Going ‘Cold Monkey’: The Rantings Of A Former PORN Addict

Hi, my names Mark and I’m a Pornaholic!

Not words I ever thought I would say out loud nor type for that matter – as flogging the log with a diurnal regularity had become such a commonality to my daily routine that it never would have occurred to me that something so base, yet normal could be classified as an actual addiction.

Like with lots of things: turns out I was wrong!

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo notes:

“Boys’ brains are being digitally rewired for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they’re totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive.”

Oh fuck! I thought. I’ve been at this for quite some time….like a decade plus! Since before there was internet!

So Porn and the isolated act of choking ones chicken can be a complete addiction as it turned out, and one Ted Talk and a bit of reading later and it seemed the Dopamine reward centres in my brain had been completely rewired for some time, and to the point where real life ‘getting yo freak on’ just didn’t cut it any more.

I mean, I’d often wondered why I was so bored during sex that as soon as I’d gotten my horizontal jogging partner’s rocks off I’d be ordering her a taxi so I could get on down to some satisfying self relief with a bunch of porno scenarios way more interesting than what I just taken part in.

Not for my general lack of trying to make things more interesting, it was just that when I had the constant variety of endless, nubile, enthusiastic, porno hard bodies ready to suck dick at the click of a button, it was hard to find that babbling, drunk chick – endlessly rambling about the lovely feel of my shaved head and making the constant obvious supposition; ‘Oooooh, you must work out’ -  in any way remotely interesting.

I’m not discriminating. The same goes for sober ‘post coffee date’ chicks too. They’re usually just a bit more awkward about it due to the lack of Dutch courage. But either way, my tolerance and interest for verbal foreplay took a serious hit when I realised I could just click a link and access instant gratification.

See the ‘instant click’ bag smacking satisfaction and lack of hassle that comes from the gargantuan web of online smut – all free and ready to send your tiny monkey brain truly porno ape shit – was slowly but surely asserting it’s dominance over my man brain, to the point where if I’m honest; regular human interactions and regular sex bored the tits clean off of me.

I enjoyed the ego hit of picking someone up, getting them off or just scoring in general, but over a period of years I’d noticed I was becoming an emotionally dulled, hollowed out Homunculus of a man. My girlfriends over the years seemed to notice it too, and worse yet, I didn’t seem to mind.

Unless I could imagine a variety of nekkid glamour models working into my sex scenarios and performing various athletically improbable carnally unrealistic roles, then I felt unfulfilled. Like a low rent Tiger Woods without the cash to pay for all those hookers to cheat with my supermodel wife on.

I might have looked and acted human (well, to an extent anyway), but all those little thoughts and impulses that would drive non-addicted people to do certain things – interact with women, give a shit about getting a partner, care about sustaining any form of relationship – were being replaced in me with an apathy that knew it could just click on porn and avoid any of that day to day hassle.

Now, I’m not going to lie, I’m a solitary creature, talkative in company, but largely isolated and silent but for short conversations with my trio of pet cats, so not having to deal with people kind of worked out. I didn’t mind the lack of compromise, and being busy you just chock it up to ‘not enough hours in the day’ so I guess I’ll just drop trou and take care of bidness without having to make any phone calls.

But truth is I’ve been becoming disconnected for quite a while now – distant and in short; a bit of a cunt. In fact a total cunt! A relentless, porno brained, emotionally switched off cunty, cunt, McCunterson. And it wasn’t until a pal pointed out the obvious; ‘You’re a complete porn addict’ that I realised that yes – I was a complete porn addict, and it hadn’t ever occurred that it could be a problem until my instant epiphany; oh shit! This is a problem!

Now I’m not going to blame porn for this. Porn is what it is, and I’ve recognised that I, like many other dudes, have got a problem with it (in that I like it waaaay tooooo muuuuch), but in an effort to be more energetic, healthy minded, functional and proportionately strong grip wise in both hands – I’ve decided to go cold turkey (or should I say monkey?) and thus haven’t watched porn or whacked off in over two weeks.

The overall results should be my getting mentally sharper, physically more energetic and just generally more interested in women that don’t live on the internet. And in the two weeks since I’ve stopped beating the Bishop I’ve already noticed that due to my inability to blow vast wads of testosterone into the closest baby wipe – I’ve become more assertive, less tolerant of shite, less sleepy and most of all: manly as all good fuck.

This can only be a good thing.

But I’m not going to get all preachy. I’ll leave that to this guy in the vid below, who does a much more eloquent job than me in explaining what happens when you’re a porn fiend (like I was up until 2 weeks ago) and how maybe taking time off might be a good idea.

He’s the reason I have balls like water melons, a new found desire to get in fights with other men, a quicker wit and an eye for real life women that I previously would have labelled high maintenance head melters due to their disinterest in giving me an instant blow job while their glum looking friend tickled my ass with a feather.

I’m giving this porno detox a try dammit!

Wish me and my inflated nut sack luck!

And for more info and humor on the subject:

Cracked: The 10 Steps To Porn Addcition

The Anarchy Dilemma And Time Off For Good Behavior

an·ar·chism   [an-er-kiz-uhm]
noun
1.
a doctrine urging the abolition of government or governmental restraint as the indispensable condition for full social and political liberty.
2.
the methods or practices of anarchists, as the use of violence to undermine government.

It’s been a while since I blogged, so excuse me, I actually am as busy as I often complain I am. Which means in my free time I like to sleep, read stuff for review or lets face it; masturbate (hey, I’m only human).

But when I get the time I like to Blog, and I decided I’d answer a question, more an accusation that’s been leveled my way lately by folks who’ve known me for a while:

BAD MAN, how come you’ve stopped with the political?

True enough, I’ve always had Anarchist ‘Fuck The Man’ tendencies and especially on Face Book I was more than keen to bemoan Capitalism and all of it’s inherent evils, Politician’s, Corporate corruption and just about anything else that stuck in my craw from the weeks news with an added dose of choler.

In the past 2 years I’ve stopped doing that. And most people have presumed this is to do with my running a business myself with BAD HAVEN. You can’t berate ‘The Man’ if you seek to emulate him eh? But this is only partially the reason I’ve stopped my frequent Anarchic bile eruptions. For the full reason I’m going to have to get a tad philosophical on yo asses:

Now most people have no idea due to my goof ball nature and childish demeanor that I started life as a disgruntled philosophy grad. Ironically so did Ricky Gervais and we’re both twats so maybe there’s a pattern, but I digress. The point is that as a closet philosopher I’ve recently had to reassess my rationale and in doing so I came up wanting.

I found that coming down on global corporate ethics (or the lack of) and a banking sector that’s morally bankrupt is essentially hypocritical when you eventually seek to make money amid a system that supports them. But again, my reasons for Face Book silence are philosophical, not borne of a necessary corporate change of ethos.

In short I realised that unless I was prepared to step up to the plate and make a personal stand against the things I complained about then daily strident mouth off’s weren’t really going to change anything. They were cathartic on the short term, if not a bit pointless, and wasted a shit load of energy I really should have been pumping elsewhere. So I stopped ranting and two books and a successful website later I feel I’ve justified that decision.

But just to clarify, it’s not that I’ve abandoned Anarchism or indeed the idea that change can be produced through the undermining of government. I just don’t think the disorganized malcontents of the ‘Occupy Movement’ are the ones to elicit it. And even if there was change – through global protest, world wide bloody Marxist revolution or some other as yet untested on-line means that may aid in overthrowing Government, the corporations and the banks all in one fell swoop….

Then what?

Will we radically alter our natures so as to eliminate the cyclical? By which I mean there have been lots of revolutions, power change-overs, re-elections etc. But somehow things always stay the same. Propaganda isn’t getting better, we’re not getting stupider, technology isn’t advancing the playing field, but we still end up with bastards in charge. Some are nicer than others, but essentially the game stays the same.

My take is this: While our world evolves around us, our natures stay pretty much the same. We’re still the same greedy, murderous, survivalist sex monkeys that we were 5 million years ago (I’ll have to recalculate for Creationists) and every time we get a fresh shot at fixing things it has a brief honeymoon period before we just go back to fucking each other over again, over some thing or another.

In the past it was Power, land, riches, resources etc. In the future it’s not so far removed, in fact it’s pretty much the same.

Told you it was going to get philosophical.

So I thought about it and I realized that instead of focusing all my attention on something that even if I could change it, it would eventually revert to what it was before (and worse I’d have helped), I would focus on making something for me and mine. I’d do something that’s not at all hypocritical, if anything it’s the very essence of our dirty little man-monkey natures. I decided I would make something for the nerd tribe.

So I made BAD HAVEN. It’s a place for my nerd Pal’s and me, and while it probably wont change the world it sure does make me happy. And it makes some other folks happy too. It was either that or keep pushing the metaphorical Anarchy bolder up hill in order to beat a nature that we’re sadly stuck with. And I’m tired of wading against the tide.

So until we reach a state of bio-mechanic fusion, through which technological singularity frees us from our wicked natures I’ll be over here: http://www.badhaven.com/

Feel free to come join me.

 

Recent posts by The BAD MAN:

Saving Superheroes: How Superhero Comics Need To Change To Stay Relevant

My Dread Of DREDD Was Dreadfully Unwarranted

Having tucked into Dredd for a nice 90 odd minute run time I came out not quite the husk of embittered fan boy rage I’d expected. particularly after my fan boy breakdown that followed the Danny Cannon/Sly Stallone version of the 90′s. This version was a faithful, visceral, hyper violent, dystopian and utterly uncompromising wrecking ball of a movie and I’m honestly still reeling from my euphoric glee at a genuinely well portrayed version of a very black and white character.

Under Pete Travis eye and Alex Garland’s pen Karl Urban did the fans proud, and now more than ever 2000AD, the galaxy’s one time Greatest Mag needs to capitalise the shit out of this big success and make Dredd relevant again in it’s pages (and not just via their merger with IDW). I have ideas on this, that along with the mysterious mind of the mad man known as Majestic will soon come to fruition. Stay tuned over on 
http://www.badhaven.com/

Professionalism. You Either Got It Or Ya Don’t

pro·fes·sion·al

[pruh-fesh-uh-nl] Show IPA

adjective

1.

following an occupation as a means of livelihood or for gain:a professional builder.

;

It’s been over a year now since I set up badhaven.com , a site that first began life as a shitty blog – a launch pad for my then fresh off the presses self published book (Deadfast), which quickly morphed into an alternative nerd forum by accident and became something of a juggernaught while I wasn’t looking. ‘Life is what happens when your busy making other plans’ quoth John Lennon. But then so apparently is web sites.

Since then we’ve spiraled into something more massive than my tiny simian brain could have ever comprehended. I became CEO of something far beyond me (what does that even mean, and can someone tell me if I’m doing it right?) and the site blossomed into a hugely unprofessional success of sorts, that looked okay out front but was held together with spit and bailing wire round back – for anyone who cared to look – because seriously; our naive trust of everybody and anybody was incompetently laudable.

A year on I’ve cobbled together another (as yet unpublished) book, recruited a load of writers who are by far more talented than I am (and make me raggedly jealous on a daily basis) and had a good friend convert my one time ‘shitty blog’ into a gorgeous looking bit of web wonder that actually looks as good as it reads, and even charges me money for the privilege of being so vast and consumptive that lots of people now actually take the time to visit it. Wowzers!

The point of this great accomplishment gush is that a year on, we’ve kind of done something deliriously ambitious, my BAD HAVEN chums and I. We, and certainly I, have become bigger than the sum of our parts in this grand venture into territories, that were for me at least, once entirely unknown.

Oh what masturbatory, self congratulatory back slapping pap is this BAD MAN you might ask? (and rightly so to anyone who’s so arrogant as to refer to themselves by their third person pseudonym. Ed’s note: I am!)

Well I’m not slapping my own back solo I tell you, for there’s no ‘I’ in team, but I do feel that every now and then it’s nice to take a step back from my daily melody of madness (both administrative, writing, social and otherwise) and enjoy our ongoing achievement which was just over a year ago not even a bit of code in the gigaplectic vastness of t’interweb.

Part of me keeps demanding that, that makes me a professional at something. But then the other part – the perpetual infant that lives within my stocky substance and is only ever inches away from surfacing in a juvenile spree, who laughs at farts and people falling over in public! That guy feels otherwise on the matter.

And that guy, ladies and germs, needs an outlet of sorts that isn’t solely BH related, and isn’t making all those (relatively) intelligent moves in the realms of web site maneuvering.

So from now on I’ll be posting here in what small capacity my scarce free time grants me, on all those things I personally would like to rant, rave, moan, groan, gripe, gurn, growl, grind, bite, banter, berate, lament, lambaste, complain, condescend, or otherwise comment on.

I’ll be doing this with sporadic frequency and invite you to join me.

It will be for the most part entirely unprofessional.

Until next time

- The BAD MAN

This Weeks Articles By The BAD MAN:

Fashion Beast #1 Reviewed ‘IN A NUT SHELL’

The Phantom Stranger Reviewed ‘IN A NUT SHELL’

The Winners And Losers Of The New 52 Part #1

The Winners And Losers Of The New 52 Part #2

Ride: Southern Gothic Reviewed ‘IN A NUT SHELL’

Green Lantern #0 Reviewed ‘IN A NUT SHELL’