Is Pornography a Bad Drug?

Am I bad for doing porn?

I have a confession to make. I've worked in porn. No, I wasn't getting paid to fuck porn stars or have a double anal penetration gangbang with Sasha Grey after reading to schoolchildren. I'm no Peter North or Ron Jeremy.

Instead, I was one of the millions of porn salesmen that flood the Internet with smut. I worked as an affiliate for several major pornography producers. I got paid when someone bought a membership to their content. A cut of the action. A commission.

If the producers of porn are like the heroin processing centers in Afghanistan, then I was the guy who brought it to you on the street corner. You can thank me now if you'd like for helping make pornography the pervasive problem it is today. The only requirements are human greed plus the Internet.

By the way, you're welcome.

You'll notice that I refer to my porn involvement in the past tense. That's because I quit.

Now, you might think that working in porn sounds like the best job in the world. Getting paid to look at tits and ass and people fucking all day long? Awesome! So what's the problem? Well, doing pornography is a WHOLE lot harder than you might think.

You see, peddling women's asses for money isn't as easy as it looks.

For one thing, if you're in it for the money, you're definitely facing some stiff competition (sorry, I had to). Modern Internet pornography is such a recent phenomenon and has changed so quickly over the last 10 years that the market for porn is absolutely saturated. Millions upon millions of adult pictures, movies, games, and software can downloaded for free. Huge online communities trade free porn via message boards, image hosting services, alt binary groups, and also via the bane of Hollywood copyright lawyers, bit torrent software. Porn producers give away enormous quantities of free smut, hoping to entice their customers into shelling out for a monthly membership.

It's a total production-line mentality: tease the horny bastards with an endless stream of titillating content and hope it makes them wonder what you're NOT showing them. Make them feel like they need the stuff they have to pay to see.

Even though getting men to open their wallets for porn is difficult, getting men to unzip their pants and spend the wee hours of the morning frantically surfing your sponsor's porn is INCREDIBLY easy. Women and the men who sell them figured out this basic truth back in the Bronze age: leading men around by their dicks is just about the easiest thing in the world.

And that's why I had to quit. Not because of social mores or fear of what my friends might think. Hell, porn stars are practically celebrities nowadays. And not because I felt guilty about exploiting women. Every image I sold was backed up by documentation proving the performer(s) were of legal age and consenting. It was all 100% above board. I even paid my fucking taxes on the income.

I quit not because I think pornography is bad, or that masturbation is bad, or even that infidelity is bad. I quit because the rush I got out of manipulating (mostly) men was bad. Bad for me that is. It was turning me into a person I didn't like. A person consumed by the lust for power, for control, for the thrill.

I quit because I started acting like a drug addict again. A drug addict without any drugs at all. Except the porn itself.

Most of the guys who read this will know what I'm talking about. Pornography is a highly addictive substance and can progress like a really bad drug addiction. You always want more. And more. And MORE. That's what ultimately does make men open their wallets and pay up. The need for more.

The successful porn affiliates all know this and act accordingly. I knew it too, before I even started selling it. You really are a dealer, and your job is to get your customers so hooked and so strung out that it becomes easy to separate them from their cash. This was the part of pornography that was bad for me.

I've used pornography my whole life, but the bad part started when I crossed the line from merely using it to actually selling it. Have you ever heard that old druggie saying, "Never get high on your own supply"? Well, that saying also applies to selling porn, although it should be modified slightly: "Never get high SELLING your own supply".

Because that's when pornography does become a bad drug. For me. VERY bad!

Is it bad for you too?