Yeah, I was addicted to porn for 19 years. I’m 31 (& a half!) and I started when I was 12.
I am from Toronto, Canada and back in the early 2000s we had a show that would air on channel 28 (I think) named “The Red Shoe Diaries”. I have absolutely no fucking idea what it was really about but I quickly (and accidentally) learned that it would often show a woman’s exposed breast or buttocks amidst what felt like an eon of commercials in between scenes.
For all the youngin’s reading this, I think it’s worthwhile to explain why I was watching “porn” on TV at 11:30pm after my parent’s went to bed, on school nights. You see kids, the Internet, computers and fast connections weren’t really a thing in 2001. I mean, yes the Internet existed but it was confusingly connected to your house phone (those old ass phones that were hard wired into the walls). So, if someone picked up the phone your “dial up” internet connection would be lost and by the time the slow ass computer got it up and running again…well, it was easier to just wait for The Red Shoe Diaries to do it’s thing for 22 minutes (there are 8 minutes of commercials in those 30 minutes!).
My first time finding porn on the Internet was that same year and it only came in pixelated photo form. I had to wait several minutes for a preview-less photo to load. Often times the page would time out before it could actually load and other times the fruits of your patience would be rewarded with a fully clothed woman…what a jip! The time I will never forget however, is the time I finally found the nudes I was hoping for but because the photo was so small and I didn’t know how to zoom in, I saved it and made it the background image on the desktop itself. Well, I saw what I wanted to see AND I also had my first “frozen” or lagging computer situation. I frantically called my dad at work and made up some lie about how I was browsing the internet and came across these weird ads that popped up and somehow they got onto the background of the screen and that I didn’t know what I did.
This is where my problem really started. The lies.
I grew up in a medium level strict Middle-Eastern family. The mention of sex, porn or even girlfriends was a no-no! The main problem with this is that it creates a sense of shame for being curious or having questions about sex, sexuality and romance/intimacy. I learned at a very young age that I had to shamefully hide everything about my desires, curiosities and urges for they were forbidden fruits! Touch them and you die, I guess?
So I did it in secret. I would try to find them on the computers in the library at school, friend’s computers and even in magazines.
My dad, still to this day has not said the word sex in my presence. My mom almost had a brain aneurism when she heard I was always surrounded by girls in clubs (more on my DJ life later). I suspect my parents have had sex twice: once to create me and the other to create my younger brother. We are talking about people who grew up in Iran during the 1960’s 70’s and 80’s.
I was left to figure out sexuality and sex for myself, by myself.
There are lots of problems with porn but the main one is how it skews your expectations for when sex does happen in real life. You expect perfectly round breasts, hairless women and penises the size of organic english cucumbers. You simultaneously see what you’re supposed to crave and desire when it comes to women and you are also reminded of how miserably inferior your body and your penis is to that of the male pornstar. Overtime you develop this kind of thirst for women you’re told are beautiful and desirable in society based on what you’re looking at through the screen. However, when you do have your first or early sexual experiences and more than likely see that it doesn’t resemble what you’ve been watching (& learning from) all these years…you are TRAGICALLY let down. I watched porn for 7 years before I lost my virginity. It lasted around 11 seconds and it had none of the plots of the scenes I’d been watching. I mean, where was the stepmom?!
The other problem porn creates is ambiguity around consent. In the porno’s I watched, there was never a “yes, I am comfortable having sex with you” line or even feeling that was expressed. It was usually the male trying to assure the woman (the stepmom, step sister, friend’s sister…you get the point) that no one would find out and that it would remain their secret. Then off with the pants and on with the fellatio! From there, you are SO quickly onto the foreplay and penetration that you miss the part about this ambiguity being glossed over AND the fact that you’ve now collected this expectation too. Over time, I saw myself doing the same thing with women in real life. I would understand a kiss on the cheek as the “consent”. “Well, she’s obviously into me, of course she wants to fuck me” ← That’s literally how my train of thought would go. That was my consent. The fact that we broke the barrier of just being 2 people to now being 2 people who were putting our mouths on one another meant it was all systems go. It was binary, 0 or 1. It wasn’t a sliding scale from 0 to 100. It just went to 0 to 100. It’s as if a kettle went from stone cold water to boiling hot the moment you turned the stove on. Unfortunately, this is NOT how it works. But porn doesn’t show you that ;)
Plus, there are no scenes which show the woman (or the man) saying no and then the scene ending! I mean, how else could I know how this romance ends?!
Another problem with porn is exactly that ^ you never see the part where the step sister and step bro finish the sex and then go on to have a lovely romantic relationship full of respect and love for and with one another. You are consistently and relentlessly pounded the idea that the woman is merely there to satisfy the man — then he finishes (usually on her face or inside of her) and as Jay-Z would put it…Onto The Next One!
Over the last 2 decades I consumed more porn than I can honestly even remember. I bought 4TB hard drives to store the scenes I downloaded from Torrent sites (streaming was still mainly reserved for paid sites then). I bought several year long passes to sites like Brazzers and had dozens up dozens of pages worth of saved/favourited videos. I would often masturbate upward of 2 or 3 times a day. I objectified women at every chance and soon enough the relationship I had with my computer screen wasn’t satisfying enough anymore. I began to join video chat rooms and used my clout as the DJ to exchange my free alcohol for nudes from girls over snapchat. I also (somehow) held onto a long term relationship all the meanwhile.
I let porn ruin my expectations of women, sex, relationships and my wish is to never consume it again. At the time of this writing I am 73 days into beating my addiction and I feel absolutely fucking fantastic. It took years of journaling, meditating, reading and educating myself to understand not why the addiction, but why the pain. I understood that I had insecurities formed around my body, my appearance, my desirability and social hierarchy to the point where I made it all feel better with the click of a button. Porn never said no to me, porn never told me I wasn’t fit enough, that my dick wasn’t big enough or that I didn’t have enough money. Porn was always there for me.
This is the problem. IT. ISN’T. FUCKING. REAL. But we behave as if it is so. I recently saw an Instagram post that laid it out beautifully…you know how you often hear “that’s someone’s daughter!” or “that’s someone’s sister” in an attempt to get you to stop consuming porn? This picture had the words daughter and sister crossed out. It said “that’s someone”. And that’s really what I forgot. Through watching so much porn my brain stopped looking at women as people. Just as objects to satisfy my male member. Somewhere along the way, girls stopped being classmates, team mates and friends. They became only potential sex “partners”.
When my fiance left me and when girls I hooked up with stopped (often immediately) responding to my texts…it was well deserved. I would put on any mask and act just to get them to sleep with me. Pardon my honesty here but I couldn’t see their purpose otherwise.
The start of my self growth journey began with accountability. I had to accept there was a problem. When I accepted porn as a problem and as an addiction I began to pull back the curtain on all the pain I caused whilst still under it’s mercy. I hurt real people. I damaged relationships and I made the women who were intimate with me feel empty, meaningless and cold.
I debated writing the following sentence as I think it is obvious and often unnecessary but I am choosing to include it because at this moment I think it’s part of my attempt at full accountability: I can’t take back any of the decisions I made or actions I took. No apology will make a real difference.
But, I can become an advocate against the very behaviours I now see as detrimental to people everywhere, relationships everywhere and connection everywhere. I don’t think it is hypocritical anymore because I changed my mind, my beliefs and most importantly my behaviors. A wise woman once told me “an apology without changed behavior is manipulation”. The main difference between being a hypocrite and changing your mind is being willing to own up to your actions, which is what I have finally done for myself.
Here are some staggering statistics with regards to pornography online:
–Enough porn was watched in 2016 on this one website that all the data would fill 194,000,000 USB sticks. If you put the USB sticks end to end, they’d wrap all the way around the moon.
–In 2017 alone, Pornhub got 28.5 BILLION visits. That’s almost 1,000 visits a second, or 78.1 million a day — way more than the population of the entire United Kingdom. That number has since jumped to 33.5 billion site visits in 2018.
–In 2016, 91,980,225,000 videos were watched on Pornhub. In 2018, that number jumped to more than 109,012,068,000. That’s over 14 videos watched for every person on the entire planet.
-Also, more than 5,824,699,200 hours of porn were watched on the site in just 2019. That’s equal to almost 665 centuries of content consumed in 1 year, on just one porn site.
-“Lesbian,” “teen,” “stepmom,” “mom,” and “step sister” have all topped the charts as some of the most searched terms on the site for years.
I am going to be openly sharing my experiences with pornography with the hopes that others (particularly other young men) will change their minds too. There are some amazing resources I found on my quest to beat this addiction and I have listed them below. This is my first open expression of how I let porn affect me…I was afraid of how this would be received and what kind of feedback I would get from it. I’m not afraid anymore. I know in my heart that the suffering I caused for myself and others will be in vain if I don’t use my voice to at least try and relieve the world of this problem anyway I can, even if it means some people will hate me for it.
Resources that helped me:
Fight The New Drug — specifically the 3 part documentary you can watch for free. Brain, Heart, World.
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Stay strong, friends.