[illumination]

Hello Enough,

good login name - very determined.

I don't know about any scientific 'facts' about the effects of porn, but these are the facts of my experience.

The main thing for me was that the addiction was controlling me. I had decided many times over that I wanted to stop using porn because I was wasting so much time, because I think it's degrading to women, etc. But the addiction would take over and make me act against my will in a degrading way that felt filthy and made me hate and despise myself. I feel that this is not a healthy mental state to be in.

Not sure if you will count this as a 'fact', but ejaculating too frequently is considered harmful in Traditional Chinese Medicine and esoteric Daoism. Semen is believed to contain great quantities of the body's 'essence', an energetic substance of which we have only limited quantities. Depleting the essence could cause symptoms such as knee and back problems, faulty short-term memory, baldness, and, yes, sexual problems such as premature ejaculation, infertility and impotence. I'm not saying this is true, but that's the theory. According to the Daoist teacher Mantak Chia (about whom I have my doubts, but other people say this too) ejaculation through masturbation is particularly harmful because it's not balanced by the benefits of receiving emotional energy from a partner. Conserving the essence is considered by Daoists and others to be important for health and spiritual development. Overindulgence in sexual fantasies is also considered harmful because it alienates us from reality.

Porn has distorted my sexuality and hindered me from developing true emotional sexual relationships. It has made me hide part of myself from others. Most importantly, it became an addiction that controlled my mind in an incredibly powerful way. Giving up smoking was much easier. I have never been addicted to substances like heroin or crack, but I imagine that the degradation of the spirit I experienced through porn addiction is closer to those addictions than to smoking.

Hope you find this useful.