Don’t Be Naked on Facebook

Please don’t be offended, but you can’t friend me on Facebook. If you see any profile for a Monroe, I guarantee it’s not me. I admire people who give advice like mine and fully identify themselves, but that’s not me. Only a small segment of people connected to me offline know that I share my experience with masturbation and pornography and sexual fantasy online. Honestly, I would be happy to share it with more people, but this is a need-to-know category and if you don’t need to know, you don’t want to know. That’s a healthy boundary.

The Cycle of Self-Sex Temptation: A Map of Self-Pleasure Island…

Moving beyond masturbation, pornography, and sexual fantasy behind requires that you understand that it is a cycle that feeds on itself. The temptation mechanism draws you giddily through the same destructive gauntlet while blinding you to the fact it’s the same darn dog track you’ve bounded around before. When you are in the process of being lured into problem activity, it’s hard to see that disappointment and regret are just around the bend. Below is a diagram of the temptation and regret cycle, a map, if you will, of what I call Self-Pleasure Island. (Don’t miss the map key below the map.)

Save the Naked Girl!

The practical problems of obsessions with pornography and sexual fantasy are that they don’t respect boundaries. I can’t tell them to stick to a schedule or location. Unfortunately, this means that, despite my best intentions, I find myself in the “real world”, far away from my designated safe place to surf porn, daydream, and masturbate when the thoughts that serve me so well in fueling my masturbation fantasies arrive to pick on some REAL person I that I absolutely did not intend to interact, or worse, I fantasize about someone I know well and have to be around. Surely you know how weird and awful it can feel when you’ve seen someone and find yourself imagining them in some unspecified nudist situation, and then they make eye contact. Aren’t you certain at that point that your thoughts are transparent? Don’t you expect a dirty look?

Christian Pornography? Church Strip Clubs? Righteous Boner!

There is a small, passionate movement afoot to justify ogling nude dancers and drooling over lewd images of sexual intercourse. This movement suggests that the Bible does not forbid looking at nudity and it’s only lust if you acknowledge to yourself a literal desire to engage in sexual intercourse with someone other than your spouse. Oh, and some would say that ideal Christian pornography would show kind, caring lovemaking between real husband and wife. I’m not yet clear on what makes for a Christian strip club, but there is a notion that if the customers were all Christians, it wouldn’t be a den of sin. After all, if it’s just looking and your interest is in the “appreciation and admiration” of God’s handiwork, it must be Godly.

Undressing Nudity, Part Four of Four

This is the fourth and final part of an essay on nudity. I’m trying to de-mystify it, un-power it, and un-couple it from associations that aren’t healthy.

I’ve always been fascinated by nudist camps, closed-access communities where people give each other complete visual access to their bodies. The idea of privates is meaningless. Back when, as a kid, I feared going to the doctor largely because he might have to see under my clothes, the idea of a nudist camp blew my mind. Even as an adult, when the idea of being a visitor kind of excites me, I imagine that I’d spend the whole time comparing forbidden body parts, hoping that a cross-section of society would be present and I could learn all sorts of things about body types and puberty and aging and so on and so forth. Well, I recently read a serious study about behavior and attitudes of nudists. Basically it was asking if all that exposure to nudity created a sexually-charged environment. Well, the conclusion was that a nudist camp and an orgy are nearly opposite environments. It made the nudist camp sound like prudes at a church supper. They didn’t discuss the human body or sex and they primarily did not look below the neck. They had virtual boundaries for themselves.

Undressing Nudity, Part Three

In the first two parts of this essay, I explored how seeing nudity and being seen nude are sometimes quite appropriate. Yet, I’ve hung onto my childish thinking that to be seen naked is like being cut open and eyes upon you are the blood draining from your body. It’s that life-changing and earth-shattering. In this essay, I’m trying to unpack my thinking and rewire my brain to make the mere state of nudity less of a hot button. That should help me put pornography and sexual fantasy in their proper perspectives.

As an adolescent, I was the boy least likely to have sexual intercourse. If I’d learned nothing else from Sunday School, I was pretty sure I was not allowed to go all the way with a girl. So, one of my fantasies to masturbate to was that I was stripped and forced into a small room with a girl whom my classmates used as the butt of ugly jokes. Of course, she was naked, too. In my thinking, male and female naked in a room together necessarily meant there would be sexual intercourse. It was a given and I’d have no choice about it. I didn’t have to imagine threats from my captors or weapons aimed at my head. Boys weren’t supposed to see vaginas. Girls weren’t supposed to see penises. If such a thing happens (a boner is a given), we have liftoff.

Undressing Nudity, Part Two

Continuing from Part One…

In the years before my 11th birthday, I was very comfortable with my understanding of nudity: it’s a bad thing to be and a bad thing to see. When I was nine-turning-ten, my family drove to Mexico City for a convention. We we were with a large group of RVers and had a government guide. In the little villages along the way, I saw poverty conditions I hadn’t witnessed before or since. I saw half-naked kids (the lower half!). I know I saw at least one squatting in the street to take a dump. You don’t forget that. When I entered seventh grade, nudity became a part of my life, but only because donning jockstraps for PE and showering afterward in a square, partionless room was forced upon me. I coped with it as well as anyone else seemed to, but I almost daily got a boner thinking about how embarrassing it was going to be. A year later, I saw Superman: The Movie and witnessed the unconscionable: voluntary nudity. Now I read that Superman was about some visitor from a distant planet capable of saving Earth from disaster and such, but at the time it was the “movie with the naked boy in it.” I grant you he was only four (or nearly four), but the young Superman standing in the crater that his escape pod had made was wearing only a smile. That floored me. Screenwriter, parents, director, producer, theater owner, and I don’t know who else all decided that it was okay to put a penis on the movie screen. I saw no justification for it.

Undressing Nudity, Part One

I have a real hang-up with nudity. When I was a kid, it was a scary, unnatural, disgusting thing. Then when puberty hit, it was still scary, but I strongly associated it with sexuality. As I’ve matured, I find it easier to be casually naked. Better yet, I’m not bothered that my kid is comfortable seeing and being seen naked. Still, I recognize that I have deeply-entrenched associations with nudity. They are not healthy and I want to address them. In fact, I believe my obsession with it is core to my problem with sexual fantasy and pornography.

Circuit Breakers for Unwanted Sexual Thoughts

Thinking about sex is definitely not bad. The problem for me has been that I have had a lot of sexual thoughts that weren’t by choice. They came to me by habit.

I call them circuit breakers. That’s because I think of these habitual thoughts as bad brain circuits (mind you, it’s not my brain that’s defective, it’s the habits that have been programmed into it).

Consider this scenario: I see a person who fits a character type in my library of sexual fantasies and I essentially own that person while I imagine them in my fantasy scenario. Can we agree that that’s not always a thought you want to have?

Consider another scenario: You’re flipping through channels and see a movie advertised. It’s a sex comedy and just that fact makes you ponder things about sex comedies and how far one on a particular network might go.