Porn addiction is an interesting topic to discuss, given a fair number of us question if it’s really real. Using my own anecdotal experiences, I would say it is – my fascination with porn videos and erotica cost me the majority of my grade 9 and 10 years in high school, and I started to treat many of the tropes I saw as reality. I genuinely believed for a bit that everyone had a pretty ‘meh’ attitude about incest, that everyone masturbated as much as I did and that if I showed a girl enough affection, or attention, she would fall for me. If she didn’t, I wasn’t trying hard enough.

This was but a few examples of the things I believed in my freshman and sophomore years. I didn’t develop healthy relationships, I lied and cheated to get what I wanted, and while porn may not be entirely to blame for that, my addiction to it certainly didn’t help. There is a hundred to one chance that at least one developing boy or girl who has read my work suffers from being addicted to porn as well – it’s why I feel it necessary to depict bad sides of casual sex and jealousy, drama, pregnancies etc. in sex stories. If you’re addicted to porn, I don’t have a good suggestion for a way out. But if you are, and you’re reading stories like mine a lot, the least I can do is make sure readers don’t get obsessed with a type of sex that doesn’t exist.

We all like the unreal. Huge tit fetishes (I’m talking H+ cups), shemales (they do exist, but are unfairly stigmatized in the real world and are usually more shy than the open sluts they’re portrayed as in porn, plus a good number of people transitioning, let alone hermaphrodites, have difficulties having normal sex), anime/furry obsessions, I would say this is all to an extent normal for an interest. Odds are, if an actual anthropomorphized dog tried to have sex with you though, would you really jump on that opportunity? Think hard about what is only sexy in theory.

An addiction to porn is one thing, but an addiction to the unreal is another thing entirely. There are some types of porn that have a surprisingly huge following – mind fetish porn, weird dystopias where women are a slave race to men, etc, and there are some people who are specifically addicted to these. As I implied earlier, the point where this becomes a problem is when their mind assimilates everything in their regular life into this erotica wish-fulfillment fantasy. I often wonder how many people have read Bible Belt by Pandora Box and thought, “Ooh, wouldn’t it be cool if a girl became addicted to my cock just by looking at it?” The scary part for me is wondering how many people were sure of that, and how it may be inspired by stories like that. In the wake of the #MeToo movement and all of the male celebrity figureheads going down, it is important that we examine what role these ideas of how sex works in porn stories has. I understand it’s most likely an uncomfortable and divisive topic for most, but it needs to be addressed.

If this leaves you going, “Yeah well I never actually thought girls were all potential sluts that would love getting raped if the guy was good enough in bed, I just found the story sexy,” then good for you. Can you also tell me, in full confidence, that no person reading these stories is ever going to think that? Does everyone think like you? Speaking as someone who, embarrassingly, used to believe that very example I just gave, it’s a very important point to make, in case there’s another past me out there.

This is another reason why we have to be very aware of the real world and what is only sexy in theory. This topic is not limited to examples of, “Aw man, a tittyfuck isn’t as good as how it sounds in stories,” it has real-world consequences, especially for minors that we’re not allowed to admit are reading our stories but are totally reading our stories. They don’t have a full understanding of either sex or how people work yet. God knows you won’t have such an understanding of the latter until your late twenties, earliest. By accepting that rape is called ‘non-consensual sex’ for a reason or that the grand majority of girls don’t lactate just by getting aroused, we can close the realism gap between sex stories and realities, and imporve the sex and social lives of our viewers.

And by realism gap, I’m not talking about fantasy. By all means, write a story about a genie fucking a dinosaur, have fun. I’m talking about pretending some things exist in the real world when they don’t. No, not all girls have lesbian tendencies and just need to be coerced into it. No, not all guys will have sex before the end of high school or they’re inept. No, incest is not commonplace in the slightest. If you’re writing a sex story that has unreal elements, it’s your job as a writer to make sure you outline clearly that you’re writing a fantasy story, not something that looks like it could happen in real life. Ultimately that comes down to skill and practice, but you owe your readers that. If you have genuine respect for your reader audience, you owe them at least the respect of not making them sexually and socially confused.

Again, if you came to this because you believe you’re addicted to porn, I don’t want to claim I can help you when I can not. I satiate myself and try to limit masturbation and looknig at porn with willpower and the belief that I should masturbate when I’m truly horny, not when I’m bored (it’s super important to distinct the two). That’s just how it works for me, and I understand it won’t work for everyone. At the very least, I hoped this blog post has helped, whether you’re a consumer or a writer. I’ll talk to you all next week.