OK, last question.
How can I break this habit?
I have been putting of answering this one, simply because I don’t really know the answer. As I mentioned before, it is difficult not to be pessimistic sometimes. What can I try that I haven’t tried in the past 25 years? My two main thoughts are either (1) get married, or (2) just keep trying and hope I grow enough to get past this. I tend to think that #2 will be the key, and, as with many things in life, there won’t be a quick fix so much as a long-term persistence that wins in the end. But, I won’t discount the possibility of a miraculous change from God either, which is something that I hope and pray for.
As of Saturday, I was at a “streak” of 27 days. Saturday night I gave in to edging and “pseudo-pornography”. I eventually quit, but I’m going to count it as a relapse anyway. I shouldn’t be toying with this at all.
Warning: The following involves some ruminating about my habit. It might be triggering for some people, or TMI for others. Also, it’s a long ramble.
Proceed at your own risk!
My struggle seems to boil down to a couple of main points. One is that I seem to be capable of masturbating without viewing any content or having any fantasies, and when faced with strong urges it’s somewhat easy to convince myself that the activity itself is not wrong, or at least something I shouldn’t worry about. I think I have talked about that before. It’s something I debate with myself over, but generally it wasn’t terribly distressing until about a year and a half ago when I started applying this line of thinking in other ways. First, I heard about ASMR - not the overtly sexual stuff, but the concept of being able to “trigger” feelings through somewhat abstract ways. So I started thinking that maybe I could discover a “hack” that would give me sexual pleasure without involving anything actually sexual. So I started masturbating to youtube videos of things being squished, or brushed on microphones, or whatnot.
Then I started wondering if there were abstract images that might trigger erotic feelings, and I started browsing for things like closeup photographs of fruit or flowers. That was yet another step into questionable territory, some of these things being photographed in ways that have more or less obvious sexual innuendos.
The next step, where I currently find myself, was to think “if looking at inanimate objects and masturbating might not be sinful, what about exploring fetishes involving inanimate objects?” So I started looking at women’s shoes and underwear. I found niche videos involving clothing items and shoes, without any people in the video at all.
This is the current state of the addiction. I suspect part of it is related to the idea of “intermittent reward”, as the psychologists would say. It’s what makes slot machines addictive - you might be rewarded on the next pull of the lever (or the next video), or you might not. I can spend hours searching through Youtube for these specific kinds of videos.
Anyway, that’s one part of the problem. Another is the desire to find a wife, and the fact that the most plausible way for me to do that is through online dating. But I find that I’m not very good at forming attachments with people online, and I have gotten into a pattern of browsing profiles seemingly endlessly. After a while they all start to seem alike, really. And there is this exploratory part of me that wonders if I can find more unique people elsewhere online.
After all, it seems like the internet is supposed to be a place where you can connect with your “people”. But it is surprising how non-social social media is! You can watch videos, you can see pictures, but you don’t often get a chance to interact with anyone. And, of course, many of the pictures and videos are sexually provocative.
And then I have this fetish. Not the shoes so much - that just seems like a handy one to explore when the urges strike and I’m trying to convince myself that it’s OK to look at inanimate objects. The fetish that has really nagged at me, ever since I was a kid, is called salirophilia. It tends to be rather obscure, although it has a niche that seems to have grown in the last few decades.
Anyway, salirophilia is a fetish in which one is aroused by “soiling or disheveling one’s object of desire” to quote Wikipedia. Also known as wet and messy fetishism. To me, a pie fight can be as much of a turn on as nudity. Weird, I know. I don’t really know what to do with this fetish. It seems to have developed at about the same time in my childhood when my first sexual feelings were developing. And it feels so much a part of me that I feel sometimes that I should find a way to include it in my search for a spouse.
But at the same time, there is a component of this that doesn’t seem to be purely sexual. I feel like there is a freedom that I crave - the abandoning of social inhibitions and doing things that we aren’t “allowed” to do, but aren’t really bad. Playing in the mud, or playing with food, for example. After all, people do these things for fun at summer camps, game shows, and such. And to find someone that also thinks this is exciting is a strong desire.
Now, from an objective standpoint, including any fetish in a search for a spouse seems like a bad idea. Thinking about my potential mate from an explicitly sexual standpoint seems like a bad idea. But, as may be apparent by now, I have a tendency to rationalize things when experiencing urges. “What would it hurt,” I think to myself “to see if there is anyone out there somewhere that genuinely enjoys being silly and getting messy?”
To answer my own question, there are two obvious ways in which it hurts. #1 - who am I kidding? Isn’t this just sexual objectification of women? #2 - I have learned from experience that the number of women online who genuinely enjoy being silly and getting messy is very small. The majority of what is out there involves models and adult entertainment revolving around the fetish.
So, usually, these kinds of searches end up getting me aroused whether I meant for them to or not. Which leads to urges, and I often compromise and go back to shoes or something.
So I don’t know where to go with this one. I suppose try to ignore the fetishistic desires. Lots of people struggle with things like homosexuality and have learned to live with the desires and move on. Many men with homosexual desires have fallen in love and married women. But I think I can understand what they mean when they say that it “feels right” or that they were “born this way”. That’s how salirophilia feels to me. But living a Christian life isn’t about feelings.
Well, that was a long ramble, and I wonder if anyone read it. I don’t blame you if you skipped it. But it seems helpful to try to get this stuff out into the light.
