22 The Times Magazineporn addiction ruined everything. It ate away
at me, making me feel inadequate as a woman,
even though it had nothing to do with me and
predated our relationship by years.
With any other personal problem I’d
have confided in my female friends, but this
was the loneliest place in the world. Apart
from one close girlfriend who lives abroad,
I didn’t know anyone who had experienced
this. I certainly couldn’t ask my mother for
advice. I felt shame on Mark’s behalf, shame
on my own.
When we finally broke up it was intensely
sad. We had tried everything – cognitive
behavioural therapy for him, sex counselling
as a couple. Nothing worked. Without sex,
we were just best friends.
And that’s what we are today, best friends
still. I used to roll my eyes when I heard
celebrities claiming to be “addicted” to sex or
porn, but now I know how real it is. Mark is
still single – and we love each other as much
as ever. Without porn we’d be married, but
that secret addiction isn’t something I want
to live with.PORN RUINED MY SEX LIFE
Daniel, 29, a graphic designer, lives in London
with his girlfriend of three years. After
watching porn for the first time as a teenager,
he developed a habit that ended his sex drive.had a fairly traditional induction into
the world of porn. When I was 14
a friend told me about this website
called Pornhub. He said it was like
“Google but for sex”, which as a horny
teenage boy sounded like the jackpot
to me. I was one of my few friends whose
parents were laid-back enough to let them
have their own computer in their room, so
after school I went home to find out about
Pornhub. It was an intense experience. There
were hundreds and hundreds of videos and
scenarios of men and women doing whatever
you could possibly think of. I don’t think I’d
ever seen so many naked people.
Around that time in your life, when you’re
going into adolescence, teenage boys spend
a lot of time thinking about sex, so you can
generally assume that most of your friends
are watching porn at every opportunity
they can, which is exactly what I was doing.
I was plugged in. Not to anything particularly
raunchy – usually pretty standard massage
porn or lesbian porn – but I just watched a lot.
By the time I got to university at 18, most
of my friends had girlfriends and were having
actual sex with real people. I didn’t, so I was
still visiting porn sites at least once a day. At
that age, you don’t talk about porn with your
friends. It’s seen as either an embarrassing
habit or something quite private, so I didn’t
realise that I was more into it than the rest ofmy friends. It bookended my day. I’d search
Pornhub on my phone before I got out of bed
and, unless I was going on a night out, it was
the last thing I did before I went to sleep. I
wouldn’t say I was addicted, but it was a habit.
From my experience, watching that much
porn made sex complicated. If I put it really
simply, sex felt desensitised. I was so used
to being stimulated really intensely by porn
that it was difficult to get the same kick from
sex. The real thing didn’t seem as special or
significant. When I had sex on one-night
stands or during flings, I would feel like I was
acting out a template of what I remembered
from videos I’d seen, rather than actually
being present. The whole thing felt like an
out-of-body experience.
The first time that became a problem for
me was when I started to have sex with a girl
I was seeing in my second year, when I was- I’d never struggled with getting erections
when I was watching porn, but when I was
with this girl, it was like my brain couldn’t
speak to my penis. I fancied her a lot, but
I found it really difficult to get an erection.
Having that happen feels like your
manhood has been thrown into the spotlight.
It was so embarrassing. I tried to make a few
excuses – I was drunk or hungover; I’d taken
drugs – but then it would happen again the
next time as well. That experience started this
cycle of nerves around having sex, so I tried to
avoid having it. That meant that whenever I did,
I’d be so tense that it would happen again. It
was like being stuck in a revolving door.
I got my first serious girlfriend in my fourth
year at university. We had to have a frank
conversation basically straight away. She asked
me what I thought might be the problem and
I told her. I decided to try to stop watching
porn and installed an adult site blocker on my
phone and my laptop. I wouldn’t say it was a
magic fix – I also had to go to the doctor to
pick up some Viagra – but my confidence has
finally returned.WE WATCHED PORN AT SCHOOL
Henry, a single 25-year-old investment banker,
first looked porn at school. He says watching it
between classes and on phones during lessons
was normal.he first time I saw porn was after
PE class in year 7 when I was- One of the boys in my
form group had a video on his
phone and passed it around the
changing room. It was more
of an educational experience than an erotic
one, in that this was the first time most of us
had seen two people having sex.
I went to a boys’ school and sharing content
like that was quite normal. I remember friends
getting ripped for being caught watching porn
in the toilets. There was another time when
my best friend got caught showing topless
photos of a porn star to me on his phone.
Teachers knew but generally turned a blind
eye to it. There was a “boys will be boys”
attitude. I think it created this environment
where it was OK to talk openly about women
in a sexual context.
At that age, nobody was having sex
regularly so our only exposure to it was porn.
Those years are really formative and what you
see in videos is your only frame of reference
for the opposite sex.
I don’t think this any more, but you get
used to watching such extreme situations in
porn videos that you go into your early sexual
experiences assuming that girls are going to
be up for pretty much anything you ask of
them. Whether you’re conscious of it or not,
at that age it’s difficult not to see sex as a way
of ticking off everything you’ve seen in a porno.
It also set the standard that women are
going to have perfect bodies all the time and
that sex will be this really sexy, hot, seamless
circus that will last for ages. That doesn’t just
put pressure on the girls; I remember feeling
the pressure too when the first few times I had
sex it lasted a matter of seconds.
Looking back, I find it shocking that we
were allowed to get away with watching porn
at school. I can’t remember one lesson or
assembly where we were spoken to about how
unrealistic porn is. I think if you’re in charge
or educating hundreds of boys, some of that
responsibility falls on the school. n
All names have been changed‘Watching porn as a
teen meant I thought
sex would be seamless,
hot and last for ages’
T
I
l 55% of men told a BBC report
in 2019 that porn had been their
main source of sex education.
l A BBC survey of 2,049 men
aged 18-39 found 35% of them
had choked their partner during
consensual sex.
l 50,000 people a month are
downloading a phone app calledSOURCES: STATISTA, PORNHUB, OFCOM, BRITISH JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY, INSURE2GO, GOV.UK, CITY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, BRITISH BOARD OF FILM CLASSIFICATION, BBC DISCLOSURE, REMOJO Remojo that helps users quit porn.