Things that I have learned over the past few months about Filth

1. Porn is extremely hard to leave
2. Porn is worse than masturbation
3. Porn is what causes masturbation 95% of the time
4. The more you consume porn, the larger your appetite becomes
5. This appetite grows by doing the following (I haven’t had any personal experience with some of these, but they are still extremely destructive):
   • live webcams, cartoon pornography, sex forums where people post up pictures of themselves,
   • sex stories –> which have a disturbing popularity for incest themes, rape, torture, and cheating,
   • going to strip clubs, hiring prostitutes,
   • completely leaving the idea of a possible marriage to having sex with multiple people by looking for girlfriends, etc.
6. Exposure to the above completely changes the way you think about the opposite sex, especially women, and is the beginning of creating a mental complex that is deadly, not to mention it destroys your self-respect
7. The more you do it, the less guilty you feel
8. After watching porn, and feeling guilty, I sometimes make ghusl (take a shower) and pray –> while I am praying images of pornography flash in my mind, and it is horrible
9. The only way to leave pornography is cold turkey – leaving it ALL at once, and never looking back –> why?
   • A pornographic image has an incredible ability to arouse emotions and these emotions feel good at the time
   • Those feelings are difficult to remove from your mind, and even if you stop watching porn for a few days, that image will stay in your mind, and your imagination will drift into porn-like thoughts
   • Those porn-like thoughts will eventually bring you back to watching more porn which will restart the whole process. So if you are watching 2 hours of pornography everyday, and you think that it will help if you reduce that time to 1 hour a day – it makes NO difference, because seeing a single image for a fraction of a second will arouse emotions that will be engraved into your mind, bringing you back to watch more porn unless you completely preoccupy yourself with something positive that has the same arousal (and there aren’t many things that can do that)
10. When you are searching for porn, you completely lose track of time, you can search porn for 8 hours at once, literally, without truly realizing it
11. If you are addicted to pornography and masturbation, pornography is MUCH WORSE and you should focus all of your efforts on ridding yourself of pornography. Why? Pornography arouses abnormal amounts of sexual thought – masturbation relieves some sexual tension, and although it does arouse some sexual thought it is not as invasive to your mind as is pornography –> however masturbation will still send you to hell,
12. If you watch episodes of your favorite shows, it is inevitable to see a woman without hijab. In reality, TV in general should be haram when you think about it, because we are supposed to lower our gaze even while women have their hijab on, so if we are watching TV, we are directly opposing the idea of lowering the gaze because you are looking wide-eyed at women who are exposing themselves to levels way beyond what the hijab envelops.
    • Watching TV, and TV episodes leads you to think about sexual thoughts because many of today’s shows have sexual themes, not to mention sexual advertising
    • If watching episodes online, it is very easy to open a new browser window and start looking at porn – the thought of which being inspired from the show