I remember thinking to myself, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to have normal sex again.
“Even though I could only really get off to porn, I knew inside that real sex and a real connection with a real person was what I wanted,” he adds. That’s when he found the thousands of men online discussing similar problems and decided to quit porn to see if his sexual encounters with women improved.
The doctor prescribed him Viagra, which helped him get erections but didn’t seem to fix the underlying problem. “I remember thinking to myself, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to have normal sex again,” he says. When that relationship ended he started going out to meet women, but when he went home with them he would again struggle to get an erection, sometimes even when watching porn on his own. “When she came back I was excited to see her and we ripped each other’s clothes off and it was like … nothing’s happening. He turned to porn to keep himself occupied. Problems for Parks’ sex life emerged when he was 24 and his girlfriend went away for a few months. He progressed from finding his father’s Playboy collection to spending up to two hours a day streaming porn in his late teens and 20s. Something similar happened to Brian Parks, a 32-year-old manager from Toronto. “I would find myself fantasizing about porn while having sex with women,” he said. A Pittsburgh native, Rhodes first encountered porn as a pop-up on a video gaming website aged 11 and, like many teenagers, spent the next few years diligently masturbating.īy the time he was 19, he didn’t feel as though he was in control of his habit and found he wasn’t as attracted to female partners as he was to the fantasy sex he saw online. Photograph: AlamyĪlexander Rhodes, 26, founded the NoFap subreddit in 2011 as a place for people to anonymously discuss their perceived porn addictions. It was a virtuous circle, and within months his erectile dysfunction was gone.Īccording to anecdotal reports, rebooting promises benefits including increased libido, better sex and an increased motivation to meet real-world sexual partners. He put this energy and the extra time to use by going to the gym. In Schmidinger’s case, he went cold turkey from adult material and, after around six weeks, noticed he felt “charged with some energy”. On top of this, some rebooters report that they feel less social anxiety, less “brain fog”, more energy and a greater ability to empathize with others. These offer support and advice for those seeking to take control over their lives, advocating a period of abstinence from porn and masturbation called “rebooting”.Īccording to anecdotal reports, rebooting promises benefits including increased libido, better sex and an increased motivation to meet real-world sexual partners. The result? Real-life sexual experiences are no longer stimulating enough.įor those who think they have a problematic relationship with porn, there are large online communities such as Reddit forum NoFap (the largest, with almost 180,000 members), Your Brain Rebalanced and Reboot Nation. Compulsive porn use is often paired with a tight-grip masturbation technique that can’t be replicated by a human orifice. Many believe that pornography is addictive, and that the endless stream of on-demand internet erotica catering to every imaginable fetish has hijacked their brain’s reward system.
Schmidinger is one of thousands of men, and some women, who report that their compulsive use of internet pornography is negatively affecting their real-world relationships, whether through erectile dysfunction, decreased sensation, or feelings of isolation and shame. “It perfectly described what I was experiencing,” Schmidinger says. That was the space where ‘it’ worked,” he says.Īfter a visit to a urologist confirmed that he had nothing wrong physically, Schmidinger turned to Google and stumbled upon a website – Your Brain On Porn – that described something called porn-induced erectile dysfunction. It happened enough times that he started to avoid sexual contact altogether. But trouble started in his 20s when he discovered that, when faced with real sexual partners, he couldn’t sustain an erection or reach orgasm.
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