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If memory serves your particular experience may not mirror that of the usual heterosexual dude.
I doubt I'm all that far off the heterosexual baseline, and I'd say it's a pretty reasonable description for the porn life as well. After a while it approaches wireheading. You want to feel [GOOD], and these actions allow you to turn on the [GOOD] feeling and sustain it for arbitrary amounts of time. Orgasm is nice and all, but it really isn't the point, the point is, as a book put it once, surcease. Your larger mind, your worries and anxieties, the tension and frustrations of the day, vague unknowns of the future and sharp hurts of the past, all of that flattens right out to smooth, gratified pseudo-flow-state, a delightful little mental loop through desire and satisfaction that's always there when you need it. And all it costs you is time, discipline, investment, human connection...
Thank you for the response. Just to press the point, is the worst that would happen to a hypothetical child that he or she would end up like you? Is that so bad?Posted in the wrong place.
To be clear, I'm describing the life I used to have; I'm not living that way any more.
I don't think I could claim that it's the worst that could happen. My porn addiction was far more manageable and less destructive than, say, what I've seen of the median meth addict. There were pleasures and pursuits beyond mindless self-indulgence. But it was not a good life, and it absolutely was not getting better with time. I observed myself slowly degrading, becoming less in very tangible and concrete ways, losing my humanity and degenerating into something verging on the insectile, as bitter regret and the need to escape that regret grew more and more to define my existence through habitual loops of pointless escapism and empty stimulus-response. Lying awake in the early hours of the morning, I would remember what it felt like to have someone I loved lying next to me, and know for an absolute certainty that I would never, ever have that feeling again, and the pain of that was considerable. At the time, I joked to my family that my purpose in life was to serve as a cautionary example, but the joke wore thin the worse it got. Toward the end, I spent a lot of time fantasizing about being dead. One of my main objectives in my current life is to do what I can to help my children and nieces and nephews avoid ending up in a similar place.
...All this is to say that, in my experience, the question of whether sex is or can be better than masturbation depends on the mentality of the assessor. In my own experience, I know for a fact that masturbation appearing preferable was a consequence of profound dysfunction. I am at least somewhat confident that my own experience generalizes at least to some degree, but this is pretty obviously a question that grounds out at one's values. At a minimum, I'd endorse what you wrote here.
Wow apparently I misclicked because my question was meant for someone else, apologies.
I did wonder about the double-reply...
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Oddly I spent the better part of my considerable commute time this morning reading several of your old posts debunking materialism. I saved them.
@rae if I am correct is a trans woman. Now I don't know to what degree masturbatory practice is consistent among biological males of whatever stripe, but one might assume the "ideal partner" as it was put might be considerably more difficult to locate. A good man is hard to find, etc. Or the other way round as the case may be.
I can't sit in judgment of masturbation as an act, but I would certainly caution any young man against relying on it, and chaturbate or whatever, as any sort of long term answer to the yearning for companionship. For that matter one doesn't have to look far in my part of the world to find men who seek solace in hostesses, call girls, or various other professional services, and I don't see any of them smiling broadly on a regular basis. And finally, I would suggest orgasm itself outside of some Tantric whatnot isn't particularly long-lasting, post nut tristesse is real, and, perhaps sentimentally, ultimately nothing beats (cough) the dozens of micro-interactions that are just spending time with someone you love (or are attracted to), completely outside the context of the boudoir.
After 20 years of marriage the dynamic changes somewhat, but the thesis still holds.
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