Initiation

Your first experience is probably when you are an adolescent. One of your friends, really a friend of a friend -- a guy in the grade above you who is known to be a bit of a troublemaker -- has something in his backpack. He is showing whatever it is to all the kids on the playground. He charges them five cents, but someone tells him it's your first time so he says he'll show you for free. You peer into his backpack, trembling with the anticipation of illicit experience. There's a picture of a lady. A lady with no clothes on!

You're not sure what to do. A bizarre urge overtakes you. You run to a nearby jungle gym and you begin to climb one of the poles. You get to the top but you keep climbing in place like a monkey on a string. Girls point and laugh. It's all very confusing.

Next time he charges you 5 cents.


Maturation

Years go by and you become a regular user. In a fully developed habit, there is no masturbation, there is no manual stimulation whatsoever; there is only a pervasive need to acquire and view more and more pornographic material. Climax would just cut short the rush. Once a picture or a video is viewed a few times it loses its potency, it no longer fulfils the need. It is spent. You keep it anyway, with all the rest. You soon have whole sectors of your hard-drive and piles of CDs brimming with dirty pictures and nasty videos that just aren't any good anymore. You can no longer get by on your own supply and you can't use someone else's -- you might catch something from their keyboard or mouse. You just have to find another source. Buy it from a vendor. Steal it off the internet when you can. Maybe a friend will hook you up. Where it comes from doesn't matter, you must find more! And then more again. And then yet more! Soon enough the thick clouds of butts and breasts and genitalia part and you come forth from a daze in some other room, in some other house, in front of some other computer with no recollection of what happened. You look confusedly at a screen plastered with flesh only to find that three days passed since you first clicked the mouse. You grab your coat; apologizing as you head out the door to the stranger you meet in what is presumably his living room, and swear, "Never again. Never again!"

A month later it happens again.

After the thirtieth recurrence, the truth might penetrate the soft, wet recesses of your brain and you might realize that yours is a fully mature and uncontrollable porn habit.


Permutation

By now, you are a connoisseur. Obviously, you are fully experienced with the soft and the hard stuff, but you know that those labels are just the tip of the categorical iceberg. If you're looking to establish a spin to your habit, the categories from which to choose are innumerable. To get a handle on them it is useful to break them into groups. For instance, there are categories that pertain to sexual orientation: straight, gay, bi-, lesbian. You can group by the ethnicity of the participants: Asian, Indian, interracial, black, black-on-white, white-on-black. Or by point of entry: anal, vaginal (this is the milk and potatoes), oral, aural, ocular. By position: missionary, doggy-style, over-a-chair, man-on-top, woman-on-top, pretzel, 69, in-a-box, lotus. By age: just 18, mature, teen, wifey, barely legal, wizened. By atypical biological adaptation: double-dicked, triple-nippled, transsexual (Chicks with Dicks), dwarf, Amazon, knotted-penis. There are fetishes: shoe, bondage, bestiality (this category has as many sub-categories as there are chapters in the Physiologus), S&M, teddy bears, leather, nylon, neoprene, lollipop. You can spice it all up a notch by adding more people -- hence orgy, group, gang bang. And all the participants don't have to be real either -- hence Real Doll, cartoon porn, hentai. Where any of the male participants in a particular grouping choose to leave the evidence of their climax is a huge part of the porn vernacular. Hence the "cumshot" in all of its forms: the anal cumshot, the pearl-necklace, bukkake, and, of course, the immortal Facial Cumshot (whose popularity is the focus of gender issues researchers around the globe).

Even before you got sucked in deep and were still into run-of-the-mill male-oriented softcore, you had options. There were categories for all the different focuses of the common man: breasts, asses, legs, and so on. But you know that no category really has to stand on its own. You know the fundamental rule of porn: any number of categories can be combined to yield a fully legitimate and respectable new category. Fact is, this "new" category probably already has a devoted following. You can have simple permutations like "teen anal" or "lesbian Asian". You can also have "black-on-white double-dong gang-bang." And you could just as well have "interracial barely legal group sex with transsexual teddy bear facial cumshot and ocular penetration to boot." You were into that scene once.


Cessation

It has to end somewhere. You come to a point where the endless combinations, the endless titillation, the endless fulfillment of urges linked to the process of reproduction through pre-recorded imagery and sound must stop.

You reach that point and you look for help. You find that there are resources for people in your shoes. There's a hotline for porn fiends who are trying to break their habit that has very empathic staffers (they know you're used to expressing your deepest, dirtiest secrets through a handset). Sometimes you call them and they take the edge off your need. Nonetheless, you later give in to a multi-week bout of porn viewing -- you just lock your door and don't leave your room.

Nobody knows what happened to you until your mother finds you unconscious, draped over your monitor. Fortunately, there are clinics for folks who have been ravaged by their own porn-viewing excesses. You check into one and they help you back to your feet. Afterwards, you join a program where you are partnered to a eunuch. Your discussions and time together teach you much about the world and alternatives. You also participate in a support group where you bond with other porn-fiends. All of you hope that eventually together you will triumph in your struggle against Big P.

You've heard it postulated that the male sexual impulse is at the root of historical female subjugation. You think that maybe men are enslaved by their pervasive sexual needs. For you, the choice between a life free of porn and one mired in its use is not about societal standards, about decency, nor about gender issues. It is just about time. Time is a valuable commodity for all mortal beings. And porn, like her sisters alcohol and net surfing, likes to suck it right up and swallow.

You get to a point where you think you can do it: you think you can just quit Cold Turkey. You decide to go small at first and commit to making it through March without using. Buddies of yours who are still in the excessive-masturbation throes of their much milder habits don't understand the reason for your Porn Free March.

You build a bonfire in your yard and burn all your magazines and the lacy lingerie you used to wear on your head when looking at bondage. You end your magazine subscriptions at the local filth shop. The owner insists that you were half of his business and that without you he will surely be closed by the next quarter. You end your subscription to the Sick-Pic-A-Day email list and sell your 600 CD collection of digital smut on eBay. Then, with a sigh, you format your hard disk. Finally, you invite all your friends and relatives to your home. You tell them about your decision and that you are going to need 110% of their support.

They tell you they are there for you.


Temptation

Your dedication to a month free of porn is not always easy to stand by. Opportunities to stray leap out at you from behind every corner. You decide to sell an old computer to your sister so her kids can play educational video games. Knowing what filthy stuff lies in its innards, you have to sweep the hard drive for offensive material. It's difficult to resist taking a peep. A friend sends you a link to a website that specializes in "hardcore male animal fur suit sex." It takes every ounce of your resolve to keep from clicking the tempting URL. When you threw out all your porn, you kept your collection of classic videos. It took a while to assemble Caligula, Deep Throat, Debbie Does Dallas, and all the rest. You just can't bear to dump them or give them to unworthy friends. Maybe you'll bequeath them to your nephew when he comes of age, but for now they just sit on your shelf. The trouble is you used to put Behind the Green Door on in the background just to relax. Now you're all edgy but your new life course says that even classic artsy porn is a definite no-no. You stand with your finger on the play button for nearly an hour as you struggle with your inner demons. Eventually you take the tape out, put it back in its case and onto the shelf. You know that such seemingly innocuous opportunities are just bricks in the road back to your once raging and out-of-control porn habit. They are small morsels, but once you feed the monster it will want whole, fresh virgins. Soon you'll be devouring fresh virgins, not-so-fresh virgins, wholly unvirginous whores, lesbian cheerleaders who like sex toys... before you know it you're back to transsexual teddy bear facial cumshots. You don't want that. You want to be free.

There were trials (and probably even tribulations) but you make it through Porn Free March without deviating from the path once. It was a temporal oasis of self-control. It went so well that you are now enjoying a self-prescribed dose of Porn Free Life. As a once oft-debauched titillation-burnout, you wonder how feasible a life free from porn is for you. You figure you will just take it one step at a time.