The secret lives of porn addicts: ‘I am meticulous about covering my tracks’ | Pornography

[Pelican Press 0]

The secret lives of ***** ********: ‘I am meticulous about covering my tracks’ | ************

Tony is in his 50s and recently did a rough calculation of how much of his life he has spent looking at ************. “The result was horrifying,” he says. It was eight years. “I can barely think about it. The sense of ******** is intense.”

Tony saw his first “*********” film on VHS in the 1980s when he was 12. In his 20s, he connected to the internet for the first time, which turned his habit into a “full-blown addiction”. Over the past 30 years, he has just about managed to maintain a double life: he works in a caring profession, is friends with men and women, has had relationships. But there is a part of him he keeps entirely hidden.

“So far, I’ve only told three people in my life about it – two therapists and now you,” he says. “It’s a complete secret from everyone I have ever known. I’m meticulous about covering my tracks, even when in a relationship. My lack of interest in **** with my partner might be the only thing that would cause her to wonder.”

Tony has tried to stop looking at ************ multiple times, but has never managed more than a month without it. He’s tried cutting down, he’s gone cold-turkey – banning himself from ************* and blocking ***** sites. But “the ******* brain is exceptionally devious and adept”, he says. He’s also tried therapy, but has found it hard to keep paying for it long-term.

Still, Tony is grateful for one thing: he was young before the internet. “At least I had a normal youth – parties, gigs, adventures with friends. I had girlfriends and a **** life. Boys like me don’t stand a chance now.”

Every statistic related to ************ use in the *** – and globally – is soaring, driven by the ubiquity of mobile phones. About 13.8 million people – a third of all adults using the internet – viewed ***** online in May 2023 alone,

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. Two-thirds of these were men. While ************ companies don’t report (or acknowledge) statistics on underage viewers, British children, on average, first watch ***** at the age of 12. The children’s commissioner for England found in a recent study that

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***** use carries a risk of escalation and that is what hallmarks it for me as an addictive behaviour

Paula Hall, psychotherapist

Jack is in his 20s and first saw ************ when he was nine. “I was with a group of friends on a school trip. It was a woman giving a ********, something I had never been told about in **** education.”

Like many children and teenagers today, ***** found Jack before he went looking for it. “It came up through things friends shared, then on flash gaming websites. I saw really bizarre things which evoked both arousal and curiosity. That gradually turned into just arousal and then compulsion grew along with it.”

Soon, the intense stimulation of the ************ he was watching meant he “lost interest in day-to-day life”. It wasn’t so much the time he spent watching *****, but the “hyper intensity” of the content. “Sometimes in a particularly addicted phase I would spend hours watching it each day,” he says. ‘‘But usually it would just be an occasional binge then less use the rest of the time … In terms of how it was affecting me, though? That was not a normal life. The ***** stimulus is intense and it leads to desensitisation to the small everyday pleasures that keep us sane and content.”

‘These websites are specifically designed to target ******** and keep them clicking.’ Photograph: Derek Croucher/Alamy

When Jack started having real-life ******* experiences, “it was very difficult to maintain an *********. Real **** was less intense than the masturbation of a desensitised ******* – which is what I was”. Unlike online, “there was no option to click through many possible videos for something new and more stimulating.”

Both Jack and Tony describe themselves as ***** ********. Unlike other behavioural addictions such as gambling and gaming, ************ addiction is not included in the International Classification of ********* (ICD), which is compiled by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is instead defined as a compulsive ******* behaviour.

Some people might be ************* 10 times a day, up to three or four hours a go. They’re physically in pain

Peter Waddington, Relate

Paula Hall is a psychotherapist who specialises in working with people struggling with their ************ use and has set up a private

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. She has been an addiction therapist for 30 years – and started her career working with people with substance ****** issues. She believes it’s clear that ************ is addictive. “***** use carries a risk of escalation and that is what hallmarks it for me as an addictive behaviour,” she says. “It’s a condition that causes significant suffering and we desperately need to develop resources for prevention and treatment.”

Peter Waddington is a counsellor with Relate, a charity offering relationship support, who is seeing more people with concerns about their ************ use. “Some people might be ************* 10 times a day, up to three or four hours a go. They are physically in pain and sleep deprived. I see people who look unwell. The similarities to alcohol [misuse] are very strong … It’s also perceived as more shameful than gambling or alcohol,” he says.

“It’s helpful that it is now recognised as a compulsion by the WHO but we would like to see it classified as an addiction. If it was supported by the NHS, people could ask their GP for help.” As it stands, Waddington believes that shame can be a barrier to accessing help.

“There has been concern that by talking about ************ and **** addiction we are pathologising human sexuality,” says Hall. But, she insists, calling it an addiction is not increasing that sense of shame. “We know that alcohol is linked to violent behaviour, to coercive relationships, to heart ********, but people still enjoy alcohol. So we can acknowledge those potential risks without pathologising recreational ***** use.”

Hall is finishing work on a leading study into British ************ habits with Leeds Trinity University. The aim is to help develop an online

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. Out of the 193 people interviewed who felt they could not control their ***** use, more than 93% reported struggling with depression. “Very worryingly, more than 40% say that, at times, they feel like ending their life,” says Hall. “In the same way that the gambling industry has been instructed to provide warnings and help problem users, the ***** industry needs to do the same.”

Tony says: “I indulge in a compulsive behaviour that I feel totally unable to stop, despite severe negative consequences. I feel like an *******, I emotionally isolate like an *******, and I suffer the consequences like an *******. These websites are specifically designed to target ******** and keep them clicking.”

A lot of guys have become so addicted they’ve started watching it at work. Their world is imploding

Peter Waddington, Relate

The algorithms that serve up new content for users “are incredibly powerful”, he says. “They tease out interests and kinks you didn’t know you had … You wouldn’t believe the number of mouse clicks you go through in a session sometimes. It’s not enough to watch the same few videos over again. It’s always more, more, more, new, new, new.”

Tony thinks this has made it impossible for him to commit to a relationship. “***** tricked my brain into thinking I could have an endless supply of ******* partners. How does one partner compete with that? The version of me that isn’t ***** addicted might have made a good husband and devoted father, but I became ********* bored and I always hid my addiction – I was never authentic.”

************ is often a factor in relationship breakdown, says Waddington. “For a lot of the guys I see, their partners have brought them in because they found out about secret ***** viewing. Or they have become so addicted that they started watching it at work. So they need to change urgently – their world is imploding.” None of the ************ websites I approached for this piece wanted to comment.

‘The algorithms that serve up new content tease out interests and kinks you didn’t know you had.’ Photograph: Oleg Elkov/Getty Images

Gunter De Win is a urologist who specialises in adolescent and paediatric urology and, each month, travels from his base of Belgium to London, where he is a consultant at University College hospital.

“Three years ago I started seeing more and more young guys coming in with erectile dysfunction related to issues with *****,” he says. “They need ************ to climax with a partner or to maintain an ********* during masturbation. And they may have to watch many videos before they find one that turns them on. As a scientist, I wanted to unravel this.”

He is now part of a

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the impact of ************ on young men’s **** lives. But, as his most recent

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, it is difficult to assess the impact that ***** consumption has had on young men with erectile dysfunction as “it is more or less impossible to find a control group that is not using ************ from a young age and at the same time is not morally against its consumption”.

It’s hard for me to be sure what is really me and what is me corrupted by ***** use

Tony

Teenage boys getting “performance anxiety is absolutely normal”, he says. However, De Win has seen young men concerned that they lose an ********* during foreplay – which again, “is all normal”. But by watching ***** so young, “they don’t understand the basics”.

De Win believes more research is needed into the impact of widely available ************ in the digital age. “Too much of the research on ***** is biased either for or against,” he says.

Cold-turkey approaches such as

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, a US-based peer support network that encourages abstinence from ************ and masturbation as a recovery method, can have mixed results for young people, he says. “For some, going cold-turkey can be beneficial, but I see boys who end up with no ******* interest at all, which is also bad for their wellbeing.”

His solution is vastly improved ******* literacy – in **** education in schools and in the medical community – that does not condemn all ************ and masturbation as bad. “Introducing shame and guilt has consequences,” he says. For example, “if someone has a religious background and sees ***** as ******, then maybe this creates shame”. Shame, in turn, means that honest conversations around ************ do not happen.

“What I think might have steered me away from compulsive behaviour around ***** might have been frank conversations with my parents,” says Tony. “My mother was extremely kind and caring but with an inability to communicate emotion. So maybe some of my tendency towards emotional isolation is just that I am my mother’s son? It’s hard for me to be sure what is really me and what is me corrupted by ***** use.”

For now, nature is stepping in to help. “I’m in my 50s and my testosterone levels are dropping significantly, so that’s been a blessing and I am looking less at *****. I’m thinking now about getting help again,” he says. “But it feels like standing at the foot of Everest looking up at the summit.”

Some names have been changed

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#secret #lives #***** #******** #meticulous #covering #tracks #************

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