By Russell Nolte
Special to YNOT
MALIBU, Calif. – One of the best things about overcoming an addiction to porn is how much more productive you become once you’re not wasting all your time browsing tube sites, waiting for clips to stop buffering and obsessively scrubbing your hands under the scalding water coming out of your bathroom sink, hoping in vain to wash away your relentless shame.
As observed by J.S. Park from the XXX Church, watching porn takes up a lot of time for an addict. Park estimates such people spend 15-20 hours a week watching porn — which is a lot more time than it takes me to jack off, but whatever. We’re not billing people at an attorney’s rate or something, so it’s fine if there’s a bit of fudge factor in the estimate.
I know what some of you skeptics are thinking: “God damn, this article is already boring me to death. I’m going to watch some porn.”
Don’t turn away yet, friends, because what I’m going to tell you next will really make you want to quit watching smut: When you quit watching porn, you get better and more efficient at everything else you do, including using the restroom at work.
Instead of sitting in some drab metal stall watching a muted gangbang video on your smartphone while your butt cheeks go numb on the cold toilet seat, you’ll focus on the task at hand — ideally without getting any of said task on your hand, if you catch my drift.
Take me, for example. Before I quit watching porn, I spent the majority of my time either finding, consuming or feeling bad about recently having found and consumed pornography. Now I spend most of my time writing in my journal, painting sunsets or aimlessly meandering the lush, green, beautiful grounds of the rehab center of which I’m not ready to check out just yet.
Sure, it helps to be heavily medicated and surrounded by people whose job it is to make sure I don’t fall back into my bad habits, but I’m confident that with just a few more months of counseling, continuing to attend meetings with my fellow recovering porn addicts and the occasional injection of Depo-Provera, I’ll soon become so productive I’ll make that Leonardo da Vinci guy look like a hopelessly stoned teenage slacker.
I must admit, though, there are a couple restorative effects of quitting porn mentioned by Park that I have yet to experience. One of them is “renewed connection and intimacy.” I tried to experience those things with one of the female counselors here, and all it got me was a written reprimand and immediate reassignment to a male counselor named Scott, who I’m pretty sure doesn’t want to touch me, either.
Park says quitting porn also means a “loss of objectification,” which I might be experiencing, but it’s hard to say, because I’m not at all sure what this phrase means.
“Maybe the best thing about quitting porn is that only weeks after, my brain slowly killed those dirty fantasy loops,” Park wrote. “You know what I mean. It’s that visual playground of objectifying daydreams that makes you feel guilty and awkward at social gatherings all the time…. Soon after I quit porn, I could talk to women without the terrible layer of sexualization in my head.”
I guess I can see what Park’s saying, but without the “terrible layer of sexualization in my head,” I’m not sure I’ll ever get laid again for real, which seems certain to further complicate that whole “connection and intimacy” thing.
Still, making a strong effort not to watch porn definitely has had an impact on the way I look at women, as now I look at their shoes, instead of their chests, when they’re speaking. To be clear, I haven’t become a footwear fetishist through all this counseling. I just find it easier to avoid arousal when I spend the time while a woman is speaking trying to estimate her shoe size rather than her bra size.
At any rate, as you can see, I’m still a work in progress as a porn-free person, but I think it’s safe to say there’s light at the end of the tunnel — and I’m pretty sure it’s not the illuminated tip of an endoscope anymore.
Russell Nolte is a recovering porn addict who has been entirely porn-free since last Tuesday evening, so far as any of his well-reimbursed counselors can definitively prove.
