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I'm asking in a spirit of curiosity and not of attack: how does one come to participate in this practice? What made you do it for the first time? Did you regret it at the time? Leaving aside moral disgust, do you feel like you get your money's worth?
I've never in my life paid for internet pornography (I have purchased the odd vintage magazine, and Mrs. FiveHour has a fondness for vintage Playboy calendars and puzzles as home decor, so strictly speaking I have paid for nude images of women). It always feels like a sharp line for me, where doing so would cause me to cross into some new kind of behavior and I recoil from it. In the same way that I can imagine eating or drinking a drug, I eat or drink other drugs and something stronger is a soft line, but I don't know how one comes to inject drugs.
For me it started when I was broken up with in the summer by a girl who was just not interested in me sexually. This did not make me feel good: not being desired sexually has always been a weak point in my otherwise pretty self-confident/self-assured persona. This left me pretty vulnerable to falling down the PornHub sales funnel of a star I liked. The experience made me feel pretty good in the moment: the women.bots are fairly good at making you feel wanted sexually, although if you look at it from the outside it's absurd because they have so little information about you (maybe a photo and a dozen messages). Afterwards I pretty much immediately regretted it: I deleted my account seconds after satisfying myself. Of course I didn't forget that the high was much better than regular porn, so whenever I felt particularly bad about myself I would relapse. I have, however, been completely clean since shortly after the New Year.
In terms of my moneys worth, if one thinks about it like a drug, it's not a terrible deal. These women's pages are usually around ~$5/month, but you end up paying extra for better content when you're interacting with them. I probably spent about $20/session, which is a lot, but not worse than what you would have to spend on alcohol or stronger drugs (weed I think is much cheaper).
I don't generally have problems with addictions in other areas of my life. I've never felt the need to drink more than a beer or two, and always need months or years long breaks between using weed or LSD. But sliding down the OnlyFans rabbit hole was a wake up call that maybe I do have some kind of masturbation/pornography addiction. The OnlyFans stuff really is a step up in degeneracy as you point out, but the whole edifice is rotten and needs to be knocked down. I'd like to stop caring so much about if women desire me or not (which is something I frankly can't control, and judging from statistics, is something that most men have to face). I also would be completely turned off by similar behavior from the opposite sex (gooning to romance novels), so before bitching more about how I don't have a girlfriend/am not married I should genuinely try to fight this addiction, which maybe means going to stuff like AA meetings.
Anyway thanks for reading all this.
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Yeah, I've always drawn the line at paying for stuff, both because it feels like you're now financing your vice and because it feels cheating-adjacent, like sexting with your coworker or going to a strip club.
But I can understand why I would do it if my principles were weaker. Sometimes you stumble upon someone who just ticks 99% of your boxes and you want to see more, you think that if you get her to put shoe on head or wear a choker or strike just the right pose you will immediately reach that gooner nirvana.
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