Sorry for a throwaway but this is a little awkward. It sounds like you're more concerned about what doing the pornography is doing to its performers, than what it's doing to you. That's fair. I don't personally believe it's automatically harmful to the viewer in small doses, and I still watch a bit of it. Maybe I'm just still hooked on it.
Anyway. I got myself in a pickle with porn. Watched a bunch of fetish porn involving acts I have conflicted feelings over. Simple gross factor, rather than anything ethical. It was a new kind of experience, orgasming to something that's simultaneously disturbing and erotic, and you can end up cyclically chasing that. Dissociative, almost.
It's extraordinarily hard to resolve the fantasies and images in my mind with an actual human being I talk to. They are disjointed, two different worlds that don't mesh. It was affecting my sexual performance. When I was with a partner, I would have intrusive images of the fetish act in my mind and it made it hard to engage with them. Having a person as a fetish object and as a lover at the same time, does not work in my experience.
So I stopped watching it. I watched other more "normal" sexual acts. I still respond to those. And I exercised my imagination. Honestly for the first time since my teenage years. What did I think about when it wasn't being presented to me? It took more than a month. But the intrusive disjunctive images while having sexual relations slowly decreased over time. I feel more sexually confident. But still not like before.
We do know that simple reward conditioning works on humans, a little bit, sometimes. And orgasms are a powerful reward. Be careful with that.
Anyway. I got myself in a pickle with porn. Watched a bunch of fetish porn involving acts I have conflicted feelings over. Simple gross factor, rather than anything ethical. It was a new kind of experience, orgasming to something that's simultaneously disturbing and erotic, and you can end up cyclically chasing that. Dissociative, almost.
It's extraordinarily hard to resolve the fantasies and images in my mind with an actual human being I talk to. They are disjointed, two different worlds that don't mesh. It was affecting my sexual performance. When I was with a partner, I would have intrusive images of the fetish act in my mind and it made it hard to engage with them. Having a person as a fetish object and as a lover at the same time, does not work in my experience.
So I stopped watching it. I watched other more "normal" sexual acts. I still respond to those. And I exercised my imagination. Honestly for the first time since my teenage years. What did I think about when it wasn't being presented to me? It took more than a month. But the intrusive disjunctive images while having sexual relations slowly decreased over time. I feel more sexually confident. But still not like before.
We do know that simple reward conditioning works on humans, a little bit, sometimes. And orgasms are a powerful reward. Be careful with that.