You know how some people give up alcohol for a month - usually after the Christmas excess? Well, I'm in the middle of a month without porn, just to make sure I can do it. I'm not sure whether I'd been indulging to excess recently. After all, one man's excess is another man's slight mess, nothing to worry about. No, I probably used my handiest porn site three maybe four times a week. So why have I stopped and how's it going?
I stopped because I just felt it was degrading. To me, obviously. Yes, sure, it's degrading to women generally, but this is my blog not a Guardian article. There's just something too mechanistic about the automatic see-tits-get-aroused process that leaves me feeling like a lab rat hitting a lever to get a reward. And part of my brain never switches off the bad-taste-ometer. God what terrible acting. Did no-one ever tell her you can have too much silicone? There's no camera angle that makes a ball-bag look attractive. What will that tattoo look like when she's sixty? Christ, look at those curtains!
And I did wonder whether it was killing my social sex-drive. I'm internet dating at the moment - or at least, I would be if I wasn't so damn busy at work for the last month. Question - am I giving my full attention to the real, human, flesh and blood women I could be meeting, dating and romancing in the real world if I'm getting off on the women of easy virtue I encounter in online porn? Possibly not.
It's now two weeks without a single log-on. Which is not to say I've given up on masturbation. I'm just relying instead on fantasy and memory - a forest in the Pyrenees, a bright morning after Athens, a tent by a loch. I'm not relying on immediate visual stimulation. It's more creative, using left-side brain - probably good for staving off early onset alzheimers.
I did wonder this morning whether using an lingerie advert counted.....
hand-stitched, organic Indian cotton.... lace-lined, softest fabrics... underwired and structured around a supermodel's nellies.... this is not just porn, this Mark & Spencer's Lingerie Porn...
But no, I think that still counts as porn. What about the fantastic sex-scene in Sebastan Faulks' Birdsong (the bit before the war, not where he's shagging some toothless French crone a mile behind the trenches)? Literary stimulation... I reckon that's alright.
Which might just go to prove I'm not just a wanker, I'm a snob too.
