One Month Without Porn: Laurent

A pseudonym is used to preserve the author’s anonymity.

Day 1

Let me introduce myself. Hi, there! I’m Laurent. My friends call me Lo. I’m a 27-year-old gay man. I’ve been masturbating to porn since I was 12 (!!!), and I’ve been in a relationship for 3 years. By pornography, I mean sexually explicit videos and photos: close-ups of genitals, sex, etc.

I have an active sex life and a fairly healthy relationship to pornography, though I’d like to cut down a little (ok, a lot). I sometimes watch porn with my boyfriend : these are moments of connection and vulnerability. When I use porn, I usually ejaculate in 15 minutes or less.

Search words: daddy, domination, leather, rimming, threesome, fingering, toys

Day 2 

Day. We made love. We both came. Special mention to the rim job I did on him: his hole was so good and so soft, and my expert tongue, so greedy. Nothing different in my approach to pleasure. I think I have a somewhat pornographic relationship to his anus. I mean in terms of imagery and fetishization.

Night. I dreamed that I was watching porn. Upon waking, I had a hazy memory of two fingers in an anus and muscular bodies. I woke up without an erection, and not necessarily aroused. Looks like my mind is playing porn director.

Day 3

Day. A few sexts with my boyfriend, then with a guy with a nice hairy and bouncy ass on Instagram. We’ve agreed to allow ourselves these kinds of perks.

Evening. I tried to masturbate by closing my eyes and thinking of a possible threesome with the three of us. I tried to stimulate my anus with a dildo, but after a few minutes I gave up. Sluggish erection, scattered mind. Good night!

Day 4

Day. I am so, so horny! While scrolling through my Instagram, two or three handsome guys caused blood to rush to my cock. I gave in and masturbated to the feed of some sexy landscaping influencer who lives in Soho. With some imagination, I made the pics of him clad in a carmine red speedo come to life. I was animating the images! Did I cheat? I don’t know. It took me 25 minutes to come. It was laborious. sigh Let’s do this.

Day 5

Evening. My boyfriend and I were about to fall asleep, but I wanted to kiss him a little. Making out triggered our desire, and we began to make love tenderly. I spit on his cock and sat on top of him in the bedroom’s complete darkness. My mind had what I call “porn temptation”. I wanted to imagine his penis inside me, to imagine someone looking at us: to conjure up images.

But then, nope! I decided to focus exclusively on what I was feeling. On his hand against my penis, on my dilated anus, our wet mouths.

Unable to see anything, I began to feel more fully. It was so good.

Day 6

Evening. The porn temptation is strong. I quickly skimmed through an old Tumblr specializing in photos of men’s butts. It wasn’t pornographic, but erotic. Remember that, technically, Tumblr has banned porn content since 2018. The nice round asses had an effect on me. I wanted to spread them gently to discover the pink anus at their centres. I animated them in my mind’s eye. I got a little hard, but felt bad for cheating even a little, so I turned off the screen and let it be. I was tired.

Day 7

Thought: if I’ve masturbated 5 times a week to pornography for about 12 years, and that each session lasted for about 15 minutes, that means I’ve spent about 46,800 minutes, or 780 hours, or 32 whole days of my life in front of pornography. Holy crap.

Day 8

Morning. Noon. Evening. It’s grey in my heart, in my head, and in the sky. I’m not horny. In normal circumstances, I probably would have tried to drown my pain in pornography. But today, I don’t have the strength to be able to masturbate without it. When I feel this sad, I’m unable to make myself feel good without an aid. I’d need to be bombarded with porn to forget my tears. Only the most hardcore scenes would take my mind off things. But abstinence it is.

Day 9

Day. I start playing with my penis while I’m in the tub. I’m feeling very horny. Once in my room, I masturbate by inserting a pretty turquoise dildo up my ass. I imagine an older man on top of me. His firm, hairy chest, his sex dripping with pre-cum. I imagine him being the one who’s inserting my toy. I dirty talk alone in my empty room, as if I were talking to him. I ejaculate in a few minutes, powerfully. My toes twitch. It was so good. Daddy, daddy, daddy.

Day 10

Time stops. My boyfriend and I broke up after being together for three years. I am drained and terrified. I don’t need any pictures anymore. I am in an infinite present without a face and without desire. The sex we had on Day 5 will have been our last. I have just lost the most beautiful of all images. No more porn, no more love. What do I have left? I’m left with myself. Or am I? I don’t know anymore.

Day 11

Day. I cheated. I was in total distress. My heart was in pieces, my mind in a storm. I needed a hit of sensationalism. To soothe the sadness of my breakup in front of offered flesh. I chose a video that I particularly like and I paused on an image. I didn’t want to cheat all the way.

I ejaculated while eyeing a frozen image. A pink anus that was well dilated by a huge veiny cock. I came in three minutes.

An orgasm, a burst of serotonin, a blank image. Is that really my salvation? A gaping ass in 720p. I’m sorry I cheated.

Day 12

Evening. My libido is strange. I’ve been taking antidepressants since the fall (20 mg of Citalopram). It has a huge impact on my desire and my approach to pleasure. It didn’t kill my libido, but it certainly changed it. Orgasm is more difficult to achieve in general. I can now go a day or two without even thinking about sex. Today was one of those days.

My brain chemistry controls my crotch.

Day 13

Morning. Can desire leave us for good? Can pornographic images stop devouring our time and our sense of existence? The artifice of pornography seems dwarfed by the almost organic, tangible reality of my heartbreak.

Evening. I didn’t masturbate. I didn’t think about it. Will I desire again? I feel extinguished.

Day 14

A memory. First exposure to pornography. I was 6 or 7 years old. My cousin had cable with U.S. XXX channels. I remember the excitement, the feeling of forbiddance, pink bodies like candies or Toulouse sausages. I remember the huge dicks, the stretched vulvas, the sharp stiletto heels, the cries like those of drowning animals. I remember not being able to sleep.

Images that will forever remain in my mind. Images that hypnotize and distort the gaze.

Day 15

Day. I feel desire blooming in me again. I bought myself three jockstraps on Amazon. One white, one black and one grey. I feel desirable with them on. They accentuate my round ass. I feel like not touching myself all week, then to go and parade myself in my new lingerie in front of daddy, my lover who is 13 years older than me.

Is this daddy and son roleplay spawned by porn? Are my fantasies influenced? Contaminated? Do these images follow me all the way into my Amazon cart?

Day 16

Evening. Masturbation session without pornography (!!!). I was rereading my lover’s text messages to excite myself. “I want to go, without restraint, from your greedy mouth to your pink pussy.” “Show daddy!” “Wow, that ass sure is hungry. Good boy.” I came while I was imagining myself unwrapping a new, gifted butt plug while he ate my ass. Once the gift was unwrapped, he inserted it into me easily, using just his saliva as lube.

My cumshot reached my right nipple.

Day 17

Midday. I find dirty videos of myself with my ex on my cell phone. Should I call him my ex now? I’ll never get used to it. I watch these videos of the two of us and start touching myself. They belong to our past, to a love that no longer exists. I am as excited as I am hurt. I orgasm to ghosts fucking.

Does it count as porn if I’m in it?

Day 18

A thought. In porn, what obsesses me the most are gaping holes. These huge anuses, widened by cocks, which remain open after penetration. Machine-bodies that pound, then leave pink holes behind them. When I get penetrated, it’s my own hole, my own yawning chasm, that I think about.

Day 19

Evening. I realize how hard it is to complete this porn-free month challenge during a breakup. Abstinence from love, abstinence from images. No more sex, no more artifice. My reflex is to turn inward, towards my mind, my work. I feel less sexual, less desirous and desirable. I’m hungry and empty, but for and of nothing, it seems.

Will I wallow in porn once the month is over?

Day 20

A dream. I was watching pornography on dozens of screens at the same time. The images overwhelmed me. The penises, the anuses, the mouths, multiplied like tentacled monsters. I woke up with a pounding heart and a hard dick.

Day 21

Day. Masturbation session without pornography. I try something out. I lie on my bed and try to replay the scene from a porn video that I like in my mind.

I remember one of the actors’ torsos, firm and hairy. I replay the different positions, I visualize the wet sexes, the tense anuses.

The more I focus, the more layers of reality I add. Then, for a moment, I am distracted by a noise and I lose the imagery. It crumbles slowly, then suddenly. My erection disappears too.

I feel like a tightrope walker.

Day 22

CW : Drug use

Night. I did cocaine with friends at a party. When I do cocaine or other drugs, I have to ejaculate otherwise it’s almost impossible for me to sleep: the white-hot chemistry in my brain needs to empty its valves. On those occasions, I usually masturbate to porn to make it easier, making myself come with a half-erection. My drug-softened cumshot tends to be oozing and pathetic. Tonight, I don’t have the strength to masturbate without porn.

Morning. I had a sleepless night.

Day 23

Endless day. Morning-afters (or rather day-afters) are particularly terrible when I have a broken heart. I don’t want anything. I’m a prisoner of an endless present. My brain doesn’t secrete anything. I am a larva without libido. A maggot with disordered brain chemistry. Even porn can’t do anything for me when my serotonin is killing me. Not even a double penetration scene.

Day 24

A thought. I’ll sometimes (before the present month, of course) masturbate to pornography that is far removed from my own reality. I’ll sometimes watch more hardcore videos, fisting, and BDSM. I even ejaculated once to a golden shower video. A man was pissing in the hole of a young adult who was on all fours in the shower. However, I have no intention or desire to try these practices in “real life”.

I’m then purely a voyeur. It’s pure entertainment. Is it dangerous? Can this turn me into a sex pervert?

Day 25

Morning. All the bodies I imagine and all the positions I fantasize about with my eyes closed bring me back to my ex. I am haunted. My mind has confined me in its embrace. I never expected to go through a breakup during this porn-free month, and now, I am a prisoner of my own memories. They’re all I have to bring myself to orgasm. I have no more sexuality. I don’t want to sleep with someone else. I’m in a no man’s land of desire.

Ground zero. Back to simple masturbation. Finding myself again.

Day 26

Evening. I masturbated to dirty videos of me and my ex again, videos that were buried deep in my phone. It was very painful. This month was supposed to be a way for me to rediscover my pleasure, to reclaim it, to enhance my imagination, but, in the end, I only hurt myself even more by clinging to the past and to dead desires. I’ve always had a self-destructive tendency. To set fire to everything and watch it burn.

This is not a cry for help. It’s a call to heal. My ashes will be fertile.

Day 27

A thought. I wonder if there’s a fundamental difference between gay porn and straight porn. In gay porn, I have the impression that power dynamics are fluid, that bodies have several possibilities. As if, because it was gay porn, we are essentially dealing with new, disruptive, unprecedented relationships.

In straight porn, the power dynamics that we see in society are reproduced: woman as object, dominated, stiletto heels and schoolgirl outfits, and hairless bodies and vulvas. What images are we saturated with? Who will change our gaze, and how?

Day 28

Morning. I befriend my pleasure like one befriends a feral cat. I discover a new language that I thought was dead. I lie on my bed and focus on my bodily sensations. No visuals. Just the sound of my breath, the touch of my fingers against the head of my penis and on my balls. Two fingers caressing my anus and gently penetrating it.

I am hot summer rain. I dissect the sensations without words and without imagery. Alive. I come hard, but peacefully.

I reconnect with a body that has been ravaged by sadness. Rebuilding desire.

Day 29

Evening. Powerful desire for self-destruction. I want to be dominated, annihilated. I want to be given orders, to be possessed in my master’s raw and ancient language. Strong hands around my neck, swift slaps on my ass, thick saliva on my back. I want a vacation from myself. That’s all I ask. Give me a break from myself.

There is salvation in submission, don’t you ever doubt it.

Day 30

Early in the morning. Through the fog of my antipsychotics (I’ve been taking 12 mg of Seroquel to help me sleep since I started taking antidepressants), I feel the onset of an erection in my lower abdomen. I rub the tip of my penis against my silky sheets and imagine a pair of buttocks against my sex. I hug a pillow and imagine my lover’s warm body. I gradually go back to sleep and return to the fluid world of dreams.

I wake up an hour later, the sheet sticking to my urethral opening due to dried precum. I rip it off in one go, a soft moan of pain escaping from my lips.

Day 31

Last day. A thought. Tomorrow, I can masturbate to porn again. Am I excited? I don’t know. I’m hungry for something, but I can’t quite put my finger on what. I’m always hungry for something unspeakable.

But, somewhere in the meanders of this pleasure diet, I found several things: a broken heart, a loneliness that tainted the erotic images, a focus that’s been torn by speed. Somewhere in the recesses of this month, I healed.