Taking Back Your Mind: A Radical Feminist Approach to Recovering from Porn Use Kitty Follow Apr 1, 2019 · 9 min read

Just a note: this essay is addressing radical feminists (or gender critical/radical feminist-leaning feminists) and therefore starts with an assumption the reader has a baseline understanding of the horrors perpetrated by the sex industry and porn industry. That reality is not up for debate here. Thanks.

As radical feminists, we know we live in a society poisoned by porn on a global scale in an epidemic that’s been escalating. If you are one of the many women who istrapped in the cycle of degrading participation in viewing porn, no matter the origins of your usage, just know that you are not alone and that there’s hope for you. Read this essay with an open mind — take what works for you and leave the rest.

BE AWARE OF NEUROPLASTICITY

First off — your brain is not in stasis like scientists used to believe. Discovering and understanding the concept of neuroplasticity was a first step in my healing process. Neuroplasticity is defined as the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment. Neural pathways are simply connections between parts of your nervous system that have formed from patterns of thinking. I’d suggest taking some time to explore the concept of neuroplasticity.

So what does neuroplasticity mean in relation to porn use? We know that your brain is affected by porn, but those effects (sometimes referred to as pornsickness) are not permanent. You are not doomed!

Here’s what happened: every time you had an orgasm to porn, the neural pathway between groinal response (getting turned on)/arousal/orgasm and the stimuli of porn use was strengthened. The neural pathway for groinal responses/arousal/orgasm from non-porn stimuli has not been used and is therefore weaker. That’s why it can feel like porn is the only thing that turns you on or that gets you off, and/or you can lose groinal response to situations (like consensual & healthy sexual interaction with people you’re actually attracted to) that you know “should” turn you on, used to turn you on, or you wish you had normal arousal responses during.

If you’ve been using porn since a really young age and/or extremely heavily, your brain will be more affected, because the effects on your brain are cumulative and neuroplasticity is more intense before adulthood. Even still: you are not doomed. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to rewire your brain by avoiding the old neural pathways and using and establishing the new and healthy ones, but with that time and effort there will be progress. A healthy, loving, non-pornified sexuality is worth fighting for.

DON’T HAVE ORGASMS TO PORN

So now that we know about neuroplasticity and neural pathways, we know they can be addressed. Not having any orgasms to thoughts about porn or porn is the way to do this, combined with working on having orgasms to thoughts of healthy sex. I’m going to share the methods I have used, which may or may not be appropriate for you. If they are not, it will be useful to both yourself and others to come up with alternative methods.

When having sex or masturbating, if I have any intrusive thoughts about porn or violent/pornographic sex, I have a process for stopping those neural pathways from activating. When moving toward orgasm, if I was thinking about porn/violence, I would physically stop moving towards the orgasm and then try to clear my mind. I used a variety of techniques that are recommended for cyclical anxious thoughts or intrusive thoughts. When I wasn’t thinking about the porn imagery any more, I would continue. If this was happening more than a few times or I couldn’t get it out of my mind, I would stop sexual activity entirely and move on with my day. Distraction can be a very useful tool.

I’ve been asked what to think about instead and it really varies person to person. If you’re not ready or able to fantasize about healthy interactions, try to just focus on the physical sensations and keep your mind clear of thoughts of sex. Focus on the enjoyable things you’re experiencing and different tactile things. When you’re feeling ready and less in danger of fantasizing about porn or violent sex, using healthy & loving sexual fantasies is great too. It is normal during recovery to not have the same intense groinal response to these fantasies as you do to porn and doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong or that you’ll never have normal arousal responses. It just takes time.

An important detail: if you have sexual partners, it’s very important to be aware of how your reliance on porn affects the sex you have with them. If you are unable to orgasm with another partner without thoughts of porn, it will most likely be necessary to stop having sex while you work on healing your sexuality, which brings us to the next section.

SUPPORT FROM LOVED ONES

When you are struggling with quitting porn, you need people on your side. If you have a sexual partner(s), you especially need them on your side. This is an intense journey and involves a lot of shame, especially if as a woman with radical politics. Shame and isolation are huge barriers to recovery for any person struggling with any kind of addiction. If people don’t know what you’re going through and how you’re trying to fix it, how can they help you?

If your sexual partner is not understanding of this situation, I would urge you to examine that relationship. If you don’t seem to be able to make them understand the seriousness of this situation or if you struggling with this causes serious sexual incompatibility, it may not be the right relationship for you right now.

Dependency on porn for sexual arousal is a very painful and frightening thing to combat, especially when so much of it is accompanied by sexual abuse and trauma. Finding friends who are struggling the way you are and having a plan of action together can be really helpful. For example, having a friend who has the information to some sort of parental lock or filter on your phone or computer can be a good barrier. Yes, pretty much any filter is by-passable, but that extra step can sometimes be all you need to say wait, I don’t want to do this, and reach out to a friend for help. That help can be serious talk about how porn has affected you or doing something fun and distracting until the urge has passed. Feel it out.

KNOW THAT POLITICAL AWARENESS MAY NOT BE A FIX

I’ve had multiple women confess miserably that understanding what the women in porn are going through didn’t stop their porn use, and the continued use after that knowledge made them feel even more ashamed and isolated with those feelings than before. Being a female person that uses porn doesn’t make you immune to the effects of it — it causes us to see women as objects. I’ve found that often the lack of empathy for the women we are watching mirrors the lack of empathy we feel for ourselves. Many women consume porn that mirrors the kind of sexual abuse they’ve experienced or fetishizes specific oppressions that they face. I don’t think this is a coincidence.

It is frightening and disturbing when your eyes are open to the horror that is the porn industry, the physical and mental toll performing in pornography takes, the sex trafficking involved, and all the other details, and still once that video is on, it doesn’t make a difference. That is what porn does to your brain. It’s an awful truth that you cannot rely on your sense of empathy to help you stop watching porn, because the porn itself has attacked that empathy so wholly. But that brings us to the next tip.

MOTIVATE YOURSELF THROUGH RAGE

Righteous female anger and spite are an excellent motivators. Framing your actions to yourself as actions of defiance is helpful in a lot of situations, but I think especially helpful in this one.

On a political level: learning about what women go through in the sex industry may not be enough — but learning about the men who have created this, fostered this, and prospered from this is a whole new ball game. Pimps, pornographers, and sex traffickers want you to watch porn. Pornography corporations and porn company CEOs want you to watch porn. They want the ad revenue. They want you to be pornsick so you come back for more. They don’t care how much harm they do to performers or porn consumers, all they care about is the money.

On this level, not watching porn is an act of resistance against a violent industry, a capitalist venture that has left nothing but ruin on an unimaginable scale in its wake. They don’t care about rapes or serial murders committed by porn addicts. They don’t care about the new rise of child on child sexual abuse where little kids are molesting and violently raping each other because they saw it in porn.They don’t care about the suicides and the drug addiction and the trafficking. They just want your mind so they can have money. Are you going to give it to them?

On a personal level, if you were exposed to porn by someone who sexually abused you and/or someone who was sexually abused and just passing it on, I am so fucking angry for you, and I hope you can get angry too. That never should have happened. If someone wanted you to act out porn, or wanted you to think porn was normal, I’m angry at them, and I’m angry at whoever taught them that, and back into that lineage of rape culture forever.

Porn wants you to feel like a fuckhole. Porn wants you to feel like your worth is what a man wants to do to you. Porn wants you to feel like an object. and not just you — all your female friends, your female relatives, little tiny girls. Do you want us all to feel like fuckholes? No. That’s NOT what we are. Get angry. Grief comes in many forms and righteous female rage is one of them.

If you get the urge to look up porn — turn to these emotions instead. Go read what pornographers say about women. Check out how much revenue the porn site you were going to use is bringing in. Be angry at who did this to you on a personal or political level. Say fuck you, I’m not going to do what you told me I should do, I’m not who and what you’re telling me I am.

MAINTENANCE ORGASMS

Your mileage may vary wildly on this point but I’ve known many women who have a lot of trouble falling asleep or feeling anxious/tense/irritable without having an orgasm, or have their mood affected negatively from not having regular orgasms. When you’re trying to stop being pornsick, reaching orgasm without porn can become extremely frustrating, and can bring on relapses because you feel like you can’t have an orgasm without porn.

One tactic is a powerful vibrator and/or lube. Simply put, you can have an orgasm in a really small amount of time, giving you less time to struggle with not using old neural pathways. I know there are debatable downsides of heavy vibrator use so I don’t want to say this is the best solution, but if you need regular orgasms to keep an even keel, this works for some women.

IT’S TIME TO STOP USING PORN

About 3 years after quitting porn (after being introduced to it at a very young age) I started to have normal sexual arousal come back. I still struggle with relapse, especially when re-traumatized or when trauma is coming up hard. If you relapse, you are not alone, and what matters is starting again. It doesn’t cancel all the time you spent without porn. This is a journey we’re undertaking, a reclamation of our brains from a sexually violent industry that seeks to destroy us. You can heal your sexuality from porn with time and energy, and it is absolutely worth it.

Get angry, get real, and get clean of porn. You can do it.