So, this is a topic that has profoundly troubled me for a while. I do have sexual desires, which I currently relieve through masturbation. However, it's hard to do that through thoughts alone, so I tend to use pornographic material too while doing that. Now, this is where the problem lies. The pornographic industry is not the happiest place at all, far from it in fact. Porn stars have a pretty high suicide rate and lower life-expectancy. This highlights the general unhappiness that porn stars have, and it makes it very hard to consciously watch porn without thinking of the working conditions and relationships, how dehumanizing it must be to have a job like that and the normalization of sex that makes it hard to fully enjoy it.

So, what I tend to do frequently is use fictional media instead, mainly hentai (in the forms of anime and doujinshi), as since they're fictional characters it is impossible for them to be truly hurt/exploited. However, I can understand that for others it's hard to do it, and even for me I tend to shuffle things up in order to be able to stay aroused and avoid desensitization. So, there has to be a happy medium. I myself try very hard to not have pornography affect my views and treatment of women, and I hope that I have maintained that. But I was also curious on your guys' thoughts and perspectives on the matter.

Are you sure that's the case? Like I think we'd need the voices of some actual women here to see if that's true.

So, this is a topic that has profoundly troubled me for a while. I do have sexual desires, which I currently relieve through masturbation. However, it's hard to do that through thoughts alone, so I tend to use pornographic material too while doing that. Now, this is where the problem lies. The pornographic industry is not the happiest place at all, far from it in fact. Porn stars have a pretty high suicide rate and lower life-expectancy. This highlights the general unhappiness that porn stars have, and it makes it very hard to consciously watch porn without thinking of the working conditions and relationships, how dehumanizing it must be to have a job like that and the normalization of sex that makes it hard to fully enjoy it.

So, what I tend to do frequently is use fictional media instead, mainly hentai (in the forms of anime and doujinshi), as since they're fictional characters it is impossible for them to be truly hurt/exploited. However, I can understand that for others it's hard to do it, and even for me I tend to shuffle things up in order to be able to stay aroused and avoid desensitization. So, there has to be a happy medium. I myself try very hard to not have pornography affect my views and treatment of women, and I hope that I have maintained that. But I was also curious on your guys' thoughts and perspectives on the matter.

porn turns women's bodies into a commodity to be bought and used at the behest of men... of course its inherently harmful to women