I’ve had quite a few people ask me about home sex videos over the years.
Guys with porn addiction want to know: do my home made sex videos count as porn / is it OK if I watch them?
I once even had a lady ask whether it would help her husband if she made home sex videos with him so he could masturbate to them instead of porn.
So let’s look into this topic and I’ll share my thoughts with you.
The short answer
Home sex videos count as porn and it’s best to avoid them, especially during recovery from porn addiction, and ideally forever.
Maybe not as harmful as other porn, but still harmful
In their defence, you probably won’t have an internet-sized stash of home sex videos, and they obviously show scenarios that are familiar and realistic for you.
So, compared to online porn, home sex videos don’t involve the same level of searching, novelty, exceeded expectations and shock value. Hence they won’t bombard your brain with dopamine to the same degree.
But that’s pretty much where the mitigating factors end.
From just about every other perspective, home sex videos are no different from “real” porn you’ll find anywhere else.
But it’s me!
I know what you’re thinking: how can watching my own home sex videos be a problem when I’m the one in them and I’m only watching sex I’ve already had?
It all comes down to a difference in perspective.
Intellectually, you know it’s you in those videos. But on a neurological level, your brain doesn’t know it’s you.
Maybe even more correctly: on a neurological level, your brain doesn’t know that porn isn’t you.
It interprets porn as a real sexual encounter, which is why it responds to porn like it does to sex (with dopamine release and sexual arousal, among many other things).
So, from your brain’s point of view, there’s no difference between home sex videos and porn – your brain will respond the same way to both, and that doesn’t help you recover from your porn addiction.
Define porn in a way that helps your recovery
This brings us to an important distinction about how you define porn.
In porn addiction recovery, what’s important is how the brain views things, and not how you view things intellectually.
So it’s most useful to look at any stimulus in terms of its effect on your brain.
When you’re defining whether something is porn or not, it doesn’t matter what it is, what matters is how you use it.
If you use something as an artificial source of sexual arousal, it’s porn.
This is true, whether you’re talking about a Beyonce music video, a Mills and Boon novel, or a postcard of a hot chick in a bikini.
With that in mind, here are some of the ways that watching home sex videos (or anything else you use as artificial arousal) can interfere with your porn addiction recovery.
1. Watching home sex videos can alter your sexual conditioning
The more you watch porn, the more you train your brain to get aroused by you being a sexual voyeur rather than a sexual participant.
In addition, watching porn trains your brain to get aroused by interaction with a computer and screen instead of interaction in real life.
In this regard, home sex videos are no different from other porn – both can worsen or at least slow recovery from porn related issues such as lack of interest in real sex and porn induced erectile dysfunction.
2. Watching home sex videos can ingrain destructive behaviour patterns
The more you watch porn, the more you practice the “skill” of sitting down with your device, switching it on, opening porn videos, and everything that happens from there.
If you repeat this behaviour pattern enough, you create brain pathways that allow you to perform it automatically without conscious thought, just like riding a bike or driving a car.
This makes it a lot easier to wind up using porn again in future, and harder to stop yourself from using it when something triggers you.
If you want to overcome porn addiction, you need to either break or weaken the brain pathways that allow you to perform these behaviour patterns easily and automatically.
But by watching home sex videos, you’re still practicing the same behaviours, and hence strengthening these brain pathways instead of weakening them through lack of use.
3. Watching home sex videos can increase the risk of escalating to other porn
If you’ve become addicted to hardcore porn, your home sex videos may start to seem boring by comparison (unless you happen to be Dan Bilzerian or equivalent).
As a result, there’s the chance that once the home sex videos trigger your arousal, you’ll just switch to internet porn and continue from there.
I’ve talked about this concept before in Don’t Go Where it’s Slippery Part 1 and Part 2.
When you’re already right there watching home sex videos on your device, it’s only a tiny jump to just open your internet browser and find hardcore porn.
4. Watching home sex videos can lead to masturbation and orgasm
Q. What do most guys do while they watch home sex videos?
(a) Eat popcorn and chill?
(b) Masturbate to orgasm?
My guess is answer (b).
As I’ve mentioned in one of the free subscriber-only audios, there are many reasons why masturbation and orgasm can interfere with porn addiction recovery in some way for most people.
As a result, I recommend avoiding them as the default starting point during recovery.
What about watching home sex videos after recovery from porn addiction?
After recovery, maybe you can watch your home sex videos again without encountering problems. But I still don’t recommend it personally.
One part of recovery is that your addiction related brain pathways weaken to the point where they don’t cause you any practical issues any more.
But this doesn’t mean those brain pathways disappear completely.
As a result, it’s much easier to reactivate those pathways again than it was to build them in the first place.
So by using home sex videos the way you would use porn, you still run the sexual conditioning, behaviour training and porn escalation risks above, even after recovery.
In the end, everyone is different, so you’ll only know by testing. But I don’t believe it’s worth the risk of even trying it to find out.
At best, watching and masturbating to home sex videos certainly won’t be helpful or enrich your life, unlike so many other awesome things that will.
So even after you’ve recovered from porn addiction, why even chance it? Just have the sex instead! ;)
Get Your Free Porn Addiction Recovery Guide Right Now
Get free videos, audios, PDFs and other resources packed with powerful techniques to help you smash your porn addiction and recover completely. This stuff works!
Subscribe right now to get free access instantly with no catches and no worries.
