Day 7

by recoveringpornguy

Tonight is pretty tough. It’s not that I even really want to masturbate – I’m just used to the habit. It’s a hard habit to break.

I started masturbating when I was about 10 or 11 years old, I think. I was so young that my orgasms didn’t produce cum. I remember that cum was something that started to develop gradually – just a little bit at a time, until I produced adult quantities some time later. So even though I can;t say with certainty how old I was, I was pretty young.

It started with me just playing with myself – like all kids do, I guess. I remember a couple of things that got me gradually into porn, though. Firstly, I found a centerfold pull out of Pamela Anderson nude in the local park one time. I took it home and kept it in a drawer and would masturbate to it pretty frequently. A friend of mine also pointed out to me that the catalogues my mum received had underwear models in them. Nothing overly sexy – but to a little pervert trying to get of before the internet, it was a treasure trove. I can actually still picture two models in particular pretty clearly in my head. I am certain I would recognize them in a line up. For a long time these kinds of images fed into my masturbation fantasies. The other main source was hot women in computer game magazines. I was pretty keen on games consoles and bought all the tips and cheats magazines. It’s disturbing looking back now, because some of the images were clearly sexualised. I can remember one in particular of a woman dressed as a sexy doctor, with her shirt unbuttoned enough that a lot of cleavage was visible. For me at that time, this image was a huge turn on. She had on dark rimmed glasses, had the end of a pencil between her teeth and her hair tied back in a tight bun. What that had to do with computer games, I’ll never know, but it was clearly nurturing my sexuality at a young age.

The next progression came a few years later. I started to notice that a lot of entertainment magazines had sexy images. A key one in my development as a burgeoning pervert was the Sex Issue of Sky Magazine with Alicia Silverstone on the cover. I don’t remember any of the Sex Issue articles – but I remember those Silverstone images. Not long later I discovered Heat magazine, which back then had a more credible entertainment angle to it than its celeb focus it developed years later. In Heat I found all sorts of other images. Two I still remember vividly are Keeley Hawes as Diana Dors and Britney Spears in a childishly girly bedroom in underwear and a cardigan (From Rolling Stone, I think, but reprinted in Heat).

Around this time, I also found a single unlabeled VHS video in my parents’ room. I knew what it was as soon as I saw it. I’m not sure how I knew, but I did. I was alone in the house at the time, so I rushed downstairs to play it.

Grainy, flickering, moving porn.

This particular discovery adjusted my psychology regarding masturbation. Prior to it, I could do it quietly in my room with no one being any the wiser. But from then on I prefered to get the whole house to myself. It was nerve-wracking business. On more than one occasion, I had to quickly eject the video, pull my pants up and hide all masturbation paraphernalia when I heard someone at the door. Even if it was just the postman, I’d have a heart attack! There were plenty of near misses. Sometimes I had to temporarily hide the video and then conspire to get it back to the spot I stole it from before anyone noticed it had been moved. I’d also get really paranoid about whether I’d put it back in the same position or facing the same way. It caused a lot of anxiety…

Eventually, I got into FHM and all of the soft porn it produces. It wasn’t as graphic as the video, but it provided novelty. New ‘babes’ every month. Isla Fisher, Terri Hatcher, Louise Nurding, Gail Porter, Heather Graham, Charisma Carpenter. I almost feel like I’d be able to describe at least one image for each of those women – lingerie, poses, facial expressions – I’ve seen them too many times.

That kind of softcore diet kept me going until I had access to dial-up internet. I never had the courage to buy actual porn in magazine form – although I definitely count FHM as porn looking back on it – so the internet eventually allowed the cowardly pervert in me to search for whatever I wanted. Of course, dial-up was painfully slow, but something I was prepared to wait for. The novelty there was fascinating, but the speed kept me from experiencing much of it. Still, that was the first time I accidentally stumbled across some pretty dodgy stuff – kids and animals. I got freaked out when I saw that, because I thought I was downloading something else. I was downloading something with Kazaa or Limewire and a few files ended up being pretty bad. I was pretty freaked out and convinced the police would be knocking down my door within days. It never occurred to me to be freaked out that a kid had been exploited and abused to create the image. Thankfully, I am horrified by that now. I grew out of the selfish fear aspect at least. It was also the first time I saw gay porn. That wasn;t an accident. I was curious. I only remember one image, but I remember it pretty graphically. It still flashes into my mind occasionally.

So things continued like that for years until I got broadband. The rest is pretty predictable. I must have seen and downloaded terabytes of porn over the last 8 years or so. Literally every fantasy or desire I have had has been provided for by Google Images, YouTube, and the various YouTube porn clones (Xtube, etc). I think I’ll save the admissions of everything I have typed into Google for another post.

The point of this post is that masturbating to porn is a heavily ingrained habit. For about 20 years now, whenever I have been alone for an hour or more (or less!), I have turned to a stack or page of images and masturbated. Whenever I felt like it. Never denying myself the pleasure.

But I don’t want to do that any more.

The main reason I want to give up porn is that it has changed the way I view women. I do view women as sex objects. Even close female friends whom I respect by day have been objectified by me. It’s not a healthy way to relate to women. I know many Fapstronauts give NoFap a go because of erectile dysfunction, but that’s not me. My reason is because I have finally realised that I don’t want to be the kind of guy who thinks the things I think about women, or do the things I do while thinking about women. I love women. I think they are great. But I want that to mean more than hoping I can find a sexy picture of them (or someone who looks like them) so I can hide away privately wanking away.

Masturbation has become a less shameful activity and porn is mainstream now, but I know there are practices I have when it comes to masturbation that I would be mortified for people to know about me. And the reason for that is when I’m honest with myself, I know it’s not who I want to be.