12 Former Porn Addicts Describe The Pitfalls Of A Serious Online Sex Habit

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1. SCROLLING, CHOOSING, WATCHING, ESCAPING, CUMMING

“Though I had periods of promiscuity throughout my twenties, my biggest issue has always been with what I do alone….There’s something so sad and humiliating in imagining a person locked away in a dark room, hot laptop balanced on chest, turning the volume down low, scrolling, scrolling, choosing, watching, escaping, cumming. And then realizing that person is me.”

2. THE FATHER WHO KILLED HIMSELF BECAUSE OF AN ADDICTION TO PORN

“Within a fairly short period of time, I found myself watching up to eight hours of pornography a day, every day.…It wasn’t unusual for me to be on a business trip and stay up until 3 or 4AM watching porn, knowing full well that I had an 8AM meeting the next morning where I was making a presentation to sell multi-million dollar software to corporate directors.…I was thinking seriously about walking over to the Wal-Mart not too far from where I lived, buying a gun, sticking it in my mouth and pulling the trigger. It was when I started thinking about writing a suicide note to my boys—that, thank God, is when I woke up. I decided that it wasn’t the legacy I was going to leave to my kids: the father who killed himself because of an addiction to porn.”

3. THE FACT I WAS AROUSED BY SHIT AND ANIMAL PORN MEANT I HAD BRAIN DAMAGE

“Since age 19, I’ve been completely unable to control my use of pornography on the Internet, my compulsive masturbation, my driving need to seduce women, and in recent years my nasty habit of spending hundreds of dollars a night in strip clubs, not so much making it rain as shamefully shoveling a wad of 20s at a stripper before scuttling away….My therapist said the fact I was aroused by shit and animal porn meant I had brain damage, simple as that. His conclusion took a couple of days to sink in. Essentially, the part of my mind responsible for rational decision-making has been overridden by a huge desire for more pleasure chemicals, and I do stupid, dangerous things to get those chemicals no matter the consequences. That’s addiction.”

4. I AM A RECOVERING PORN ADDICT; I AM ALSO A 25-YEAR-OLD WOMAN

“I am a recovering porn addict. I am also a 25-year-old woman.…I watched and masturbated to movies in the “Girlvert” and “Meatholes” series, where the obvious goal was to humiliate and degrade the women involved. The disturbing thing was that I had been performing in porn for a few years myself by then, and I knew exactly the sort of cruelty, abuse and exploitation that went on behind the scenes. Yet I still watched and got off to these horribly violent and misogynist forms of pornography.”

6. I WAS LYING TO PEOPLE ABOUT WHAT I WAS DOING

“It was starting to take up large chunks of my time; I was lying to people about what I was doing in my spare time. I’d stay up viewing all night and go to work on an hour’s sleep; it was affecting my productivity, my health, my relationships and friendships. There were times I didn’t turn up to people’s parties or I wouldn’t go out, because I’d been viewing all day, or I’d think, I’ll just view one more thing before I leave. It’s a bit like when someone goes into a casino and they lose track of time and then they realize they’ve been in there for a day.”

7. Shooting up on porn allowed me to savor female energies without all the emotions

“Like millions of other well-functioning married men with issues, I turned to pornography. For several years I wanked myself stupid. Time and space was filled with horniness beyond my wildest dreams. Time that might otherwise have been used to be creative, productive, or even just plain bored got devoured by lust. In any moment where there was a desire for some escape from life I scored some porn….I hated porn. I couldn’t sniff her, worship her or probe the beauty of her being. I couldn’t feel her essence bathing my wounded masculinity to wholeness….But for me, porn somehow replaced the real thing. It was just, well, easier. Neurosis-free women.…Shooting up on porn allowed me to savor female energies without all the emotions. Small men everywhere, who would rather not deal with the truth that women have for them, can go get a fill of female energy, have a beer, then get on with their day. Men, what is happening to us?”

8. MY HEART WOULD THUMP WITH A MIX OF THRILL AND SHAME

“I would sneak downstairs to the family computer once the house was dark. As I would settle into the polyester-cotton seat of the swivel chair and open a browser, my heart would thump with a mix of thrill and shame, my ears perked for any reason to abort my mission—zip, pull and dart with an excuse ready about checking the weather for tomorrow….It was an addict’s high, a high-stakes heist for sexual pleasure—an association that would not soon recede in my primal brain.…I found myself rapidly desensitized to online images. If a threesome was kinky last week, then I’d need something wilder this week. To reach climax, I had to find that same toxic mix of shame and lust….It was a dissociative, alienating, almost inhuman task to close my eyes while having sex with someone I really cared about and imagine having sex with someone else or recall a deviant video from the archives of my youth that I was ashamed of even then.”

9. THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME

“One day I was watching pornography in my car, when I realized that I was late for my test. I closed my laptop and ran off. When I came back I found my car broken into, and my laptop gone. That evening my friend and I went to a strip club to help me feel better. My friend soon got tired and wanted to go home, but I couldn’t get myself to walk away. Observing the consequences of my actions and my inability to walk away forced me to suspect that may be there was something was wrong with me after all.”

10. IT HAS AFFECTED MY ERECTIONS

“I was 15 when I started watching porn after my parents bought me a laptop. I did what pretty much any teenage boy does and look up porn websites. It became an everyday thing very quickly. I was watching porn for two hours a day….I found a website dedicated to porn addiction and I felt like I had an epiphany. I felt like I wasn’t alone any more. I did 100 days of porn abstinence and masturbation abstinence. It’s exactly like going cold turkey. The first two weeks were pretty awful with lots of mood swings. It was rough, it was really rough. There were sleepless nights. There were nights where I’d wake up in cold sweats. I’ve been able to get back to my routines and I’ve been OK but it has affected my erections. When I’m with a woman I’ve noticed it’s softer down there and I’m not as excited….I couldn’t get erections anymore with real women when I tried because I’d watched so much porn.”

11. I HAD TERRIBLE WITHDRAWALS

“I was 15 when I first masturbated to online porn. The high I got was immense, and it lasted about 30 minutes. At that point in my life I’d been feeling really low, and had been for about seven years. But, for the first time, I didn’t feel depressed at all—everything lifted. It made me want to do it again, and again—so I did, until I was watching online porn every day.…Eventually, I became desensitized to ‘vanilla’ guy-on-girl porn—it simply didn’t turn me on—so I sought out more extreme porn to shock my system into being aroused again. For the same reason, sex with real women was pretty much impossible. I didn’t link it to my porn addiction—because I didn’t know I had one. I just thought there was something inherently wrong with me, which made me feel more low.…I went cold turkey on porn. I had terrible withdrawals. My hands shook and I had awful mood swings, vivid nightmares and hot and cold sweats.”

12. YOU NAME A GENRE, AND I WAS PROBABLY INTO IT AT ONE POINT

“You name a genre, and I was probably into it at some point. Things that would have disgusted me one month I relied on the next to get me excited. …The process I’ve described above is well-known to addiction psychologists and therapists and is called desensitization.…Excessive abuse over extended periods of time can lead to decreased libido, erectile dysfunction and impotence. In my case, the warning signs were there. I felt terrible after a session browsing the dark side of the net—a mixture of shame, disgust, dissatisfaction, depression. I realized I could bring myself literally to the brink of orgasm solely with visual stimulation—without using my hands at all. The encounters I had with women felt somehow disappointing. Sexually I felt a bit dead, occasionally I failed to maintain an erection. Desensitization is an apt word, because years of beating my meat to porn left my penis less sensitive to touch. I blamed it on condoms, on performance anxiety, on alcohol, on being out of shape, but finally, I realized the truth: porn.”