DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I saw someone else’s post about how to get over a person who lied about how they are. I’m currently experiencing that right now, the person tricked me into loving them, they are actually really evil, so the person I loved is most certainly dead – they never existed, and I was simply used for three years. How do I move on?

Because I was manipulated to love this person, because they stole so much from me, for so long, how can I be okay again? Everyone tells me I’ll be okay eventually, I’ll find someone real who makes me feel better than I ever did. The problem is, I thought HE was real, I thought HE was the best I could find, and it was all a lie. I still want the person I thought he was back. Now I have all these memories of it/him, and I know none of it was real, and it hurts.

I know it wasn’t my fault and wasn’t even about me, he just did it to me because I was there. But…How do I move forward and heal, how do I be okay? He, looking back, controlled everything about me, had me lying about the fact I loved him, lying about us being together. He never cared about me, never loved me, and every single thing I thought I knew was a lie.

He was truthful about one thing though; he’s an asshole.

What do I do?

Just An Empty Space

DEAR JUST AN EMPTY SPACE: There’s a phrase that comes to mind when I hear stories like yours, JAES: “I am one who loved not wisely but too well”. It’s something that comes to mind when I hear from folks who, like you, fell for someone that they shouldn’t have.

There’re a lot of people who’ve had similar experiences. They fell in love with liars who hid families or other lovers. They found love under false pretenses, when someone was willing to use their love to get what they wanted. Others fell for people who were unavailable, people who put on false faces to be whatever their victims wanted them to be, or even who just saw people’s hearts and emotions as playthings.

Each and every one of them felt very much as you do. They felt shame, remorse and humiliation for being someone who could be fooled like that. They felt anger at their betrayer for using their emotions against them. But more than anything, they felt… lost. Because while the person they fell in love with was fake, what they felt for those people was very, very real. And it’s very hard to reconcile feeling real love for someone when everything about them was a lie.

At least if their lover had died, they could mourn and move on. But how do you mourn someone who never existed in the first place, when the person you loved was a fiction?

But that’s actually part of how you recover, eventually: you mourn them. Not the con, the fraudster, the liar or the manipulator – that’s not who you fell for, nor is that who you lost. You mourn the person who you fell in love with, the person you were lead to believe – or were allowed to believe – you were in a relationship with. You treat it as though they died, because in a very real way, they had. It may be the death of a dream of a person, rather than an individual, but it’s still a death none the less, with all of the pain and the emptiness that this entails.

The way you feel now and the way it hits you now is much the same as losing someone to death. You have to relearn who you are, now that you’re no longer a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. You have to unlearn the little habits and behaviors that you developed over your time with them, those unconscious gestures and actions that formed around the idea that they were always there with you, a part of your day to day life. And like losing someone dear to you, you’ll think you catch glimpses of them in the corner of your eye, but you’ll turn and they won’t be where you always expected them to be.

And it’s those empty spaces where they used to be that will haunt you the most. Those little betrayals of muscle memory, those unconscious expectations that will hit you when you least expect it; you stumble across another lover-shaped hole in a place so mundane, so banal that you never even realized that they took up space there in the first place.

As the wise man once said: that absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. And that’s ok. You’re not mourning the liar, you’re mourning the lie, the person they pretended to be.

But as you mourn, you also have to do the hardest thing possible: you have to forgive. Not the liar or the fraud. You have to forgive yourself. You have to forgive yourself for loving not wisely, but too well. You have to forgive yourself for wanting to believe in the pretty lie, for missing the warning signs or all the times you turned a blind eye. You have to forgive yourself for not wanting to believe that someone who you cared for so deeply could use you so casually, so cruelly, with so little regard for the pain they cause.

It’s very easy, after the fact to say “you should’ve known better” or “you should have seen the signs” or “It was so obvious”. Except, it wasn’t. Not when you’re in love. Love makes us willing accomplices in part because we see our lovers with golden eyes, we polish them to a high sheen and highlight the best of them. It’s very easy to overlook or rationalize away or explain the flaws. It’s very easy to get swept up in the emotion, and how can someone who goes into a relationship in good faith expect or believe that the person they love would hurt them like that? How can you let yourself go that fully if you think they’re trying to use you and discard you?

But you made the best decisions you could with the information you had at the time. Now you know differently. You have different facts to hand and if you were given the opportunity to do it all again, you’d do it differently, knowing what you know. You couldn’t know what you didn’t know back then; you get angry at yourself because you don’t have that big blue box to take you and show you what would happen. You get angry because you can’t see the future, can’t read the threads of fate… you get angry because you’re only human, not a god.

So you mourn. You forgive yourself. And you accept that this happened, so that you can move forward, a little sadder, but wiser for it. You give yourself that closure, turning the page on this and letting the past be prologue. You accept the hammer blows of grief, knowing that the hits will happen less and less over time, the impact will soften and not stagger you the way they did at first. And before long… you’ll realize just how long it’d been since the last time you felt that now-unfamiliar pang.

And now that you know better, you know more about what to look for. You’ll be more discerning, more cautious, more judicious about who you give your whole heart to. You can’t make yourself immune to lies – nobody can, and liars work best when their targets think that they can spot any lie or deception. But you can, at the very least, not make the same mistakes you made before.

The only thing you need to do is to not close your heart entirely, or not let the callus grow on your soul. You can close the door for a while, so that the wounds can heal. You take yourself out of the game so that you can rehabilitate yourself, recover from your injuries. But you have to resist that urge to completely shut yourself off, because all that does is ensure that he wins. Cutting yourself off from the possibility of love isn’t the protection you think it is. It’s just keeping the wound open, allowing it to fester, holding it close because it hurts but at least it’s a familiar hurt.

The one thing I will say though that will be the hardest: you shouldn’t hate him. He doesn’t deserve your hate, because hate isn’t the opposite of love. Hate can’t exist without love first, and you never loved him, you loved his lies.

The opposite of love is indifference. As you heal, you let him leave you entirely – a non-entity, someone who isn’t worth even an iota of your time or a scintilla of thought. Let him be resigned to oblivion, to fade into obscurity until you can’t remember the color of his eyes or the timbre of his voice.

The man you loved, died. The man who dressed in his skin will never have existed for you, and that’s where he should remain.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I regularly do social activities and hobbies, but I’m just completely unable to make any close friendships or any connection beyond the superficial. I have a mental block that prevents me from starting conversations with anyone, including people I know. Any time someone does start a conversation with me, I’m caught off guard, and I don’t contribute to the conversation in any meaningful way. I pretty much just go “uh-huh”, “cool”, or “yeah”, until the conversation fizzles out, and I only realize after it’s over what I should’ve said. No matter how much I try to imagine a conversation and how I could make one better, when a conversation actually happens, I’m caught like a deer in headlights. Alternatively, I think of something I might want to talk about, but I don’t know how to bring it up, or I don’t know if it’s too personal or would make them uncomfortable.

When it comes to starting a conversation, it’s an even bigger mental block. I never know when it will be acceptable to do so. Everywhere I go, I see people already talking to others. And even when I see someone alone, not talking to anyone, it still takes so long for it to even come to my mind that I should talk to them that either they go and do something else, or it would probably be awkward to suddenly start talking after lingering.

I don’t know if I should ever message anyone or even what would be appropriate to message them. I don’t know if messaging them would annoy them.

Whenever I’m in a group conversation, I don’t often contribute in any meaningful way. In my mind, I keep thinking about how I could contribute, and wait for an opportunity to do so that I can’t fully pay attention to the conversation, or I get distracted by something else. I think that any group conversation I’m in would be exactly the same even if I wasn’t there.

And I have no one to blame for any of this except myself.

How do I get better at social skills and make real connections beyond the superficial?

Chronic Wallflower

DEAR CHRONIC WALLFLOWER: This is interesting, CW, because I can relate to some of this and some of it seems alien to me. For example, I know I have plenty of times where I would love to reach out to some people via text, instant message or social media, but I worry that I’d be bothering them or that they wouldn’t want to hear from me. Which is made all the more ironic when I see friends – people who I like and respect very much talk about how they worry that they’re bothering people when they DM them. Meanwhile I’m sitting there saying “I am pretty much ALWAYS interested in talking to you”.

So never let it be said that this s--t is logical.

The fact that you can’t think of anything until afterwards is something everyone experiences. It’s what the French call “l’esprit de l’escalier” or “the spirit of the staircase” – that moment when you’re walking away when you realize the EXACT PERFECT thing to say. So you’re hardly alone in that.

Now, in your case, this doesn’t sound like a lack of skill or will so much as an anxiety response. I have a lot of questions that I’d love an answer to, like whether this is a relatively recent experience for you or if you’ve had issues with this all your life. And if it is a relatively recent change, what may have preceded it. If there was a particular inciting incident, then that might give more of an idea of why you have this particular block and how you could work to get around it.

I’m also curious as to precisely how this block feels, to you. Is it that always you can’t think of anything good or appropriate to say? Is it that you have SO many thoughts going at once that you can’t settle on just one? Or is it that your brain just vaporlocks when someone starts talking – you’d love to respond but your brain is just a dialtone now.

Some of what you describe – not knowing when it’s appropriate to jump into an ongoing conversation or how to start a conversation with someone else – sounds like a classic case of social anxiety and social awkwardness. A lot of times, this comes down to a feeling that you are being judged and measured and have to be “perfect” in order to make it through every social interaction.

You’re not alone in this. A lot of people worry that if they’re not the soul of Wilde-ian wit, dropping bon mots the way that a clumsy waiter drops forks or navigating the often chaotic nature of a group conversation with the skill of a pilot doing the Death Star trench run, they’re going to be exiled from society. But the truth is… these are all really just mental distortions. We vastly overestimate how likely people are to notice any malaprops, verbal missteps or just plain mistakes and overestimate how much they’re going to care. Similarly, we underestimate how much someone – such as that person standing by themselves, not talking to anyone – would appreciate somebody coming along and saying “hello”, even if it’s not as smooth as a fresh jar of peanut butter.

Part of the problem is that we’re all the center of our own universe. Because we have a constant, 24/7 stream of our own perceptions, our own thoughts and our own feelings, we feel like other people are aware of them too. But the truth is that most folks are too caught up in their own s--t to spare the bandwidth to give more than a single “…huh” to any mistakes we might make

One of the ways you can get past this – especially while you work on other aspects of what you’re worried about – is to put the focus on other people. By giving someone else the spotlight, you feel less pressured to perform under the (not actually) withering gaze of others. The easiest way to do this is to just ask questions and let the other person talk. As I’m often saying, most people rarely talk to somebody who genuinely wants to listen; everyone is usually just waiting for their turn to talk, instead. By being willing to be the person who wants to hear their life story or their opinions on tropical fruit or whatever, you are giving them a gift. And of course, the best part of this is that it means you rarely have to worry about not having something to say. As long as you’re an active listener, other people will give you plenty to react to and to use as springboards to more questions.

Now there are risks to this. To start with, you’re not James Lipton and this isn’t “Inside the Actor’s Studio”.

Unless you are, at which point I’d want to know how you came up with the Thundercats theme. And also how you wrote me this letter – dictated via Ouija board?

But my point is that what you want is conversation, not an interview. Think of a conversation like a tennis match. The initial question – “hey, what’s your story?” – is the opening serve. When they respond, they’re functionally volleying the question over the net back to you. You, then, take that answer, respond to it and put your own spin on it or relate to it, then ask your next question based on what they said. This lets you keep things going until either you or they drop the ball… at which point you serve the next question or topic.

The other risk is that many people will realize that they’re dominating the conversation and turn it back around to you… and now you’re right back to the very thing you hope to avoid. Which is what actually leads to my next point, conveniently enough.

The other part of the problem you’re experiencing, is that you’re stuck in your own head. You’re so busy thinking about what to say or how to say it that you’re not actually able to participate in the conversation at all. So it’s not really a surprise that your responses are experiencing some lag and you only come up with a better thing to say after the fact. You are, for all intents in purposes, off in your own little world and the signal takes time to get there.

And you’re also rapidly running out of oxygen.

So how do you get past this? You stop thinking so much. Yeah, I know, you’re thinking about everything because you’re worried about making some sort of critical misstep. Well allow me to point out that you’re able to navigate in the world without having made mortal enemies of your employers or authority figures in your life, nor have you been run out of town for saying something so egregious that nobody could tolerate having you in their presence for a moment longer. You have made it this far in life without having been so offensive that nobody would allow you to be part of polite society. So perhaps you might be willing to cut yourself a bit of slack and not worry quite as much about being “perfect”.

Of course, it’s easy to say this. It’s a lot harder to put it into practice. But practice is precisely what you need – practice in reacting instead of thinking, in just being in the moment instead of being in your head. It can seem a little counterintuitive, but thought often is the enemy of wit. If the secret of comedy is timing, then the last thing you want is to be in a ten second delay. So, by getting better at being in the moment and just responding, without being as worried about it being the exact right thing to say is going to be invaluable.

But how do you get to that point when you’re regularly drowning in flopsweat over basic conversations? Well, you take classes.

Specifically, improvisation classes.

Here’s the thing about improv: we tend to think of it as being all about people having the funniest, cleverist ideas and being able to toss all these hilarious jokes, gags or bits out at a moment’s notice with just a prompt from the audience. But that’s not how it works at all. It’s not about being funny or clever; in fact, trying to be funny is the opposite of what you want. Improv is about being in the moment, reacting to what others have given you and building on it. If you’re thinking about what to say next or trying to get this perfect funny line out, then you’re doing it wrong. You’re not being in the moment, you’re being in your own head. You’re not building with others, you’re trying to show off – the opposite of collaboration. And conversation, when done properly, is a collaborative exercise. If you’re focused on the right thing to say or trying to get to a place where you can say the thing you’ve got in mind, you’re not collaborating any longer.

In improv – especially at the most basic level – you’re trying to work with your scene partner and work with what they give you and vice versa. That means that you work at paying attention to the important things – the settings, the setup, your character, their character, etc. – and let those be what inform what you say next, in that moment, without planning it in advance. Thinking slows you down, creates delays and means you’re not paying attention. That, in turn, breaks the scene. So you learn to stop thinking and just start doing instead. Being funny in those cases comes from the setup and buying into it as wholeheartedly as possible, rather than having the gift of gab and a filing cabinet of humorous responses.

So it is with having interesting and productive conversations with people. If you stop thinking quite as hard about how to bring something up or how to find the perfect response and instead focus on responding to what they say, right then and there, you’ll find that things flow much more smoothly and organically.

Now, improv is a skill – a Voltron-like gestalt skill built out of other, related skills, but a skill none the less. That means that you’re going to go through the same progression as you would with any skill – unconscious incompetence, where you’ve never done it before, ever and so don’t know what you’re doing; conscious incompetence, where you are all too aware of what you don’t know and what to do; conscience competence, where you can do it, but it takes effort; and finally unconscious competence, where it becomes something you do without thinking. So you have to be willing to embrace the sucky part, where you feel awkward and ungainly and are absolutely sure that you’re f--king up to levels that nobody in history has ever f--ked up before. But by pushing through and not letting that throw you, by continuing to practice that skill through deliberate use, you’ll get to the unconscious competence stage much faster than you’d realize.

Once you get to the point where you realize that you don’t need to think as much about maintaining conversations, the rest becomes much easier. You won’t be as worried about trying to find places where you could join into a group conversation, because you’ll just see an opening and go for it… like pretty much everybody does. Nor will every conversation just be moments of someone trying to connect with you only to get monosyllabic answers in return.

Getting out of your own head will make it that much easier to actually make connections with people, where you’ll realize that getting personal or sharing things that connect to your core values and interests isn’t so bad or scary. In fact, you’ll quickly realize that most people enjoy those deeper, more meaningful conversations, because they give us genuine insight into the person we’re talking to.

Of course, now I’m going to throw a curve ball at you. One thing that helps, especially when you’re trying to break through a block like the one you’re dealing with, is going to be the opposite of everything I just told you. I would recommend having three or four stories or anecdotes – but no more than that – locked and loaded in your back pocket at all times, stories that you can fire off without needing to think. These are useful for when you have those dial tone moments and you can’t think of anything else, or you’re powering through an awkward silence. You don’t even need a smooth segue; sometimes, all you need is a “hey, that reminds me, check this out…” to transition into it. The benefit of these is that you can have them ready for specific occasions, and have worked out the narrative rhythm, proper inflection and pauses for responses in advance.

Over time, you won’t need them as often as you might at first. But just knowing that you have something locked and ready to go in case of a conversational emergency will give you enough confidence to go and get one started.

Oh, and one more thing. You – and everyone, really – are vastly underestimating how much your friends would appreciate getting a DM or instant message from you. You don’t need an excuse or “good” reason outside of “I like talking to you”. So reaching out with a “Hey, we haven’t talked in a bit, how are you?” or “I saw $CRAZY_THING/$FUNNY_THING/$GOOD_THING and thought of you, what’ve you been up to?”

I think you’ll be surprised (and gratified) by the response.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I know you’re not an actual medical doctor but I’ve been wondering do I have a crippling porn addiction. I was introduced to porn when my middle school friends around 7th or 8th grade were talking about it and I proceeded to look it up when I was home alone.

Keep in mind it was pretty much the way I was introduced to sex (which isn’t good) because the sex education was a joke more pathetic than funny and my parents weren’t the best at explaining it because one was religious and the other was autistic. And let’s just say it let me down a rabbit hole that pretty much scrambled and twisted my brain about sex and women in general that even to this day they’re difficult to shake off.

Like believing women are inherently vain, shallow and vapid only want one kind of guy based on his sex drive, body type and “size” which fueled me with a s--t ton of insecurity and body image issues (I’m a literal fatass; not thick, not husky, not curvy. I’m a poster child of the modern American slob, sorry. When it comes to my body image I’m brutally honest and not pc) and you won’t see my body types in porn unless its a creepy and degrading fetish or he’s the cuck in the corner where he belongs.

I wasn’t till much later I realized it wasn’t women who weren’t the shallow and vapid ones but rather me because once again porn made me think to only go after porn star gorgeous women who will give me the most exciting and satisfying sex. Compared to average who have average faces and body types because in my mind average = dull and boring the human equivalent of flavorless oatmeal. Which once again is hard as s--t to shake off and even then turns out real world sex is nothing like porn and after I’ve learned that lesson after my fist sexual encounter (at the ripe old age of 23 too late to lose my virginity) felt like I got fooled, I got duped and quite possibly bamboozled.

Even after my sexual encounter I’m still infected with the “c-m brain” brain rot where I’m constantly horny for a particular kind of porn and once I’m done masturbation I feel nothing but shame, disgust and self hatred for myself. Like there is reason when women masturbate its fearless and empowering but when men do it’s sad and pathetic, like owning male sex toys is a sign of loneliness, sadness and patheticness. I’ve all the “health benefits” of masturbation but it’s hard believe em when you constantly feel like s--t after doing it or the people espousing might are just addicted as me just justifying it like a smoker or an alcoholic telling me destroying their lungs and liver is actually a good thing because dopamine.

I was given suggestions how to help combat these negative feelings around porn and masturbation: Try looking at feminist porn which at first just lead me to literal c&b torture vids where a woman in high heels steps on a man’s genitals calling him a worthless little f--k pig frankly did not turn me on. The second time I tried I’m not gonna lie it didn’t arouse me it bored me f--king tears like holy s--t there was nothing exciting or sexually appealing about it, just boring sets, with boring looking people, doing the most boring and vanilla sex it legit nearly put me to sleep. And another suggestion was maybe subscribe an OnlyFans girl but that opens up another can of worms because frankly the men who unironically subscribe to only fans well there is reason it they’re called simps and the lonely fans of Only Fans. Cause all those “men” are sad pathetic losers who know they have zero chances with these girls irl and yet continue to pay them for a crumb of attention, even the girls know their subscribers are sad pathetic losers. So yeah don’t wanna join the crowd of bottom feeding losers.

So what I do? How do I shake these feelings towards sex and porn? How do I stop from being a c--brain loser? How do I overcome my crippling porn addiction and actually have a healthy relationship with my own sexuality?

Sincerely

A Loser Porn Addict

DEAR A LOSER PORN ADDICT: Right, this is going to be a long one, because we’re going to be covering a LOT of topics.

This, LPA, is what we in the advice biz call “a self-inflicted injury”. Most of the problems you’re running into have less to do with porn or “c-m brain” and far more to do with your own sense of self-worth and self-esteem.

We hear a lot about porn addiction, especially from religious organizations and fascist groups like the Proud Boys, but the fact of the matter is that porn addiction as most laypeople describe it doesn’t exist. I will refer you to the statement from the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists on the subject:

“ AASECT 1) does not find sufficient empirical evidence to support the classification of sex addiction or porn addiction as a mental health disorder, and 2) does not find the sexual addiction training and treatment methods and educational pedagogies to be adequately informed by accurate human sexuality knowledge. Therefore, it is the position of AASECT that linking problems related to sexual urges, thoughts or behaviors to a porn/sexual addiction process cannot be advanced by AASECT as a standard of practice for sexuality education delivery, counseling or therapy.”

(https://www.aasect.org/position-sex-addiction)

Now this isn’t to say that people don’t or can’t have problematic relationships to masturbation or their use of porn. But more often than not, the issue with problematic uses of porn come down to a) spiritual beliefs, especially within conservative religious groups and b) a form of self-medication that leads to excessive use. Which is to say: porn and sex “addiction” are the often due to either other issues that the person is attempting to alleviate, or because they’ve been taught to see sex and sexuality in a negative light.

You are very much in the latter. And quite frankly, it’s not hard to see where a lot of this is coming from. So if you want to deal with your negative feelings about your porn usage and have a healthier relationship with your own sexuality, the first thing you should do is get the f--k off the nofap, porn addiction and other subreddits and communities you’re part of. Literally none of them have therapeutic benefits, and only serve to create a sense of co-dependency within the community and constant feelings of shame in the members.

Here’s an easy rule of thumb to help you gauge how helpful and healthy a “support community” is: if the primary purpose and motivator of a community is shame and derision, then it’s not actually providing support. All it provides is misogyny, homophobia and makes the problem worse. That’s not just “woo, sex is great!” pseudo sex-positivity; there’s actual science behind this. A study from the journal Sexualities found that not only does increased participation in NoFap make people feel worse about themselves – especially by framing relapses or setbacks as personal or moral failings – but that engagement with NoFap and “reboot” communities is directly correlated to increased feelings of anxiety, shame, suicidal ideation and sex negativity. And that’s before we get into the antisemitism, white supremacy, the homophobia and transphobia, bullying and calls for participants to harm themselves.

The fact that you’re talking about “c-m brain” is a pretty good example of this, as does framing things like male masturbation as being “sad” and “pathetic” or that people who subscribe to a person’s “OnlyFans” are hapless losers.

So to quote the old joke: “Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!” “So stop doing that.” Much as with people who join incel communities, the first step to better mental health and self-image is to quit going to the places that tell you you’re a porn-addicted loser. All this does is serve to reinforce your own sense of worthlessness. It doesn’t help, it only hurts.

This mindset that you have right now is the Rosetta Stone to just about everything you talk about in your letter. The difference between alcohol and jerking off is that alcohol is literally a toxin. Intoxication – where “toxic” is literally embedded in the word – is a form of mild poisoning. A hangover comes about because your body is recuperating after you poisoned yourself. That doesn’t happen with masturbation. You don’t damage your liver by jerking off, nor do you “drain your dopamine”. You don’t feel like s--t after masturbating because masturbation is bad for you. You feel like s--t after masturbating because you believe masturbation is pathetic and doing it makes you a loser. That’s not an issue with the act, that’s an issue with how you feel about yourself.

This is why the problem isn’t porn or masturbation, the problem you’re dealing with is the constant reinforcement that what you’re doing is sad and pathetic and that you are sad and pathetic for doing so. You filter everything through the belief that porn = bad, porn users = losers and thus since you use porn, you’re bad and also a loser. It also means that you not only miss the point of people’s advice, but you apply it haphazardly, incorrectly and take the wrong lessons from it.

Take the idea that female masturbation is “empowering” but male masturbation is “pathetic”. The reason why female masturbation is framed as “empowering” is because it’s a direct response to decades of women being taught that they weren’t sexual, that women don’t like sex and that a woman with a vibrator is broken or can’t get a man. Much of the post-second-wave feminist movement was about getting away from the sex-negativity that society demanded of women.

Male masturbation has been stigmatized and medicalized for about as long. The most infamous example would be John Harvey Kellogg. Yes, that Kellogg. A popular figure in the health and wellness community of the early 20th century proclaimed that all sex was bad, masturbation in particular, and used literal torture to prevent and discourage orgasms, masturbation and even spontaneous erections. The stigmatization of male masturbation as “pathetic” and for men who “can’t it otherwise” is a continuation of this belief, a form of toxic and restrictive masculinity that only serves to make people feel ashamed of a normal, natural and pleasurable activity.

What, for example, makes masturbation sleeves “pathetic”, when all they do is provide pleasurable sensation? Pathetic-ness is very much in the eye of the beholder. To be sure, the ones that are designed to look like disembodied vulvas can be disturbing – much in the same way that penetrative sex toys often only looked like penises – but you can find plenty that aren’t modeled after body parts. In fact, part of the movement to destigmatize female masturbation and reframe it as a means of reclaiming female sexuality was to move away from sex toys designed like body parts. Now sex toys meant for insertion or clitoral stimulation look far less like phalluses and allow function to define form.

That “pathetic” aspect applies to things like people who subscribe to OnlyFans accounts. The insistence that the only people who subscribe to somebody’s OnlyFans are simps and losers depends on toxic ideas about men and women. There’re three things to consider here.

The first is that subscribing to someone’s OnlyFans is about paying for the “crumbs” of attention from someone “you couldn’t get with IRL” rather than, say, directly supporting someone who’s work you enjoy. If I’m a fan of, say, a particular author and I decide to join her Patreon for $5 a month, is that because I’m “paying for crumbs of attention” from her, or because I enjoy her work and want to support her directly? What about if I pay the same amount per month to a male artist? Am I still just trying to get his attention, or is that different? Think carefully here, especially if your knee-jerk reaction is to say it’s different. If it’s different, how, precisely is it different? Don’t just say “nudity” or “sex”, give me actual reasons.

The second is that OnlyFans is a form of sex work, and sex work is work – as in, you’re exchanging money for a service. If someone on OnlyFans – or ManyVids, Fansly, or CamSoda or any other similar site – offers things like private chats, custom videos or things like penis ratings, that’s a service they’re offering. You aren’t being “pathetic” by taking someone up on a compensated service that people offer any more than you’re being pathetic for buying lunch at a restaurant instead of making it yourself or someone making it for you. That’s a choice that the service provider made, something they have chosen to offer to anyone who would be interested. And – importantly – they’re under no obligation to actually accept somebody’s money or grant that person the service any more than a restaurant is obligated to serve everyone. There’s a reason why places have a right to refuse service or ask people to leave if they’re being disruptive.

The third thing to realize is that OnlyFans models – like all sex workers – don’t inherently look down on their customers or fans… at least not when it’s not part of their whole gimmick. A FinDom will make a performance of looking down on their “piggies” but that’s literally part of the whole package. It’s what the “piggies” are paying for; they are asking to be condescended to and humiliated. If you actually ask sex workers how they feel about their clients, you’re going to get the same range of attitudes that you’d get from anyone in a service industry job – some have deep affection for many of their clients, others can be annoyed by them and still others see it as just part of the job.

And consider, for that matter, that sex work isn’t just “easy money”. Most payment processors don’t allow online services that feature explicit sexuality – PayPal is notorious for shutting down accounts of anyone who has even a whiff of sex – nor do most platforms allow porn or nudity and regularly shut down sex workers’ accounts without warning or appeal. If OnlyFans models really disdained their fans and customers, they’d be incentivized to find other income streams that aren’t nearly as precarious and that don’t require interacting with people they despise.

While yes, part of the appeal of subscribing to someone’s OnlyFans is the feeling of greater access to that person, the same could be said of joining the Discord for your favorite podcast or YouTuber. So if I’m a fan of Junkfood Cinema or and join their Discord because it means I can interact with Brian and Cargill, does that make me a simp who could never talk to them otherwise? Again, think carefully before you answer.

Another example of taking the wrong message from people’s advice would be the “feminist” porn you looked up. What you found wasn’t what folks meant by feminist porn; what you found were examples of BDSM. Cock and ball torture, degradation, forced-feminization porn… those aren’t examples of feminist porn, those are humiliation-play, and they’re filmed, produced and directed primarily by men. When people tell you to watch feminist porn, they mean porn produced and filmed by feminists – porn that isn’t based entirely around penetration, male domination or male pleasure. Sites like Make Love, Not Porn, Good Vibrations After Dark, Beautiful Agony, Dane Jones or CrashPad are far more about what people are advising for you – porn where the sex is about mutual pleasure, not the sexual equivalent of the Fast and Furious movies.

That, incidentally is where you’re also likely to find porn that features far more diverse body types, including fat people, where non-sculpted physiques aren’t just objects of scorn.

You say that what you did see bored you to tears. OK… why? It’s too “vanilla” – or, as I prefer to call it, “standard issue”? OK… what about it being standard-issue bores you? Think on this carefully before you answer, especially if your knee-jerk response is to say that porn “made” you incapable of responding to more tame videos – something that is widely claimed but regularly disproven in studies. I’m not asking because I want you to reprogram your brain to react more strongly to standard-issue sex, I’m asking because part of having a better relationship with your sexuality is understanding why something arouses you and gets you off. If you’re into porn that is more about dominating another person, that’s cool… but ask what, precisely, is it that turns your crank? Is it because power-exchange turns you on, especially if you feel powerless in your daily life? What kind of domination does it for you? Can you get as excited when the domination is in the form of giving pleasure – arousing another person until they “lose” control – rather than forcing them to give into something they don’t want?

The more you understand what you like and the why of it, the more you’re able to actually work with it and, importantly, stop feeling ashamed about it.

This isn’t to say that porn in general doesn’t have a metric f--kton of problematic issues. Mainstream professional porn trades in s--tloads of racist, queerphobic, fatphobic and misogynist tropes, and there’re plenty of people who mistake porn sex for real sex – often in ways that they wouldn’t mistake Bullitt for driving lessons. But that doesn’t make watching people have sex as a performance inherently bad or degrading. The problem isn’t in the subject matter, the problem is in the people who are making it and marketing it. As I said earlier: there’s a lot of porn out there being made that deliberately avoids those issues. If it’s not in the mainstream yet… well, that’s as much an issue with the marketplace and the first-adopter advantage, as well as the overall issues with companies restricting sexual content.

So. Now that we’ve dismantled and debunked some of the areas where your beliefs were incorrect or misleading, let’s talk a bit more about what you can do about all of this. As I said, the first and most important step is going to be getting the f--k off Reddit, TikTok, 4chan and every other forum, subreddit or Discord you’re going to for “support”. That is something you should go cold-turkey on – delete your account, delete the apps from your phone, use browser plugins to restrict your access and give the password to a trusted friend so you can’t just turn it off. The sooner you stop constantly reinforcing the sense of shame and misery that these communities want to foist onto you, the quicker you’ll recover.

The next thing you need to do is start treating yourself better. And I don’t mean “Eat a salad and get in shape, loser”, I mean stop treating yourself so cruelly. Jesus f--knuts Christ my dude, look at the way you talk about yourself. “Fat ass.” “Poster child for the American slob”. “stand in the corner where he belongs.” That’s not “being brutally honest” and framing that way is lying to yourself. You’re not being honest, you’re being brutal. If you were actually dedicated to being honest, then some of that honesty would be about positive things about yourself. All you’re doing is using “brutally honest” as an excuse to kick yourself in the nuts. You’re hurting your own feelings for no better reason than other people told you that you should and you’ve sold yourself on the idea that it’s some twisted form of virtue. It’s not. It’s just psychic self-harm, no different from the same sort of masochistic epistemology that incels try to pass off as enlightenment.

If you want a healthier sense of your sexuality and your own general self-worth you need to treat yourself far more kindly than you do now. You can’t “shame” your way to self-improvement; if that were the case, you wouldn’t have written into me about your issues with porn. Shame doesn’t motivate change, it demotivates it. You’re already starting from a place where you believe change is difficult if not impossible, so you’re starting from a place where you don’t give it your full effort. After all, you’re just a shameful c-m brain loser who thinks he could be better, yeah? But to make matters worse, trying to shame yourself into improvement means that when you backslide – as everyone does, because change can be hard and your brain fights against it – you won’t be able to recover from it as quickly or as completely as someone who is coming to self-improvement from a more positive attitude.

You know what does make it easier to improve, to make positive changes and to stick to them? An attitude of “I’m going to do better because I deserve better and I deserve good things.” If you decide to adjust how you eat, you don’t say “no more slop for this fat piggy oink oink”, you say “I’m going to eat a more nutritious meal because it makes me feel good, but I don’t need to be a fanatic about it, nor do I need to feel bad about what I eat.” After all, carbs, fat and sugar are not just delicious but also necessary. Nor for that matter, do you declare being fat as being shameful, slovenly or a mark of low moral character. Being fat is a neutral fact about yourself; it doesn’t make you a good or bad person, nor is it a mistake to be “corrected”.

More exercise is generally a good thing. Our bodies are designed to move, so going and being more active in general is good. Go for walks, not because you’re a fatty fat fat and you’re trying to change that but because walks are good for your cardiovascular system and your mental health and mood. Treating exercise as punishment or using shame about your weight as motivation doesn’t work and will only make you feel worse.

What if you slip up? What if you have a meal that’s more empty calories than nutritional value? Well… what about it? You had a meal that wasn’t as healthy as it could have been. I hope it was delicious and that you enjoyed it. Shrug your shoulders about it and say “yup, that happened, and that’s ok” and go on doing your best. Same with exercise; if you don’t work out as “hard” as you could or you take a day off, that’s fine. Same applies to anything else – cutting back on screen time, trying to talk to more people or any other area that you’re trying to improve. Any sort of backslide or relapse isn’t the end of the world; it’s just that moment.

Having some self-compassion is going to be much more productive for achieving your goals than self-recrimination. Punishing yourself or having an attitude of “I f--ked up, I’m so s--tty” just means you’re more likely to give up entirely instead of just saying “enh, I don’t need to be perfect” and resolving to do better next time.

You’re a “slob”? Ok well that’s an easy enough fix – stop defining yourself as a slob and put some effort into keeping your place relatively clean and organized. You don’t need to live in an environment so sterile you could conduct surgery in it, but making a point of picking up and cleaning once a week will do wonders for you. Make it a habit: on Sundays, you clean, you do laundry and you treat your living space like you give a damn.

Similarly, dress in ways that make you feel like you look good, regardless of your size. Yeah, finding clothes for fat people can be difficult, but you can and should dress like you give a damn, not just wearing something you call your “shame tarp” or whatever. Dressing in ways that make you feel like you’re looking sharp is an important part of feeling better about yourself. You’re giving yourself permission to like yourself and treat yourself better – like a friend who cares about you, not a drill sergeant who’s trying to break you down. Basic improvements to your grooming are part of this; a simple change in skin care and a different hair cut can be transformative.

This also applies to self-recriminating bulls--t like saying “23 is too late to lose my virginity”. Not only is this bulls--t – there is literally no age where it’s “too late” – but it’s just yet another way of punishing yourself, even for doing things that you’re “supposed” to do. All this is is your saying “Oh, you had sex? CONGRATULATIONS LOSER, YOU DID IT THE WRONG WAY THAT DOESN’T COUNT”. Much like being fat, being a virgin or not is neither good nor bad; it’s just data, a singular fact about you that is inherently neutral. And, incidentally, 23 ain’t that old for your first sexual experience. It’s a bit on the right side of the bell curve, but the bell curve is just about median age, not “this is when you’re supposed to have sex for the first time”.

Now I will say that you should cut out online porn for a while. Not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because right now, you’re using it in an unhealthy way. You’re harming yourself; porn and the way you feel afterwards are just the tool you’re using to do it.

Notice that I don’t say “stop masturbating”. Right now is a good time to start using your imagination to spur things, not just relying on pre-digested material and other people’s ideas about sex. Use a break from online porn as a way of exploring more about what you’re actually into and realizing that your erotic response is actually broader than you give yourself credit for. You may have a type, sure; pretty much everybody does. But having a type isn’t the same thing as only being attracted to them.

Masturbation is also a good way to figure out what brings you pleasure and – importantly – how to communicate that to your partner. Because you know one thing you don’t see in porn that you do see in actual partnered sex? Talking. Discussion. Communication. The more you understand what you like, what feels good and why, the easier it is to communicate that to your partner so that they know what you like and what gets you off. Don’t just jerk it like you’re trying to reach the finish line before time runs out, explore things a bit. What level of friction do you prefer? Do you like more attention to the glans or the shaft and what type? Do you enjoy external pressure on your prostate? What about touching your neck, your nipples, your wrists? Don’t let weirdos online tell you that any of this is weak, weird, sick or “gay”; they don’t respect you, don’t like you and aren’t trying to help you. All they’re doing is trying to control you and define things for you.

I would also recommend that you talk to a qualified and certified mental health professional. You sound like you’re carrying around a lot of pain and shame, and it’s difficult to offload those unnecessary burdens on your own. It’s important that you do so, because the healing really can’t start until you let go of the hurt first. So I’d highly recommend you talk to a counselor or therapist, especially a sex-positive counselor who understands issues surrounding sexual trauma and self-esteem. If you look for help, I would recommend going to AASECT’s referral directory; this will help you find a sex-positive, trauma-informed therapist in your area, someone who will help you work on these issues of shame instead of just reinforcing them.

Oh, and one more thing: always, always check the sources. You’re going to find a lot of sites and organizations like “Fight the New Drug” or “Your Brain on Porn” or “Covenant Eyes” that will be thrilled to reinforce your pre-existing negative feelings about yourself. You’ll also find plenty of “masculinity” influencers that will do the same and neg you for all of your other self-perceived flaws. They’re frequently right-wing (often fascist-adjacent) organizations, often with extreme religious affiliation. They rely on pseudoscience, “everybody knows” and your pre-existing negative beliefs in order to try to convince you that you’re shameful and disgusting. You need to recognize these for what they are – people who aren’t interested in helping you, they’re interested in controlling you and recruiting you.

It rarely takes much to see these organizations and communities for who and what they really are. But at the very least, pay attention to the message and the way they make you feel. When their primary message is one about shame and weakness, when they frame a nebulous “other” as the mastermind behind “what’s wrong with men today” or other bulls--t, rely on a return to some never-extant “golden age” or generally rely on your feeling like s--t about yourself or denigrating others? That’s a giant goddamn red flag.

I hope you start feeling better about yourself, man. It’s time to ditch that “loser” appellation and start actually treating yourself like you deserve – like a good and valued friend. But the only person who can make any of this happen is you.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com