A common assumption is that cuckold fetishes are caused by porn.
This is not true. In fact, cuckolding existed long before porn was even invented!
However, porn does affect your brain in such a way that it can push you down this path.
Porn can make your existing fetishes more extreme, and strengthen the fetishes you already have. Porn can also make you lose arousal to softcore things, like simple nudity. In some people, they lose arousal to everything apart from their fetishes.
Quitting porn will reduce the extremes of your fantasies, and re-sensitise you to normal arousal.
However, it won’t get rid of your fetishes. You’ll still be more turned on by cuckolding than normal sex – because you haven’t addressed the root cause.
The following is a simplified extract from my online course. Here’s how porn can push you down this path:
1. Dopamine Desensitisation
Dopamine = Pleasure
Dopamine is the chemical in our brains that creates the feeling of pleasure. It’s released whenever we do pleasurable activities, such as eat tasty food or have sex.
Porn floods the brain with dopamine, much more than we need. We become overwhelmed with dopamine (and pleasure).
Over time, we get used to having these highly elevated dopamine levels; they become more ‘normal’, and we don’t feel as much pleasure from them. We become desensitised. Then, we start to need even more of a ‘kick’ to reach the same levels of pleasure.
Fetishes Revive Desensitised Dopamine Circuits
Watching porn which is hardcore, shocking, taboo, or stressful in any way, can release stress hormones such as epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol. These hormones amplify the effects of dopamine. They give us the kick we need to feel the same levels of pleasure.
Cuckolding is obviously stressful. When we watch content like this, it gives us an extra kick, which we seek out when we’re desensitised to dopamine.
But Why Cuckolding, As Opposed To Other Fetishes?
That’s because of the way that fetishes form. It’s nothing to do with porn, but in this case porn can act as the ‘trigger’ that leads you to seek out the extra kick and discover the previously undiscovered fetishes lurking inside you. Fetishes form due to your fears, feelings, associations, and unmet needs. Porn can make you get in touch with those and discover arousal from them.
Dopamine desensitisation can be reversed by staying away from porn for a few months. However, this will not remove your fetish. Once you’ve learned that cuckolding is pleasurable, you will continue to enjoy it and continue to crave it until the root cause is healed. Abstaining from porn helps to regain normal arousal to softcore stimuli.
(For more information, sign up to my email list to hear about my online course!)
2. Conditioning
Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov discovered that his dogs began to salivate when they saw the assistant whose job was to feed them. Pavlov theorised that the dogs had formed an association between that assistant and food, so he tested it.
Every time he fed them, he rang a little bell. After hundreds of times of doing that, he thought that the dogs would associate the bell with food, and start to salivate. So, he then rang the bell without feeding them, and measured how much they salivated. Sure enough, the dogs’ salivation was triggered by ringing the bell that they had associated with food.
This proved his idea of conditioning; we form associations in our brain which link things together.
You’re Conditioned For This
If you watch cuckold porn hundreds of times, and start to associate it with pleasure, your brain will form a mental association between cuckolding and pleasure. In this way, you’ll be aroused by cuckolding because of that mental association.
Even if you stop watching porn, the association will remain for a long time after that.
This is one thing that makes it hard to quit; your brain automatically craves it, because it’s learned that it brings you pleasure.
(Again, for more info, this is covered in my online course! Sign up on the homepage to hear more about it)
3. World View
The objectification of women that can come with porn use can eventually make you focus too much on your standing compared to other men, especially in bed. When you watch a lot of porn, it affects your perception of women, sex, and life.
In one study, researchers found that people who regularly watched a lot of porn were inaccurate at judging the prevalence of ‘extreme’ sexual behaviors in real life. They thought that sexual acts like sadomasochism or group sex were much more common than they really are. This is the effect of porn – it makes you think that the things in porn are normal, and everyone else is doing those things.
This might make you feel left out, excluded, and not good enough. If you start thinking that your partner is more promiscuous, drawn towards infidelity, or experimental and kinky – just not with you – it hurts, and that’s the pain which the cuckold fetish eroticizes. It forms to turn hurtful feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, exclusion, and infidelity into sexual pleasure – those feelings are the core of the fetish, and porn can create those feelings.
Romantic Cynicism
An evaluation of the effects of porn found that: “Changes include diminished trust in intimate partners, the abandonment of hopes for sexual exclusivity with partners, [and] evaluation of promiscuity as the natural state… Cynical attitudes about love emerge.”
Do you have cynical attitudes about love and sex? Anyone finding ‘diminished trust in intimate partners’ or the ‘abandonment of hopes for sexual exclusivity’ or the ‘evaluation of promiscuity as the natural state’ are experiencing the same fears and emotional pain that cuckolding eroticizes. By watching a lot of porn, it seems like you may be able to develop hurtful beliefs about sex, women, and society – which can be sexualized through the cuckold fetish.
Porn can create the sense that women are sex-crazed beings who yearn for a big penis on a muscular stud to use their bodies for pleasure. We see them screaming in pleasure, faint from ecstasy, and do anything they’re told no matter how extreme. By comparison, if that’s the standard by which you think sex should be, ‘normal’ sex would make you feel like you’re not good enough.
Especially, seeing women submit to men at an extent which is frankly ridiculous can make you feel like you’re inadequate if in real life your girlfriend doesn’t want to do the same to you. Cuckold porn takes this concept and amplifies it much more than regular porn, because we see women submitting to other men, reinforcing these damaging feelings.
If your girlfriend doesn’t let you ejaculate on her face or in her mouth, perhaps you start asking questions of yourself. Am I not good enough? Do I not fulfil her sexually? Would she let some other guy do it? Is it because I’m not dominant enough? Is it because I don’t excite her? Did her ex-boyfriends get to do it?
Often, the answer is that your perceptions of reality have been warped by porn. Some girls truly, honestly, authentically don’t want semen on their face or mouth from anyone. Not you, and not the black guy with the huge dick either. Our brains may interpret it as a personal rejection, when this is not true. Some girls don’t like that. Porn makes you think being more dominant is ‘good’, and makes inexperienced men think they have to perform differently to satisfy a girl, when in fact this is a warped perception of sex created by porn.
Creating Sexual Inadequacy
Watching porn where penis size takes a central role will make you focus on the size of your own penis, even if you have nothing to worry about. All porn features larger-than-average penises, which does distort your perception of reality. Cuckold porn may frequently involve an element of humiliation over penis size, in fact ‘small penis humiliation’ porn now exists as a separate category of porn. Every time you see or hear this, it only makes you feel more concerned about how you measure up – regardless of the actual size of your penis. It directs your attention towards your penis size, and your mind becomes concerned, whereas without porn you may never have focused on the size or even on your penis at all. This is how porn can change you and your perspective of reality.
Humiliation Porn Makes You Fear Humiliation
There exists some types of porn involving humiliation around being a ‘loser’ or ‘pathetic’ or a ‘beta male’. Of course, these fetishes exist by turning these feelings into sexual pleasure; it’s arousing to people who have a deep-rooted fear or negative feelings about these things. It eroticizes these hurtful feelings. When they watch this porn, it makes them place undue emphasis on the importance of the opposite (being an ‘alpha male’), and therefore amplifies the pressure to be good enough and the concern that you’re not – which is what causes the fetish. Humiliation porn is formed from fears of humiliation, and causes fears of humiliation when you watch it – so it’s a self-reinforcing loop. Again, this is how porn can affect you.
Porn where a girl cheats on her husband is arousing to people who fear that. It eroticizes these emotions as a way for us to escape from the pressure and give in to those painful concepts without consequences. Then, the experience of seeing this happen in all the porn you watch reinforces your viewpoint and amplifies your concerns. It makes you think it’s more common than it is; that women are more likely to do that, and it strengthens your worries. Then, this is eroticized, and again, it’s a self-reinforcing loop.
Amateur porn is especially bad for this. With professionally-produced porn, we know for sure that it is at least staged and purely fantasy. With amateur porn, it makes it seem so much more real. All of these examples are about porn changing your perceptions of reality, making you more worried about certain things like relationships or insecure about yourself.
Reality must be hard for plumbers, pizza deliverers, masseurs, and step-moms. No-one wants to have sex with them nearly as much in real life!
(Once again, if you want to know more, I cover this in more detail in my course!)
4. Creating Shame And Self-Loathing
The cuckold fetish sexualizes shame and self-loathing. Any feelings of shame about yourself and self-loathing cause the cuckold fetish.
Porn can create shame and self-loathing. Therefore, it can strengthen this fetish. If watching porn (particularly extreme porn) makes you feel ashamed of yourself, like you’re flawed, defective, or not good enough, that will reinforce the emotions and fears which cause the cuckold fetish.
It can also do this by making you feel weird/dirty. If you’ve just watched hours of cuckold porn and you try to have a social interaction, you might not be acting normally. Maybe you’re thinking if they can tell. Maybe you’re having mini-flashbacks to what you just watched. Maybe you’re feeling ashamed of yourself, and not able to be fun, happy, and confident. All of these things will only reinforce the feelings that cause the fetish. Social isolation, too, will create unmet needs which we can often turn to porn to fulfil, but end up feeling even more unfulfilled and hollow as a result.
(My course is all about this!)
If You Stop Watching Porn, Does Your Cuckold Fetish Go Away?
No. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Abstaining from porn will make you more ‘sensitive’ and more easily aroused by simple, softcore content such as nudity. However the attraction to the more hardcore fetishes doesn’t go away. It may be reduced and less extreme, but once your brain has found that cuckolding is pleasurable, it will forever be aroused by the concept. That is, until you change the subconscious emotions that the cuckold fantasy forms to deal with.
To learn how to change these emotions, see below: