first messy encounters with girls. No need for
effort; no risk of embarrassment. The women
were there on your screen, a private universe
of naked willing females doing all the explicit
things you could ever have wanted.
Pornography was all he had ever known.
It had wrecked every intimate relationship he
had tried to have with a woman.
“Porn has raised the bar for what turns me
on,” he said. “And then raised the bar again.
I’m completely desensitised. I hate it; it’s like
something is dead inside. I want to be
physically close to you but my body is numb.
The porn needs to be more extreme than
before for me to get any kind of response.
I wish I’d never started.”
To me, this was an unknown world. I’m no
prude, but like many women I have no interest
in pornography and have never watched it. It’s
acknowledged that men and women differ in
terms of what turns us on; in general, women
need emotional closeness, whereas men prefer
visual stimulus, hence their far higher porn
consumption. I knew that, but I was shocked
at the extent to which pornography had
damaged Mark.
I persevered gently, explaining that I had
no expectations and wasn’t judging him. I read
up on sexual dysfunction and tried to reassure
him in bed. It was painful to watch him
struggle to feel something, but he couldn’t.
Porn had killed off an entire dimension of
his human response.
Even though Mark hated this addiction,
in some ways it had made his life easier. It
demanded no emotional investment, no asking
someone out, going for dinner and getting to
know them before having sex. No seduction or
romance or feelings. No risk of rejection.
Porn addict is a big label, but Mark wasn’t
“like that”. Apart from our non-existent sex
life, I would never have known that anything
was wrong. He didn’t lock himself in his study
for hours watching adult movies. During three
happy years together, I never once caught him
furtively shutting down his browser or hiding
his phone. He wasn’t misogynist or vulgar;
he didn’t ogle other women. There were
no signs. I don’t even know when he “fed”
this porn addiction. He never made me feel
uncomfortable, never asked me to do anything
strange or explicit. (Quite the opposite: where
sex should be in a relationship, there was a
gaping void.)
I say “three happy years” because we
were extremely happy. Mark was kind, funny,
gentle, romantic. He remembered every
anniversary, the day we first met, our first
kiss. Apart from the absence of sex, our
relationship was wonderful. He proposed
to me on a deserted beach and I said yes. But
we got engaged knowing this was a problem
we hadn’t dealt with. Sex isn’t everything in
a relationship, but it matters. Ultimately, hisThe Times Magazine 21imagery that makes pre-internet porn look
like Frozen.
Ben was very into the idea of getting
me pregnant. The only snag? He couldn’t
ejaculate. He could have sex for hours – the
benefit of being 23 and incredibly athletic- but even when he really wanted to orgasm,
he couldn’t. Even when he’d deliberately
refrained from masturbating for days, he
still couldn’t climax. This wasn’t a new
thing; it had been the case with previous
girlfriends too, and he was smart and self-
aware enough to understand why. But he
couldn’t undo the wiring in his brain by then,
or rewind the previous decade of intensive
porn consumption that had deadened his
sexual responsiveness.
And he is far from the only one. A few
years ago, I met Jason, an unfeasibly pretty
26-year-old model sort. His conversation was
never going to be all that, but he was sweet
and fun and sexy, so he ended up back at mine.
The sex was initially great, but things took a
turn when, apparently frustrated, he informed
me that he could “only come with anal
or porn”. Now, I’m as broadminded as the
next woman who has one-night stands with
26-year-old models, but there are some sexual
acts for which I prefer to know a person for
more than a few hours before I trust them
to execute. So, Jason took out his phone and
accessed his “go-to” porn. When I asked if I
could join in, I was told to stop distracting him.
Displaying, I think, exceptional hospitality,
I let him finish before I asked him to leave.
For the record, I’m still not completely
antiporn – that would be hypocritical since
I, too, watch and enjoy it occasionally. I’m just
anti it being the primary source of early sex
education for young men, it damaging their
developing brains and setting up a pathetically
Pavlovian response that ruins their ability to
enjoy real-life sex with real-life partners.
MY FIANCÉ’S PORN ADDICTION
LEFT HIM UNABLE TO HAVE SEX
Maja, 38, is a corporate lawyer. She would have
married her long-term boyfriend but his porn
obsession destroyed the relationship.t took me a long time to realise that
my boyfriend, later fiancé, was hooked
on hardcore pornography. Mark
was intelligent, handsome and
very successful at work, but socially
awkward, inexperienced with women
and definitely not a player. After our first
date in a wine bar in Soho, we walked through
London until the early hours, unwilling to
part, and soon we were spending all our time
together. It took weeks for him to kiss me, but
when he did, there was chemistry.
Yet something wasn’t right, and I couldn’t
put my finger on it. We became physicallyclose, sleeping in the same bed, in each other’s
arms, talking all night, but he was unable to
respond sexually. It was more than shyness;
he seemed frozen. I hoped it was a kind of
performance anxiety and that gradually he
would relax.
After several months I asked him what was
going on. Was I doing something wrong? Was
he gay or not attracted to me? Or just not
interested in sex? He was speechless with
shame, but eventually he began to open up.
When we talked, everything fell into
place. He had been a shy adolescent, and
then inexperienced and awkward at university.
At the age when teenage boys used to get
bored of their Playboy magazines, meet actual
girls and start to experiment with real-life
intimacy, along came the internet. Suddenly,
there was no need to struggle through thoseI
‘Porn has raised the bar
for what turns me on.
I want to be close but
my body is numb’
l 1.5 million people in Britain use
their work devices to watch porn.
l 51% of children aged 11-13 have
been exposed to pornography.
l 66% of 14 to 15-year-olds have
seen pornographic material.
l 63% of 16 to 17-year-olds have
viewed pornography via socialGETTY IMAGES media platforms.