The most important realization for me, is what I/we are up against. It is not the need to masturbate that entices us to look, it is the looking itself that is addictive, and masturbation is merely a peak of those desires. We desire to let our eyes feed on an image. The best example is how we derive actual pleasure just by looking at a woman passing by on the street and continue to stare as she passes by. Those few seconds are literally no different than the first few bites into a steaming slice of pizza which are eaten while still inhaling. During those first bites, the mind is focused on nothing other than that pleasure. Masturbation is an extreme example of that because it requires your mind to focus so intensely on an image and imagine that you are actually doing something to that image and that the image is responding to what you are doing. A tremendous amount of imaginative energy is put in to fooling your mind you are actually there and actually doing something. It is the ultimate actualization of that "feeding", and to reach that point of ecstasy you have to completely wrap your mind around an image and let it totally consume your conscience. The 'looking' is what we are addicted to though, and only with that realization did it truly dawn on me that allowing myself to look at an image, or more correctly to 'feed' on an image, is just as bad as masturbating, because it is a less extreme version of the same thing. We can no longer convince ourselves that as long as we are not masturbating it's not so bad. No, you have already given in to your addiction if you have allowed your mind to feed on an image, just as when you have masturbated to an image. Similar to a drug addict who cannot fool himself into thinking, "it's not so bad, it's not a fall, it's only a joint, it's not like I did heroine or anything". I think we would agree that both light and hard drugs are a fall for someone trying to free himself from a drug addiction. And if it's not in their mindset, then they don't really have a chance of recovery.