiting factors they can significantly reduce their interest and involvement in porn.