Think about the women you’ve known in your life. Your mother. Sisters. Daughters. Aunts. Teachers. Coworkers. Friends. Exes. People who, at some point, trusted you enough to be human in front of you.
Porn treats women as interchangeable. Your life tells a different story. The women you’ve actually known are specific, complicated, funny, difficult, generous, irritating, beloved. Not a category. Not a content stream. People with names and voicemails and moods and things they’re carrying.
One of the strange byproducts of heavy porn use is that it can dull your perception of even the women you know. You start to see the women in your actual life through a faint haze of the template — rating them, comparing them, noticing first what porn trained you to notice. This is not because you are a bad person. It is because attention is trainable, and you trained it that way.
Recovery is, in part, the restoration of specificity. You start seeing your mother as your mother, not through the lens. Your sister as your sister. Your partner as a particular person who has made particular choices and whose face you know. The women in your life become people again, not instances of a category.
This is one of the quietly good things about recovery. You get back the ability to know someone.
Porn dulls specificity. Recovery restores it. The women in your life become people again, not instances of a category.
Think of one woman you know well. Name three specific things about her that nobody who didn’t know her could guess. That specificity is the recovery.