Thinking about giving up porn

[maxcok]

I'll stick my neck out and say Yes.

Excellent. All the better to open that long, deep throat passage.

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

Excellent. All the better to open that long, deep throat passage.

Ah yes ... my gorge and your engorgement.
Have you never heard of a princely indiretion and tact.
Puhleez ....

 

[maxcok]

Ah yes ... my gorge and your engorgement.
Have you never heard of a princely indiretion and tact.
Puhleez ....

Have you never hear of question marks? :wink:

I humbly beg your pardon, my dear fellow, but sometimes you make the setup so tempting, how am I to resist?

I am familiar with tact and shall endeavor to better acquaint myself with its charms.

However, I am afraid I do not know the meaning of 'indiretion'.

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

Have you never hear of question marks? :wink:

I humbly beg your pardon, my dear fellow, but sometimes you make the setup so tempting, how am I to resist?

I am familiar with tact and shall endeavor to better acquaint myself with its charms.

Thwack!!!
I don't believe you. You do this on poipoise.

I am afraid I do not know the meaning of 'indiretion'.

In-dir-e-tion, n.: One who models his behavior on the self-possession and emotional acuity of Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India, 1966-77, 1980-84.

 

[maxcok]

In-dir-e-tion, n.: One who models his behavior on the self-possession and emotional acuity of Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India, 1966-77, 1980-84.

I am on a neverending quest to increase my vocabulary and to learn new things every day.

So I thank you for that, my most literate friend, and I bow to your lexical dexterity. :wink:

 

[D_Fizzy Cola Bottles]

Uggh. Looks like this thread got infected by the 'giraffe'-strain virus. It's no fun. Guess I'll be leaving. 'Cause I don't have my anti-viral bug spray.

NePlusUltra: Thanks for the tip on Fellucia Blow. Love that name... But she's still too hardcore. And x-art is hardcore as well. I'm going totally erotica, meaning fiction and photographs with no .... and no .... This should be fun. Sayonara.

 

[maxcok]

Dear G O345,

On behalf of myself, Hhuck, and Hickboy (after all, he's the one who drug the giraffes in here) allow me to apologize for carrying on our private confab in the middle of your party. Though whether that dissauaded others from contributing is an open question, clearly you are frustrated, and for that I am sorry.

I myself get bored with most hardcore porn very quickly. I find it generally uninspired, formulaic and repetitious -- more about plumbing parts and performing for the camera than experiencing any passion. However, more naturally produced videos, artistic erotic photography and fiction of certain genres can get a rise out of me, so I think I can relate to your quest. Surely there are sites, blogs and tumblers out there that you would find intriguing. Have you done any online searches for "erotica" or similar terms?

May I suggest at this point you start another thread, and rather than entitling it "giving up porn", which is negative and doesn't really describe what you're looking for, be more specific and try saying something that will attract the sort of readers who have an interest in erotica and knowledge to share. I shall do my best to steer clear of further off topic repartee, however, if anyone mentions giraffes fucking, all bets are off. :wink:

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

.... if anyone mentions giraffes fucking, all bets are off. :wink:

Oh, max ... ur sooo bad.

But, as you say, G_0345 has a point in his original post. In fact, I am entirely onside with him.

Three and a half years ago I posted something that I think has real bearing on his point. I will paste it in here. (It includes an extensive quote from an article by Naomi Wolf which I should link to rather than requote. However, back then we were allowed longer quotations from articles, there is no longer any link and, since this extended quote has already been on the database for so long, I hope I can be forgiven for giving it again.)

Here she be, G_0345:

Here's a piece that expresses exactly what I've long suspected ... that the ubiquity of porn hasn't made any of us tigers, but has declawed most men ... and one wouldn't doubt, most women.

I remember once being in a movie theatre in Morocco when a kind of preview image of Jane Fonda as Barbarella came briefly on screen.

To a western eye, it wasn't much in the stimulus department. But there was a quick roar from all the men in the theatre -- and I realized that they had access to a quick-tripping motherlode of libido that no North American I knew still had.

And along comes Naomi Wolf to explain why.

Here's her fascinating piece, slightly edited. I think it's just as true for gay as straight. Tell me what you think:

The Porn Myth

In the end, porn doesn’t whet men’s appetites—it turns them off the real thing.

· By Naomi Wolf
At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.

She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized.

But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.”

Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!&#8221—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?

For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.

For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual “mission creep” of how pornography—and now Internet pornography—has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago, simple love making was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.

Now you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene. Being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax—just like porn stars. (In my gym, the 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled.) Pornography is addictive; the baseline gets ratcheted up. By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream porn—and certainly the Internet—made routine use of all available female orifices.


The porn loop is de rigueur, no longer outside the pale; starlets in tabloids boast of learning to strip from professionals; the “cool girls” go with guys to the strip clubs, and even ask for lap dances; college girls are expected to tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses à la Britney and Madonna.

But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity?

The young women who talk to me on campuses about the effect of pornography on their intimate lives speak of feeling that they can never measure up, that they can never ask for what they want; and that if they do not offer what porn offers, they cannot expect to hold a guy. The young men talk about what it is like to grow up learning about sex from porn, and how it is not helpful to them in trying to figure out how to be with a real woman. Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike.

The reason to turn off the porn might become, to thoughtful people, not a moral one but, in a way, a physical- and emotional-health one; you might want to rethink your constant access to porn in the same way that, if you want to be an athlete, you rethink your smoking. The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity.

After all, pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it.

Other cultures know this. I am not advocating a return to the days of hiding female sexuality, but I am noting that the power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time.

And feminists have misunderstood many of these prohibitions.

I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

Compare that steaminess with a conversation I had at Northwestern, after I had talked about the effect of porn on relationships. “Why have sex right away?” a boy with tousled hair and Bambi eyes was explaining. “Things are always a little tense and uncomfortable when you just start seeing someone,” he said. “I prefer to have sex right away just to get it over with. You know it’s going to happen anyway, and it gets rid of the tension.”

“Isn’t the tension kind of fun?” I asked. “Doesn’t that also get rid of the mystery?”

“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”

I will contribute as I can to this thread, if it continues ... or any new thread you create, as max suggested.

I defer, sir, to your intelligence, patience and sense of measure.

 

[rembrandt1603]

If I had a pound for every time I've said that to myself...

But seriously, to echo the sentiments already expressed by a certain poster: it's nature, so why fight it? I periodically download and bookmark a few amateur porn videos and image galleries etc, only to delete them all in a sudden boycott, then redownload them all a few days later.

I can't wait 'professional' porn anymore, as it's completely passionless, there are less variety in terms of actresses and actors, and it's just 'not good', really. Most of all though, for me personally, it's because professional porn isn't 'real'. It'd never happen like that, and even if it did, the grotesquely stupid and overacted way in which it is performed is a sure boner killer for me. Amateur porn any day of the week. Real passion, real romance and real fucking from the average Joe and Jane.

I'd also like to say that porn hasn't necessarily killed my libido. Being only twenty-one, I essentially grew up with the internet (having the first available broadband in the UK in 2000 or so), and have been watching some kind of porn ever since. So, about eleven years old, really. It hasn't affected my relationships. Though, it has awakened me to may fetishes, acts and positions that I probably wouldn't have discovered if I were born say, in another era.

I don't have any absurd expectations in my partners (having model bodies or pornstar breasts for example), which in my opinion, makes it all the hotter once you actually see such a lady on the street with those assets.

It's just porn man, and I haven't let it skew/distort my realistic view on women.

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

It's just porn man, and I haven't let it skew/distort my realistic view on women.

Then you're to be congratulated, rembrandt.
But I wonder if your outcome has been better than many.

EDIT: Just looked at your gallery. On the evidence, you're one very creative young man. Nope, porn ain't gonna dent your real-life sense of what sex is about.

 

[hud01]

Only three years. call me in 30. I go through phases where certain porn gets me off and then I get bored with it. I then switch to another kind and watch that. There are some clips and stories that have been getting me off for 20 or more years others I can only watch once.