Male POV: I Gave Up Porn For Lent And It's Oddly ... Liberating

The Lenten season is in mid-swing! Lent is the 6-week-ish period between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday (or the prior Thursday depending who you ask) and it represents… just click here if you really care. Typically, it's marked by a period of penance (except on St. Patty's Day!) and participants often pick some particular "vice" to personally abstain from in addition to (or lieu of!) the prescribed fasts and proscriptions. Though I'm not especially Catholic, I think it's a nice test to lay off of something or other for a month in a half. It's like a more realistic New Year's resolution. In the past, I've given up pork, soda pop, lent (I'm a wiseacre), TV while the sun was out and whiskey.

This year's contrition really hit me where it hurt: I gave up porn.

Before I paint myself as some autoerotic Don Juan, know that I am a very casual porn consumer. I only use it as stress relief. As a hangover cure. When I'm bored. If I'm nervous that I may have priapism. Days ending in "Y." Some of these are jokes. I probably wouldn't be able to name a porn star whom I hadn't seen celebrated in another medium. Genre-wise, I'm flexible. I don't have anything bookmarked on my laptop (or iPhone). It's a bus pass to help semen get from wherever it is semen comes from to a napkin. But it's still not "easy." I took a porn vacation because it's hard.

Anytime I've mentioned my lenten promise to friends, they call me an idiot. Guys who were OK with me forswearing libations and baby back ribs, things that would make my company virtually tolerable, couldn't get over me pulling the plug on something I do in the privacy of my own home or sometimes hotels. These men are your friends, boyfriends, coworkers, fathers, sons and husbands. This isn't to suggest I'm doing something especially difficult or worthy of commendation, it's just a reminder of the pervasiveness of something which is still taboo in some circles. 

I've heard it takes three-ish weeks to reset your pleasure centers but I think that it can happen in as little as three-ish days, or so my *friend* says.

The quick fix does seem less urgent, now that I've been without it for awhile. A minute or two of boredom doesn't bleed into, "Well, I AM by myself so..." As mentioned, I doubt I'd fit into even the most liberal definition of a porn addict. But the act of conscious forbearance has made me want to check out websites ending in the word "tube." Any quick dopamine fix becomes trickier to avoid when it's so readily available. (It's like the crucifix full of yayo that Sarah Michelle Gellar sports in Cruel Intentions. Or living above a donut store that just gives away pounds of product at almost the exact same time you come home from work every day.)

I haven't started taking Depo Provera to turn things off downstairs. I'm not practicing celibacy. I haven't even gone cold turkey on onanism. I've decided to take a respite for at least forty days from using visual media, porn, as a facilitator. I can hear you screaming, "Don't be a HERO!," but it's too late; I'm in the trenches.

In hindsight, giving up porn feels like such a small, stupid thing: In the morning, while I'm reading on my phone in bed, it seems like there's some muscle memory of "self-abuse" but there's no real pull (pun intended). I suppose I haven't been hungover or particularly stressed lately to go back to this comfort blanket. I'll let you know though if anything changes.

All that being said, I have Easter circled on my calendar, I plan to be hydrated and I'll warn my neighbors to hold onto their f*cking hats for the second coming.