So I’m 21 years old, only been in one relationship and am still a virgin. I’m not waiting till marriage as I’m no longer religious and don’t really have much emotional attachment to sex or virginity but have withheld it despite wanting it for my personal health and safety, as I’ll explain later. I’ve always had an interesting relationship with my sexuality, I come from a really conservative culture (middle eastern Muslim, so you can imagine) and ever since the onset of puberty I’ve had a high sex drive. In the beginning, I started to pleasure myself on my own with no external stimulation. I never masturbated to the thought of any sexual desires or any person but rather simply because I wanted to release hormonal urges and for the sake of feeling physical pleasures, as most young people do. When I got a bit older (early teens) I would seek out erotic literature as my own imagination was no longer sufficient. I would do this a few times a week and for the record I don’t think there is absolutely anything wrong with erotica and it is the preferred stimuli for women and it does not involve the exploitation of real people. I always felt guilty after doing this due to how my culture is designed to shame women into having a sexuality. I felt sick and different from the other girls I was around, as they all seemed so prudish and pure, and I felt embarrassed and dirty. This guilt prevented me from seeking out real porn and for a while erotica sufficed in fulfilling my sex drive.

However, when I was around 16 I no longer felt that shame (and just to be clear women should not feel ashamed of their sexuality but what I’m about to discuss is a different issue) and I started to watch porn. The porn that I watched was of the standard variety of heterosexual porn you’d find on any website. I was still disgusted by the extreme, fringe stuff, I was porn-sick but I was never a scrote 🤣😭. And I have to say that standard heterosexual porn still involves the objectification of the female body, most of it is nothing like actual sex. I discovered that watching this material helped me orgasm very quickly, as I imagined myself as the women in the videos and used explicit material to live out my fantasies because I was too scared of actually having sex despite wanting it. I’d have periods of not watching porn sometimes lasting weeks or months after feelings of guilt and disgust, which wasn’t too difficult for me (it wouldn’t be for any woman really) but I would always come back to it. I’d found that I’d become reliant on it and when I realized this, I decided to just embrace it and stop blaming myself due to how libfem culture encourages us to prioritize our individual pleasures over resisting something that is socially and personally harmful on a mass-scale. I’d become full-on addicted and I was watching porn every other day with some days where I’d watch it multiple times. I was doing this but I never liked it, I felt disgusted by the exploitation of the actresses in the back of my mind, but I’d lost self-control due to the addictive nature of it. I didn’t know how to fulfill my sexuality without the usage of porn. Just like any drug, the user starts requiring more and more of it in order to attain the same effect. And that’s what happened to me.

I stopped because it was consuming my brain, it made me think about sex constantly. It was starting to effect my day to day life, I couldn’t even listen in class because I’d start randomly fantasizing about sex. It’s also what happens to every scrote who watches porn. There is no healthy relationship with porn, just like any drug you cannot control the effect it will have on you. The drug will do that. And that effect is that you’ll inevitably fall down the rabbit-hole and experience the highest consequences of your addiction when you hit rock-bottom. One consequence of porn that did not affect me was that I never dehumanized the women in it, the same is not true for a porn-addicted male. The only way for a male to not develop an addiction is to not watch it at all. He will experience the complete effects of addiction, it’s inevitable. And for them it becomes even more difficult to climb out of the rabbit-hole once they’ve found themselves there. I was going to sleep with my ex but I didn’t due to a variety of issues that I can discuss in a different post, but we both had extensive discussions on sex and porn. I told him that I occasionally watched porn and he told me that he watched it at least twice a day. He told me that he started watching it when he was around 10-11 years old because a kid in his class told him to search up the word ‘porn’ and he, in his own words, “fell down the rabbit-hole that day.” Except, unlike me he never realized how much he was reliant on it. If I, a woman, a feminist, who started watching porn when she was 16 experienced the side effects of porn addiction, just imagine how much worse it affects the young, heterosexual, male mind.

My ex told me that it took him 20 mins to orgasm when masturbating and that it would take him around an hour during sex EVEN without condoms. Even I, as a virgin, knew that this was no accomplishment and clearly the result of too much death-grip masturbation. What’s hilarious is that he was proud about lasting so long and he still clearly thinks that women find hours of penetration pleasurable, but that’s a side note. We never had much of a real relationship, sure we had some good moments but we were both using each other to fulfill sexual desires. It was not possible for him to have genuine relationships with women, that wasn’t the case for me even with the porn use necessarily but I definitely wanted to use him to fulfill all of the sexual fantasies I developed from porn. It warps relationships and how sex should be. The point of this long discussion is that critique of porn and the harmful large-scale effect it has had on society is so much more complex than women being “jealous” of their partners watching porn. Since I have experienced this first-hand, I know how damaging porn can be to the mind and how dangerous the industry is for women in general. Hence, it is all our moral and personal obligating to resist this drug in order to protect our mental health and to stop fueling such a depraved, twisted industry. Feel free to post your thoughts and ask me anything.