I’m 18 now, last year of school. I hit puberty very early (~9 years old) and by age 10 I began viewing porn regularly. This screwed my perception of women from almost the instant that I began to feel sexual attraction, as a result I was unable to talk to girls at all, and going to an all-boys school in addition to this meant that I have been almost completely isolated from girls for the last 7 years. This made me EXTREMELY vulnerable to TRP/PUA type stuff because I genuinely had no idea what girls were doing dating-wise, since I didn’t know any.

It, in combination with a 8-year porn addiction, had contributed to an unhealthy all-encompassing obsession with ‘getting sex’ as a measure of my worth as a man (I’m a virgin so my self-worth has therefore been 0 for a while) that I have never seen in any other guy my age.

The whole AF/BB and 80/20 shit made me feel like I ‘needed’ to be the 20% alpha male to be a man. Not because I genuinely wanted to have loads of random sex, but because I felt it would prove my ‘masculinity’. I did fantasise about being the ‘Chad’ who gets with loads of women, but it was always about other people being impressed at my conquests (my brain is really fucked ok). I tricked myself into thinking I wanted to fuck loads of women because ‘that’s what men do’.

Granted, I do still want to have sex, I’m not asexual. But that desire is nowhere near as neurotic as the ‘have sex = more manly’ thing I got from TRP/PUA/porn. Only now have I realised how many fulfilling friendships and fun, non-sexual experiences I could have had had I not had this unhealthy obsession with proving my manliness by treating women like sex objects. My thought processes are so unhealthily misogynistic and I didn’t even realise for a long time.

Anyway, I’m starting to try and get past this shit. I lost high school, I’m not going to lose university. I’m going to put my focus into school (thankfully I didn’t neglect my studies because of this, at least my career isn’t fucked), focus on developing my hobbies, building some confidence and becoming an actual man and take some responsibility for my life and help those around me instead of pretending to be manly by fucking around. I’m going to go to uni and try some new shit, be social and make friends with people, then if I meet someone who want to date/have sex with, then I’ll try and talk to them and see what happens.

Until then, I need to cast this obsession out of my mind. I’m in lockdown in my parents house, I’m not getting any no matter how hard I try until October at the earliest lol. May as well start living life instead of neurotically focusing on only one of the many pleasures of life.