BY BRYAN REEVES

In my boyhood teenage days of yore, using pornography required patience, even imagination.

One of my early adventures with porn occurred on weekday afternoons when I got home from middle school. I discovered my step-father’s erotic treasure trove of Betamax video tapes with titles like “The Oriental Babysitter” and “Taxi Girls.” I only had a small window to watch them and pleasure myself a dozen or so times (oh, to be a teenager again) before anyone got home.

A few years later my tastes grew more sophisticated when Mom started getting Victoria’s Secret catalogs in the mail. Although I kinda already knew what the big secret was, these glossy catalogs made my imagination work harder at unlocking it each time, and I delighted in that.

Those days of porn teasing my imagination are gone.

At this very moment, I (and most every other man in Western Civilization) have in my hands a little device loaded with the entire known universe of pornographic material ready to stir my lust and blow my loins wide open. I never have to wait for the mail again.

“Enough is Enough” and “CovenantEyes,” two internet safety organizations (one is Catholic-based), offer these sobering statistics:

Every second, 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography.

The pornography industry is a $97 billion industry worldwide.

Men are 543% more likely to look at porn than females.

More than 1 in 5 searches are for pornography on mobile devices.

As a single man for the last four years, great sexual encounters with women have been a rare luxury. My iPhone, on the other hand, is all too willing to dance for me, undress for me, tease me, lick me, suck me, screw me, and all around indulge me—whatever I want, anytime I want.

I do not generally have an addictive personality, yet I have at times gone weeks using Internet pornography every night to quickly arouse and then satiate myself. There were times I seemed to need it just to fall asleep. I used it so much that it once even gave me repetitive stress injury, messing up my otherwise formidable basketball game.

There’s nothing wrong with masturbation. But modern pornography can be a serious detriment not just to men, but to the women we love, too.

Here are five reasons why I believe men must give up consistent use of pornography for personal stimulation:

1. Porn can ruin our erections with actual women.

After I had been using porn moderately for about a year, I began to notice that I couldn’t sustain erections with women as long as I once could. I was horny as ever, but without the constantly changing visual erotic stimulation that watching video after video offered, one woman’s body couldn’t hold my erotic focus as effectively as it used to. To my frustrated surprise, real sex had become somewhat under-stimulating. Tragic. Since I gave up porn, even morningwood has made its return like an exotic tree rescued from the brink of extinction.

2. Porn can train our bodies to premature ejaculation.

I never had a problem with quick climax before I consistently used porn. I could always match, if not outlast, my female sexual partners, with or without a condom, with solid erections.

With porn, I could watch a short video and within minutes have myself rocketing towards climax. But I’d stop myself before I went too far, because I always wanted to see what different erotic adventure awaited me in the next video, just a click away. I would do this for an hour, rapidly rising in mindless bliss with every new short video, stopping myself at the edge each time. Eventually I’d realize how much time had gone by and I’d choose the best video I’d seen and let it throw me over the edge.

I was tuning my body to quickly rise and climax. I can immediately stop moving my own hand when I masturbate. A real woman’s aroused body doesn’t stop moving so fast. It’s like trying to slam on the brakes of a speed boat in deep water. I often couldn’t handle her enthusiasm, and I started getting really concerned.

Thankfully, quitting porn has allowed my body’s nervous system to re-tune itself to a less-hurried sexual pace and rhythm.

3. It’s such a waste of time.

Watching porn is a stupid use of our precious time on planet Earth.

4. It creates unrealistic expectations of women.

Porn just makes us think women should be easier to get into bed. It makes us think we might get laid more if we were more bold or clever, or simply more aggressive.

Women in porn videos are always willing to let a man (or men) aggressively open them up and do whatever they want. They’ll take the money shot right in the face, on their knees beneath a cock and a camera, as if to fully underscore their willingness to be conquered and owned by a man—for all the world to see.

In my experience, actual women don’t react to calculating male aggression by opening their legs. Even if some do it doesn’t mean it’s a direct link to creating an authentic intimate relationship. It just creates two bodies slapping into each other.

Women are lusty, sexual creatures, for sure. Just like us. But when men are ready to relate to women in deeper ways, ways that include sexuality and also transcend it, porn is an awful study. The wondrous feminine mystique of a woman, the mystique us men so desperately crave to experience, is only made available to the men who learn how to cherish a woman in her fullness. That doesn’t happen anywhere in porn.

5. When we watch porn, we may be supporting human trafficking, slavery, rape, and blackmail of women all over the world.

Despite my tame tastes, I unwittingly saw videos on the average free porn site that disturbed me.

I almost surely watched men manipulate, even outright blackmail, women into otherwise unwanted sex in fake taxi cabs, fake doctor’s offices, fake casting sets, and more. The camera never showed the man’s face, always only the woman’s.

I’ve discovered countless examples of criminal cases worldwide where people, mostly men, have been arrested and prosecuted for creating pornography with women they trafficked from other countries; women who were enslaved in buildings they couldn’t leave; women kept in place by physical violence; women threatened with exposure to their families; and more. I know now that I must have watched videos where women did sex acts they were forced to do. And my tastes in porn were downright tame.

I’m still tempted to watch porn sometimes. Even as I write this, my iPhone sits quietly beside me, able in a matter of seconds to unleash a marauding army of sexy “Oriental Babysitters” straight into my lizard brain. But clearly nothing good ever comes from that, so to speak.

Men, we’ve got to stop using porn. I know it’s a quick fix. I know some couples even use it to spice up an otherwise fading sex life. But let’s find other ways. Let’s get creative. Porn is easy; it’s low-hanging fruit. It’s beneath our brilliance.

And it’s not just hurting us. It’s hurting women.

Bryan Reeves is an author, speaker, life coach and transformational projects entrepreneur who has rocketed satellites into space, survived the Australian Outback, and done really stupid things with women which he deeply regrets and has learned a great deal from. Learn more about Bryan at ManagingTheMagic.com, on Facebook, and on Twitter. This article was originally featured on the Good Men Project and reposted with permission.

Photo via josemanuelerre/Flickr (CC BY S.A.-2.0)