Masturbation addiction is a touchier subject than say, alcohol addiction or drug addiction. (I hope you enjoyed my pun there) But that and porn affect a significant portion of both guys and girls. Porn is the easiest brain-ruining addiction to get a fix of. All you need to access porn is a screen and an Internet connection.
A lot of us gents were never taught a healthy relationship to our sexuality during our teen years. We never got an education on how to have healthy relationships with girls, nor how to express our sex to them in constructive ways.
So we turned to the Internet for some semblance of guidance. Sex was too shameful, too forbidden a subject for us to talk about with our families, or with anyone who could give us some real wisdom. Maybe our parents didn’t know any more than we did about how to handle a sexual relationship.
Before I say anything else, let me dispel some myths about porn addiction:
- Finally getting laid or getting a girlfriend won’t remove your urges to watch porn
- Your sex drive and your desire to watch porn are two different things
- Nofap/semen retention doesn’t give you “superpowers”, girl-attracting abilities, or some special aura. Its benefits are purely psychological
- Doing productive things with your life is NOT how you quit porn
- “Just don’t watch it bro !!” is NOT how you quit porn
- Porn is not turning you into a cuck, nor making you a worse person
You’re not masturbating because of a flaw in your character. Not because you’re some genetically inferior “incel” who has to settle for wanking in his bedroom while “Alpha males” get all the real-life pussy. Not because it’s a normal guy thing. Not because anything’s wrong with you.
You’re masturbating because you have sexual and emotional needs you’re not fully consciously aware of.
No one ever taught you that they’re valid, nor how to have a healthy relationship with them.
These sexy photo/video binges are the only place in your life where you can feel like you’re a sexually confident man who deserves what he desires – femininity.
Biologically, you desire impregnating an attractive woman and continuing your family tree with her.
Psychologically, you desire a connection with that woman – having someone to share life’s special moments with, to relate to, to learn and grow with.
Spiritually, your masculine essence desires unity with a woman’s feminine essence.
When you feel separate from the feminine on any of those levels, you may try finding it in porn, through fetishes and kinks, through projecting fantasies onto e-girls who wouldn’t care if you were dead tomorrow, and through compulsively releasing your sexual energy.
Your sexual fantasies are your buried needs archetypally crying out to you, not something you actually want to live.
And no girl will EVER meet your needs, whether she’s a porn star, an Instagram thot, your gym crush, a horny girl at a party who wants to bang you, or your future wife.
Consider your sexual frustrations a reproductive “check engine” light. They’re a sign that your sexual consciousness isn’t in the right place. You’re going for the wrong girls for the wrong reasons. Have you ever thought about how you won’t be any happier if you do have sex with these girls you’re lusting for? Have you thought about how there’s more growth ahead of you if you DON’T get the girl you supposedly “want”, compared to if you somehow pull all the right game and get her in bed and possibly marry her? Have you ever thought about how the solution to your sexual frustrations is already within you, not in the hands of any sexy female girly woman?
Being frustrated with not getting a girl means that girl is wrong for you. Feeling possessed by her, having her NOW instead of later, that’s a sign something about her is right for you.
There’s some guys out there, including me during a very fun few seasons of my life, who’ve managed to attract girls, game well, and get laid while still wanking to porn every night. We’ve been showing up everywhere else in life despite it, taking action, and doing cool shit.
Our relationships with the ladies haven’t failed or been turbulent or nonexistent because we like to see naked women and letting our sexual energy flow. That’s a normal part of being a man. Our relationships and sex lives have been tough for the same reason we’ve escaped into porn so much – low awareness of our own emotional needs, and thus, a lowered capacity to meet someone else’s.
If you stay away from porn but are still unaware of your needs, you’ll be projecting them onto real-life women instead, which will lead to disappointment and misery in your dating life. As long as these ladies have something you NEED, they can control you. You’ll still feel drained when they’re not giving it to you, and they never will give it to you.
So ask yourself:
Why do you watch porn? What needs of yours are you trying to meet through it?
That’s a question for you to answer more precisely, but here’s a hypothesis from me:
You’re watching porn to confirm your beliefs about women and your sexuality.
Maybe you believe other guys deserve to get girls, while you don’t. You might not have been cool in high school, might have gotten rejected when you asked out your crush Rebecca in 10th grade, then she started dating the hot track star Isaac a couple months later even if she told you “I’m not ready to date someone”. You might have gone through college seeing all the hot girls in their cliquey cliques ignoring you because you weren’t “in”. Your modest college best friend/crush Jessica who just wanted a nice normal guy may have friendzoned you and fucked gymbro Zack instead.
This story you’re telling yourself about how you’re some sexually deselected loser is absolute bullshit. Rebecca’s a 6, Jessica’s a 7, and Isaac and Zack are more emotionally fucked up than you are. Those cliquey college girls don’t have integrity and are just as scared of “not fitting in” as you are, yet you’re the one bravely facing that fear while they never will, and maybe they’re addicted to vaping. You don’t actually want to be with those girls.
They rejected you because they can’t meet your needs, not because there’s anything wrong or innately sexually undesirable about you.
If you’re in shape, high-testosterone, moving forward in life, and taking responsibility for your goals and mindsets and mundane life things, you deserve success with women, and you’ll have it. It’ll come to you most easily once you put your emotional world in order, and porn stops triggering your unmet emotional needs.
Until then, these emotional needs of yours will manifest archetypally, as fantasies.
You don’t actually want the youngest possible girls. You just want a girl your age you can relate to who’s re-integrated her youthful girly energy.
You don’t actually want to see a hot girl in ecstacy getting fucked by another guy. You just want to make a girl happy, and don’t yet believe you can emotionally penetrate her that deeply.
You don’t actually want a girl who can sexually dominate you. You want a girl who’s got her own strength, and who can meet you as an equal instead of being simply a cute anxious doormat. Or maybe the burdens of lone-wolf masculine life have worn you down, and you want someone else to live for.
Etcetera. What about these fantasy girls is speaking to something deeper in you?
Porn can be a blessing, unlike what the quit-porn gurus say. It’s a low-vibration industry, but when I was quitting porn, I did enjoy treating it like a film study class, exploring my own psychology, and the collective unconscious through it, uncovering my emotional needs along the way. WHY was I drawn to watching the stuff I was watching? What about it resonated with me?
Better girls than the ones you went to high school with await you. Don’t think so small. There’s infinite girls out there, and if you’re a masculine guy who’s got his shit together, some of them will love you.
Now let’s focus on the process of quitting this nasty addiction. What should you expect? How do you practically do it?
What NOT to expect from quitting your wanking addiction
I encourage you not to listen to anyone who claims Nofap/semen retention will solve all your problems in life. This is idolatry, not quantifiable, actionable advice. These guys are swapping one false idol for another.
I know their lofty promises are tempting – girls giving you more looks in public, feeling more sexually confident, having higher testosterone and more muscle mass, more motivation and more drive and more masculinity.
But think critically – these guys only claim this to be true because they’re idealizing Nofap as a magic pill of masculinity. They self-perceive as being unmasculine, not man enough, not good enough. They’re insecure and fearful, flaunting their Nofap streak and all its benefits as a status signal, or as a Savior.
The above “benefits” of Nofap are pseudosciencey BS in my experience.
For fuck’s sake, you’re not going to lose all your confidence, energy, happiness, “superpowers”, or motivation if you let yourself cum once in a while.
Cumming is a natural bodily function of yours. Your body was built for that, not to hold semen indefinitely. That’s why you have wet dreams when you go long enough without cumming (for me, it’s around every 20-30something days of retention). Your body needs to clear the excess semen out sometimes. The point of getting on nofap/semen retention is NOT to go XXX days without blowing a load, but rather to make ejaculation a matter of CONSCIOUS CHOICE, not compulsion.
Even when I was wanking to porn every night, I still had the motivation to go out and meet girls. I could still turn those girls on and get them wanting to hook up with me. I still had the drive to show up to the gym, get work done on my ambitions, and move forward in life. I put on 40lbs of muscle while being a near-nightly wanker.
I anecdotally find that I often get MORE female attention, and girls being more receptive to me soon after I blow a load, not so much while I’m retaining my seed for weeks.
This is my concise experience with Nofap:
It doesn’t change which girls are attracted to me or not, nor how strongly.
It hasn’t noticeably affected my testosterone, my other hormones, or my muscle gains.
It hasn’t changed my level of motivation and drive in any domain.
All Nofap’s given me is an extra psychological edge. An extra bit of confidence in holding sexual tension.
How are you supposed to look a flesh-and-blood girl in the eyes while holding that sweet tension thinking about how pretty she is… If you can’t even do it with a girl on a screen, or with a girl you’re just thinking about?
You can.
I’ve done it even when I was a porn addict. But it was an unfamiliar, momentary energy, rather than something I was used to holding 24/7.
Holding tension when you’re face-to-face with an attractive girl is 100x easier when you’re already used to holding it every time you get horny by yourself. And believe me, she’ll feel the sexual energy coming from you. If you can control it and stay composed under this tension, she’ll be turned on.
Nofap is one way to teach yourself to hold more tension, and to get more grounded in your masculinity. But far from the only way. You grow your masculine energy through real-world challenges, through integrity under pressure, through being on your edge.
Your masculinity and your attractiveness to women come from WHO YOU ARE, not from any one self-improvement habit of yours.
I do recommend you quit porn and quit jerking off, even though I’m not a Nofap dogmatist. You’ll feel more like a man for it.
But there is a dark side to semen retention.
At the end of 2021, I went 2.5 months without cumming (the longest I’ve gone since I was 13), no wet dreams even, and by the end of it, I wasn’t horny and I still rubbed one out to relieve the pain in my crotch.
I was going out and daygaming every day, wandering the streets and the mall for hours looking for girls to chat up, and most days, I wouldn’t see any girls who struck my fancy. And the ones I did pursue, grounded in my animal sexual energy as I was, weren’t right for me, and I was pursuing them just so I could finally cum, not because we were actually compatible.
I could have used some post-nut clarity back then. Nofap doesn’t remove all your psychological blind spots around women.
When your body demands a release, let yourself have one.
Again, this is a normal, natural bodily function of yours. Nothing to be ashamed of.
There’s a huge difference between compulsively jerking off every night to 10 girls getting fucked in 10 private browsing tabs, versus cumming once every few weeks to a sexual fantasy of yours, versus cumming during sex with a girl who likes you.
It’s like drinking a few beers or a few glasses of wine every week, versus drinking a bottle of vodka every day. The former is a benign indulgence. The latter will eff your body up. Yet unlike alcohol, you can’t quit cumming for life.
You’re supposed to desire sex with women. You’re supposed to impregnate them. Alcohol isn’t an essential part of being a man. Sex is.
The quit-porn action plan
Here’s what I’ve personally done to reclaim power over my sexual energy. You can tweak or alter this action plan as you see fit. Take what works for you and apply it to your own life.
1. Break the ritual
If you’re a daily or nightly wanker, quitting cold-turkey may be daunting. It may be exciting.
In any case, you need to break your idealizations about it.
Break your habit of “get horny > load up porn alone in your bedroom > jerk off”
Next time you get horny for some pixels, try this:
Watch your favorite porn videos, look at your favorite sexy images, over and over, without touching yourself, until you get bored of it and move on to doing something healthier.
It may be uncomfortable. You may not be used to denying yourself a release. Still, look at these photos and videos without expecting a release from them. You’re going through the motions of your porn-watching ritual, but training yourself to dissociate your sexual release from it.
This is you teaching yourself to hold sexual tension. Remember, holding tension is the point of quitting masturbation. You’re supposed to be more okay with your sexual urges, not to distance yourself from them.
Through this, hopefully you’ll discover how much these idealized girls actually AREN’T meeting your needs. They don’t love you. They don’t care about you. They wouldn’t be concerned if you wound up in the hospital, nor happy for you if you made a million dollars tomorrow. The girls in porn are treating their bodies cheaply, sometimes drugged up, and they often don’t even enjoy the “sex”, barring amateur couple porn. All their moans and gasps are just acting, not legitimate pleasure.
Are these the girls you want to be sharing your heart and your sex with? Are you ACTUALLY attracted to them, or just projecting all your unmet intimate needs onto them?
Look at them and notice all the little things about them that actually TURN YOU OFF.
I also hope you’ll lose all your urges to watch another guy have sex. That’s not my idea of a fun time.
The point here is to desensitize yourself to porn. To break all your idealizations and extreme devaluations about it. Not to avoid it, but to change how you react to it – neutrally, not with an emotional charge.
2. Delete your spank bank
Every image or video you have saved, downloaded, or bookmarked for wanking purposes, delete them.
You won’t miss them, trust me.
If you’re not ready to get rid of all your wank material just yet, be like Thanos. Count every image/video you have saved, and delete exactly half of them. Then later, delete half of the remaining ones. And later, half of those.
The point here isn’t just to go Marie Kondo on your spank bank. It’s to put some momentum into detaching your emotional needs from porn, and to get you thinking critically about WHY you watch what you watch, weighing the pros and cons of keeping it.
3. Go for a streak
Every time you feel horny, hold the tension. Go as long as you can without releasing it.
If a girl you meet or walk past makes you feel sexually tense, chat her up if you feel like she’s for you. If she’s not for you, that’s okay. You can simply leave her alone and enjoy the tension she inspired in your body. You don’t want to be forcing a connection, only surrendering to one.
If you see a girl on the Internet who makes you feel that tension, you can look at her photos till you get bored of them.
If you’re laying awake in bed at 2 AM and you’re suddenly having a sexual fantasy about your college crush, allow yourself to have it. Let it play out until you get bored of it. Enjoy the tension it’s creating in you. This fantasy is a reminder of your emotional and sexual needs that you’ve swept under the rug. Allow it to uncover them, and don’t take the fantasy too seriously. It’s archetypal, not literal.
If you make out with a girl at the bar and get horny, but she doesn’t want to go home with you, that’s okay. It would be a regrettable hookup anyway. Enjoy the tension, and remember there’s girls out there you’re far more holistically compatible with, who’ll jump right on following your lead to the bedroom.
In all these cases, don’t jerk off. Enjoy the tension for what it is. Transmute it into more of your own energy. Learn to enjoy the frustration of having no release for this tension. It’ll get more comfortable the longer you do it. Even if your dick’s hard as a rock and releasing precum, that’ll subside soon and your threshold for this sexual tension will rise because of it. (precum and cum aren’t the same substance btw, if you didn’t already know)
Don’t get hung up on going for a certain number of days without cumming though. You’ll need to do it eventually.
4. Allow yourself to “relapse”
Committing to quitting porn and masturbation may be challenging. You may fall back into old habits and go on a compulsive binge, even when you feel like you’ve finally quit for good.
If so, it’s important to let the small wins add up.
If you’ve gone years jerking off every night, and you go a week without it before relapsing, that’s still a win. That’s still a step forward. If you went 4 days without wanking, then relapse and go 5 days without wanking, that’s still progress.
Breaking a psychological dependence takes time. Building new habits takes time. Your brain won’t instantly 180 itself after years of this bad habit; Give it time to rewire itself and create new connections.
Still, this isn’t like quitting drinking or quitting smoking, where you’re abstaining from a substance and can potentially go the rest of your life without it. This is you reclaiming conscious control over a natural, desirable bodily function of yours.
If you cum during a wet dream, or after a few weeks of Nofap, consider it a win.
Consider a wet dream a sign that you’ve “maxed out” your body’s capacity to hold semen. This isn’t a relapse or a setback or an energy drain. It’s an important milestone in your journey of quitting porn/masturbation.
Your sexual energy can also get stuck and become a source of frustration, not empowerment. In my experience, hardcore nofapping (3-4+ weeks on end) has made me obsessive about pursuing girls who were wrong for me, and again, I could have used some post-nut clarity back then.
The occasional wank every few weeks to relieve pent-up sexual tension and frustration is healthy, as long as you do it consciously and with awareness of your body and your needs, not stuck in your head watching strangers have sex on a screen.
Sometimes, your body demands a release and you need to listen to it. It can either happen during a wet dream, or you can consciously give yourself a relieving release.
5. Get to know your needs
This is far easier said than done, but it’s the most important part of quitting any addiction.
If you smoke a pack of cigarettes every day, or get blackout drunk every weekend, or get high before bed every night, it’s because you believe you’re better off for doing it. You believe this is meeting your needs somehow.
Simply abstaining from the thing is a relapse waiting to happen. If you’ve created a vacuum or a void removing something important from your life, it will demand to be filled.
I personally used to be addicted to alcohol because I felt like being a masculine man meant repressing and hiding your emotions, not integrating them. I felt like I could only let my emotions flow when I was drinking. When I started to explore my feelings and my own feminine energy while sober, I went 2.5 months without a single drink for the first time since starting college.
I used to do drugs because I couldn’t stand feeling directionless in life, and they helped me dissociate myself from that reality. I stopped doing drugs when I decided to go all-in on my dreams and ideals in my life path.
I’d escape into video games and TV shows as a kid because I felt like the real world wasn’t offering me much adventure or opportunity until my high school years.
And I used to compulsively masturbate and watch porn because I craved my masculine essence being close to the feminine, but no one had ever taught me how to create or handle such a relationship realistically or practically, so I confined it to sexy fantasies. Even when I got good at attraction and game, I would still watch porn sometimes because while I was confident in my being “Alpha” and attractive, I was still heavily insecure about my perceived inability to penetrate a girl’s heart, to be desired for more than just being the masculine to her feminine.
Anyhoo.
Notice how I never said anything like “do some pushups instead of jerking off !” or “go approach real girls !” or “porn is bad for your brain !” No shit. You’re not stupid. Quitting your porn and masturbation addiction is an emotional, psychological battle, not a matter of misplaced priorities or lack of action-taking.
We can go over the details of doing pushups, approaching attractive girls, and optimizing your mindsets and mental health in coaching.
All of us gents can be more attractive, more integrated, more sexually confident versions of ourselves, and know exactly what we’re doing to turn a girl on and deeply connect with her.
See me in coaching when you’re ready to be my next client success story.
– Ben
