How to Stop Watching Porn
7 Tips to Help You Cut Out Pornography
Today, porn can seem like it’s everywhere. Though it’s actually banned by most social media platforms, there’s so much more of it, and it’s so much more accessible than it used to be, that it can have the feeling of ubiquity.
After all, if you ask anyone born before about 1985 what their formative experiences with pornography were, you’re likely to hear tales of stolen porn mags or smuggled VHS tapes.
But more than the media, the rarity was what seemed to mark these moments — prior to modern internet porn’s widespread use, erotica was simply incredibly hard to come by for those under the age of 18, meaning porn was something much sought after and treated as special.
Now, the existence of porn aggregators, aka tube sites, means that the problem with porn has done a complete 180-degree turn: Now, it can feel hard to avoid.
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After all, if you know how to look for it, and spend even a second or two doing so — and that might be all it takes, in a moment of arousal — you’ll quickly find yourself staring at thousands upon thousands of hours of erotic videos, free for the taking, a sort of bottomless pit of horniness.
Reasons People Try to Quit Watching Porn
Whatever your reasons for reading this article, if you’re here, it’s probably because you’re one of the many people who’ve realized porn is playing something of an outsized role in their sexuality.
And while claims that porn can cause erectile dysfunction may be overblown, it’s true that your porn-watching habits can have an impact on your sex life — and your life, period.
Maybe you feel like it’s shaping your desires in ways you’re not comfortable with, or you just don’t like how you feel after watching it. Maybe you’re not comfortable streaming clips for which performers don’t get paid, but you don’t have the money to pay to watch. Maybe you find that it’s eating up too much of your time, or impacting your phone or internet bill. Maybe you just want to see if you can do without it for your own reasons. Those are all valid!
While there’s nothing wrong with porn in and of itself, much of contemporary porn can be seen as promoting somewhat iffy ideas about sex, especially for people who haven’t had much (or any) experience with it in real life.
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Mainstream porn performers are typically cis, able-bodied young people with little by way of body hair, coiffed and tanned and almost always skinny and/or muscular.
Which is unsurprising — they’re expected to resemble our cultural ideals of beauty. But if those are the only people you see having sex, you can start to forget that people with all kinds of bodies are also sexual beings.
And then there’s the fact that the sex that happens in porn is also not realistic. It almost never shows people using condoms or lube, or having an onscreen discussion of boundaries or desires, and there are never any awkward moments or pauses. The actors simply play out their moves according to the script. Which is sexy — but, again, can cause people to have unrealistic expectations.
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Recognizing that porn might be playing a role in shaping an inaccurate perception of sex for you can be a very compelling reason to take a break from it.
How to Stop Watching Porn
Regardless of your reasons, there are some handy tricks, concepts and alternatives you can use to curb your habit:
1. Make a Resolution
This might seem silly, but have you ever really tried... not doing it? If you feel negatively about your relationship with porn and like you’ve come to rely on it a little bit, what if you simply made a promise to yourself that you wouldn’t watch any for a certain amount of time — say, a few days, or a week, or a month, depending on how frequently you’d normally use porn — and tried to stick to it?
Everyone’s willpower will function a little differently in situations like these, so your mileage may vary, and if you’re trying to find solutions online, you may have tried this avenue already and failed. But before moving on to other options it’s fair to suggest that you just make a no-porn resolution and see if you can stick to it. You might surprise yourself!
2. ...Or Just Try Different Types of Porn
Because of the way porn aggregators work, mainstream porn producers take up a lot of the visual real-estate on sites like Pornhub and YouPorn and their ilk.
But the truth is, not every porn production company out there is doing the same kind of thing, and what bothers you about the porn you’re watching might not be a factor in other kinds of porn.
For instance, there’s feminist porn, high-production-value porn, amateur porn, artsy porn, classic ‘70s porn, and live chats with real cam girls, which is sort of porn-adjacent. Porn production companies like Sssh.com, Girlfriends Films, XConfessions and MakeLoveNotPorn (all NSFW, obviously) might be what you’re looking for instead.
3. Explore Erotica Instead
If you’re excited to keep masturbating but don’t want porn to be involved, there are other options. People with no access to visual porn have known this for a long time, but a really sexy alternative to watching people have sex is reading about people having sex.
Admittedly, that might sound less exciting, particularly if you’re not much of a reader, but erotica, like porn, is produced by the truckload and, unlike porn, features really stunning amounts of conceptual variety.
Whatever your fantasy, there’s not only erotica about it, but a lot, and some of it will be really, really hot. If you’re looking to buck your porn-watching habits for something arousing but different, cast the porn inside your imagination with all the sexy stories out there. Who knows? You might even be inspired to write some of your own!
And if reading isn't your thing, audio erotica or audio porn might do the trick for you. Apps like Quinn and Dipsea are full of sexy audio productions that will arouse you without any bodies in sight.
4. ...Or Just Fantasize
This might be something you’re doing already, but a great alternative to internet porn is, well, just imagining sexual scenarios in your head. The truth is that our brains are our biggest sex organs.
Whether conjuring up scenes with past partners or future hookups with crushes you’ve never even talked to yet — or envisioning scenes you’re not even a part of — exploring your sexual fantasies by your lonesome can be an exciting way for you to discover the things that arouse you the most without the limiting constraints of the cheesy porn tropes, story arcs and bodies that exist in mainstream pornography.
Without relying on porn, you’ll likely find you’re still able to get just as turned on with your thoughts to accompany you. So dim the lights, lie back and experience masturbation the way people used to for thousands of years.
5. Block Porn Sites
If the above-mentioned possible solutions don’t seem strong enough — or you’ve tried them already and they simply aren’t working out for you — you could always take the brute-force technological approach and invest in some site-blocking software.
While these options often leave some control in your hands — and no amount of blocking individual sites one by one could ever stop you from accessing all the porn on the internet — at least making it difficult for you to easily access your favorite porn aggregators or producers could go a long way toward helping you kick the habit in the short term.
Sites and apps like Freedom, StayFocusd, Cold Turkey and more could be what you’re looking for when it comes to finally kicking the porn habit — or simply help you cut down a bit by blocking porn during certain times of day.
6. Get Parental
Fortunately for you, you’re far from the first person to wonder how to block people from seeing porn online. While much of the existing porn-block effort is about adults preventing minors from accessing porn rather than adults preventing themselves from accessing it, the mechanics aren’t totally different.
You could always run through a definitive guide like this one by yourself, but it’s then possible that, knowing what you did to block yourself from seeing porn, you could undo it in a moment of weakness.
In that case, you could recruit a tech geek or computer technician to aggressively porn-proof your devices for you, leaving you on the outside looking in, as it were — whether you tell them it’s for your purposes or to protect someone else is up to you.
7. Make It a Group Effort
If you’ve tried all that and you’re still struggling, it might be time to reach out for help. Many people find that sticking to a resolution is easier when there’s someone to hold you accountable — hence the concept of gym buddies — and that could definitely be the case here.
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While it might be trickier, given the subject matter, if you have a friend (or partner) you can talk to about these issues, you could try asking them to check in on you and your anti-porn resolution to help give you extra motivation.
If you can’t think of anyone in your life who fits the bill, you could consider reaching out for help on an online community — like, for instance, NoFap on reddit, where users come together to help each other quit masturbating.
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