Addict

Hi.

I’m Rupert the Bear, and I’m a porn addict.

Like many of you, I’ve been working home for the past, I’d say, coming up to two full years now. And it has had its benefits. No more commute, I’ve saved a ton of money, more time to myself, to eat better and exercise more. Even manage a bit more of a lie-in now. Some days I just roll out of bed, sit at my rickety desk, laptop supported by numerous text books, pyjamas bottoms and denim shirt on and get cracking with the day. No one the wiser as I pick the sleep crust out of my eye during our morning check-in.

Of course, there are elements of work culture I miss. The ease of people around you, the freestyling conversations, I mean, you can still have those via Slack or video calls, but it seems more formal, forced, the hosting platform like a third wheel in the conversation, ensuring us workers are receiving our daily dose of human interaction.

And I guess another impact of WFH is the increase in my Internet time. I would say I’m probably among the last generation who remembers the Shit Internet. The primitive Internet. No super fast connection. I remember, when I was around 11 or 12, my family had a computer, a big beast of a thing, and we had to dial up connect to get on the Internet. Tiscali, anyone use it? The screeching throughout the house, the waiting.

And phones, no cameras. You could just about play ridiculous versions of popular songs at an exorbitant cost. I had a stupid In Da Club on mine, it sounded like it was made on a shitty school keyboard, I paid £6 for it.

So, I guess I’m saying, as I grew older the Internet progressed and I have benefitted from that, without being actively part of it. I took it for what it was, a tool, a way to A and to B, rather than a new world to immerse myself in. The sub-cultures, games, reality refracted and spiralling. I guess it just didn’t interest me.

But WFH changed all that. Filling the gaps that were appearing my life now. YouTube, that became a thing, David Dobrik, Sidemen, I didn’t give a scooby before all this, but a couple of months into lockdown, these sugar-crack videos became omnipresent in my life. With so much shit going on, and uncertainty, the sliding into another place relaxed me and allowed me to forget about it all. I now knew all the Vloggers, the world inside the box, I know when they drop and to schedule my life around their latest offerings. I’m at their mercy. It’s an addiction, or have I just caught up with the world?

And once the Internet became more of a presence in my everyday, you can bet incognito tabs came into the equation. Porn. Look, we’ve grown up with it, school friends talking during lunch breaks of seeing this, that, curiosity and desire propelling us to go hunting for what we knew so little about.

I would say it is a part of any, predominately, male’s growing up. I remember my first cum, the first real porn video I watched, beyond the soft porn offered to me via Babestation, lesbians kissing, blonde lesbians. My Dad telling me to not look at porn on the family computer as I hadn’t learnt the crucial task of deleting my Internet history, or my brother walking into our shared room, catching me in the act, and I reacted by saying I was just scratching my balls. Embarrassing moments, but part of life. I didn’t care back then, because they couldn’t stop me unless they cut my hands off.

As I grew up, learning to speak and interact with girls/women, my porn habit oscillated. Sometimes a lot, other times not. Depending on my situation, but never a problem. I used to watch porn when I was stoned but that stopped once I realized my brain seriously couldn’t handle weed. But WFH, I’m growing concerned about it.

It is just so easy to do. To pass time, when nothing is happening. And it was fun I mean who doesn’t love that momentary pleasure you receive. The exhalation of tension. But with more time spent consuming this product, the more I was trying to snatch at these moments. It’s a real thing to be de-sensitized to explicit material and it can really frighten the fuck out of you when you fail to get an erection over something that should to all extents and purposes get you hard. To feel nothing. I’d try and touch myself through my trousers as I watched porn just to get something, to spark some form of reaction. To fill the gaps with porn is a sad state of life.

And then the aftermath. The dullness you’d feel. Motivation sapped. Your head a thicc grey. You close your eyes and all you see is sexual acts. Your go to, porn. Not doing anything, porn. It became so easy to just fall into its embrace.

I had/have a partner at the same time. And fortunately it never affected our sex life, I still had desire for them and could perform, as well as I can, so I guess I was lucky. I know it doesn’t always work out like that. But still you’d think that actual physical connection would be enough for me? Why isn’t it enough? And so, it makes watching porn a guilty experience. I’m doing something wrong. How would I feel if they walked in on me doing it, or that you think of someone else, different hair, colour, body shape, ethnicity, gender, are they not good enough?

I’ve now gone a week without watching anything. Let’s see how it looks a couple of months down the line.