Last updated on September 26, 2020
Question:
Hello,
I’ve been struggling with so many things. I used to be addicted to gay porn, and now I’m back to gay porn. I love God and truly believe He is in my life and has saved me from all my sins, but I want to honor my Lord with the temple inside of me. So I really want to kick this sin of gay porn.
I have read your answers concerning this issue, but I don’t want to masturbate. That is something I believe to be wrong personally. I really don’t want to masturbate. I will if that is the only way to really kick it. I have masturbated before for pleasure and a way to not have wet dreams, but it began to consume my every thought. I really want to masturbate, but at the same time, I don’t want to if that makes sense.
I also struggle with sexual fantasies about being in that porn scene. I know I’m not gay, but so often I want to be a part of it.
Again masturbation is something I’m open to if I can do it healthily, so if you could tell me how to do it healthily I would greatly appreciate it. The biggest thing I need is to kick this porn sin, so please help me.
Thank you so much for this ministry it truly does help people. Thank you!
Answer:
No one says you have to masturbate. But you do have to ejaculate every so often. Depending on the person, his age, and what is going on, the average young male ejaculates twice a week. So long as you understand that ejaculating is not an option.
Typically what guys do is decide that they are going to quit porn, so they stop everything. It works for a few days, some times to a few weeks, but somewhere along if wet dreams don’t kick in, the guy begins feeling like he is going nuts. He starts doing odd things when he isn’t paying attention, things he would never do normally. Eventually, something gives, and generally what happens is that the guy who is trying to kick porn starts to use the Internet for something unrelated. But one idea brings up another and eventually, without ever really intending to, he stumbles over porn. Then next thing he knows his pants are down and he’s masturbating. He may even be telling himself the whole time, “I shouldn’t be doing this,” but he can’t seem to be able to stop himself. It is only after he ejaculates that control comes back and he beats himself up for giving in. He vows to do better next time, but it happens again.
What I tell guys is to pay attention to their behavior. Instead of waiting until they lose control, if they believe they are heading down the wrong path again, then they should just stop everything, go find some place private where they can’t look at porn and masturbate. Hopefully, the need is handled by wet dreams and masturbation is not needed, but for those times when you might lose control, masturbating is far better than sinning.
First and foremost, pornography is not an option, since it is sinful (I Thessalonians 4:3-5).
One way to reduce masturbation is to do it at your normal rate for a week (just without porn). It won’t be as thrilling so you just might find yourself losing interest after a few days. The next week, skip just one day that you would normally do it. If that goes well, pick another day to skip, but it can’t be back to back. Continue slowly increasing the time between masturbation until either wet dreams take over or you find yourself strongly tempted. Then you roughly know your cycle.
However, you also have to understand that your rate of semen production varies, so you have to be willing to adapt. If you can pay attention to your personal hints as to when you need to ejaculate, you can avoid the situations where you lose self-control.
Once you teach yourself not to use pornography to ejaculate, then you can start addressing the inappropriate thoughts. I’ve found in the past that guys that try to do everything at once tend to get overwhelmed and give up. Usually, around two months of not using porn, the guy is fairly confident that he can stay away from it. Then it is time to start battling the thoughts.
You can’t do anything about the erotic nature of wet dreams, but you can do something about what you think about while masturbating. The method is simple. When you find your thoughts drifting into inappropriate areas, stop what you are doing. Take it back up either later that day or the next day. It will feel uncomfortable, especially if you were getting close to orgasm, but it won’t take your body long to learn to get matters done (which is what it wants) without resorting to lustful thoughts.
If you can get wet dreams but they don’t come regularly enough, then pay attention to when you know the need to ejaculate is getting strong and encourage a wet dream by sleeping with nothing below the waist.