I speak to a lot of men about the way they use porn when masturbating. If you decide to watch porn when you masturbate, here are a few suggestions...
Firstly, if you feel the desire to masturbate and watch porn, take moment before turning to your screen to check in with yourself. Place one hand over your heart and the other over your genitals and ask yourself what it is that is really turning you on right now, what it is that is arousing you.
This is an important step because it not only slows you down, possibly giving you an opportunity to decide to masturbate without porn, but also if you do decide to watch porn you can use this awareness to inform how you interact with the website that you're about to visit.
It is an open secret that social media websites are designed to keep you on their website or app.
"Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally like literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting." - Aza Raskin, interface designer and inventor of the infinite scroll
The same is true for porn websites.
To be clear, I am not talking about the perceived addictiveness of the porn itself but rather the design of the website that the porn is hosted on.
So, accessing a porn website with the prior awareness of what it is that you're sexually interested in can help you intentionally search for and choose a video without getting distracted.
And when you do search for a video, I suggest filtering the results by duration, minimum of 20min. This is so you only watch one long video while you masturbate, rather than watching several shorter videos (try to avoid compilations as well).
Once you've intentionally chosen a video, make it full screen and don't skip around to find your favourite scene. Again, by doing this you're minimising the distractions and noise surrounding the video, mitigating the algorithm's attempt to keep you clicking. This means you can be fully present with the ebb and flow of sensations elicited from video you're watching.
A lot of porn - especially when the video is over 20min long - has a rhythm to it which you can tune into and move with. To help notice these sensations and engage multiple pathways of pleasure, plug your headphones in and listen to the porn as well.
And finally, rather than sitting down, hunched over the computer screen, cock in one hand, mouse in the other, scrolling through your favourite tube site, stand up and put your screen on a shelf that is shoulder height so you can open your chest, breathe deeply, roll your hips, and move and touch your body.
It might seem awkward at first but changing and reframing the way that you use and think about porn, from something you mindlessly consume when masturbating to a tool you mindfully integrate into your self-pleasuring, will transform you sex life.
As always, I encourage you to be ethical with your choice of porn. Of course, I can't come into your home and force you to use certain website and not others, but there is a list of ethical porn websites in my Instagram highlights which I highly recommend checking out.
Some of my colleagues may chastise me for not totally condemning all porn outright but rather than shaming men for watching porn, I prefer a more nuanced, pleasure-positive approach.