When I first started watching porn, I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Yeast similarities notwithstanding, it was a simply amazing concept to me at the age when all I had for material up to that point were staunchly edited movies and the FTV’s Midnight Haute. 

Unfortunately, much like heroin or Baskin Robbins’ Pralines & Cream flavour, nothing beats your first time, and you are left forever searching for a comparable rush, down a tunnel of disappointment and regret, increasingly more desensitized to stimulation and provocation. 

 When you start having actual girlfriends, made up of flesh and blood and not pixels, you realize how skewed porn is, and how harmful it is on your actual psyche. Your image and expectations for women becomes warped, as you very quickly realize that girls in real life do not act like girls on the internet, and that they do not enjoy the same things they pretend to enjoy in videos. This is especially true in a country like India, when the vulnerabilities of the opposite sex are kept hidden and glossed over until intimacy, which causes issues for men and women alike as they create bizarre portraits in their minds of how the other gender functions. 

Porn has gotten even worse recently, which is almost contradictory to say, because the girls have gotten prettier and the production more refined. Unfortunately, this drive in quality has been toward specific fetishes, and it feels like the industry is trying to program people into being into things they were not previously into. There is no other explanation for the biggest names in porn and the highest production values being diverted to fetishes including cuckolding and incest, both of which feature prominently in the most viewed videos on any popular site. 

So I stopped watching porn. It wasn’t easy at first, but it’s come to the point where I don’t miss it. There is a rapid improvement in your life and mental state if you stop focusing so much on what you watch on Incognito mode and start diverting attention toward things that make your real sex and love life better. In a time where it seems we have lost so much to the virtual world, we should endeavor to maintain the sanctity of our intimate lives as much as we can.