Considerations on M without P, my problems and recovery

So, I'm changing my goals from quitting PM to quitting P.
I'm making this post more for myself than for everyone, though I admit that criticism is all right.

First of all, I do not think that masturbation is harmful. It's the thought you're having while you do it that is.

To me, the main problem I have with porn is the loss of protagonism of my own sexual life. Also, roleplaying with strangers in the internet. The last one can easily be avoided if I don't have internet around when I'm aroused. The problem is, if I abstain from masturbation, the urges to come online simply become too great to resist.

Is masturbation is done in a healthy way (low frequency, low duration, no edging, not avoiding sex with wife due to masturbation), when I'm aroused as I believe I should be (picturing myself having sex with a woman), I don't see the harmfulness in it. I'm also unconvinced that this is the same as porn.

It simply isn't the same as porn because, if it was, then everything would be porn. Even real sex would be porn. It's simply absurd. This is not some kind of witchery. The problem most relate with porn is staying hours and hours browsing different content, edging, avoiding women or men, looking and listening, hurting their genitalia and feeling disgusted and depressed after it's all done. And then not being able to resist it after a few hours. I see nothing of these harmful effets with masturbation alone. Therefore, they can't be the same thing, or have the same consequences.

But there is something to be avoided with masturbation alone. I sometimes picture the intercourse of females with more than one male, or the reverse of this, or picture stuff that (most likely I believe) happens only in porn. This is something to be avoided, as I simply think it's unhealthy for me. In such contexts, I should not masturbate, and, from my observations, this kind of drive only appears after I masturbate (in the healthy context described above).

So, in one thing I must agree with some people: that even healthy masturbation can lead to 'darker' wishes. Which will be my fight from now on.

Maybe what I'd like to see discussed here is, since this is a fight that I'll pursue from now on (and I'm not saying it won't change in the future), is there any point in staying in NoFap (since it's NoFap, and not not using porn)?

 

Well, first of all I appreciate the feedback.

Second; I can't expect to have all my sexual needs attended with only sex with my wife. I have a far greater sex drive than she does. Even when we got married, during what I went a really long abstinence from porn (almost three months if my calculations are correct), she simply does not want to have sex as much as I do. She's also usually on the pill due to some uterine issues she has (I couldn't explain even if I wanted to), which lowers her libido even more.

So, what my options are? Being a saint and abdicate from masturbation and MO, which has shown to me to be a failure. The longest periods I've gone without P were in the ones I used M without P (as described by the first post). I understand that my wife has nothing against masturbation, but she has against porn.

So... masturbation means objectification? I respectfully beg to differ. I'm yet to see any changes on the way I treat women if I masturbate about them. Also, it's impossible to show that there are "implicit, unexplainable and perhaps mystical effects of masturbating thinking on women regarding he way I treat them" so I refuse to accept this. Perhaps it might be for some men, but most certainly it isn't for others, and therefore this cannot be assumed. To me, it's only a matter of how you define "objectification", which is largely debatable.

IDK, but it seems to me that this point of view finds its support in a romanticized Christian way of seeing how things are. Which I do not share, btw.

 

I never said she can't satisfy me. And also, if I were to put my interests so far ahead of hers as you make it seems, I wouldn't even want to quit porn.

As for objectification, I fail to see a definition for the term that makes imagining a person as a sexual partner an object. Also, one word may have several definitions, which makes using "the" definition of it kinda... vague.

Lastly, I only meant that there is no single way to conclude that, when a person A masturbates picturing himself having intercourse with person B, this leads to a change of treatment from person A to B, much less to assert that A objectifies B. This is not observed in all cases, and for sure it does not happen to me. The only thing that's left are arguments like "invisible, unfathomable phenomena that makes your behaviour change from respectful to objectifying towards women", most of which boils down to being nature in its core ("Satan's influence" and so on, and I've seen that a lot). I didn't say that this is your argument. I simply said that this is a point made from time to time, and that that does not make an argument at all.

Also, incomplete or unfounded opinions aside, we must agree that you and I are talking about our own experiences. One can't have such a thing as a "complete" or a "founded" opinion (if they were so, they wouldn't be opinions, but facts). Perhaps a "complete" opinion is saying stuff like

which sounds like I'm 100% wrong in whatever I'm trying to do, and that if I don't agree with you only two options are left: listen to you or sink even deeper into addiction.

Wow.

The point is: I'm trying to do things differently from what I've been doing in the last few years. I have evidenced that this might work. Perhaps other people have some positive feedback on this. After all, there is no general formula for all members of this group.