Until my partner held up a mirror to what I was doing, I have to admit that porn had ruined my definition of how I related to women and to myself. It put me in the position of being an outsider. I didn’t cultivate meaningful or loving relationships because I was too invested in my use of porn – which I now appreciate was an addiction. Even when in previous relationships, I wasn’t invested in them fully as I had a sexualised view of the world. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone as the cycle of self loathing has damaged my own view of myself and I have lived a life in shame. I haven’t been present in my relationships either and this is the most harmful aspect. I am now porn free though and am grateful. Porn is just abusive for everyone involved.

When I was at Uni a male friend came over to study. He said he wanted to show me something on his laptop. It was porn – degrading to women type of porn – and I didn’t know what to do. I’d never seen it before and I froze. He said it was funny & I agreed out of… politeness?… or a wish not to look like a prude? I never mentioned it again with him but I was spooked – why would he have shown me something so violent and degrading without any prior discussion?

[Please note; this story may be triggering. Please read with caution. Includes mentions of explicit imagery]

I developed a serious stocking fetish when young (from age 12) and used pornography to feed it. Ridiculous as it sounds I got angry with women for preferring to wear tights to the extent that I decided I would rather have porn with fantasy women in stockings than actual women. In this way I became what would nowadays be called an incel. I also got into secret cross dressing though I didn’t persist with that for long. My sex life was basically ruined and I didn’t lose my virginity until age 30 (by some miracle). Even after that my porn habit continued on and off and caused serious damage to my sex life (in the usual way, ie being caught using porn by my partner) I also got interested in the BDSM side of porn, especially women in stockings getting caned (or caning men). Nowadays though not entirely over it I have a different view – I’m pro feminist and appreciate the female view of the world. I’m actually glad women don’t have to wear that stuff any more but dress to please themselves rather than the porn-influenced male gaze. I also have a better understanding of the abusive nature of the porn industry in general, due to reading feminist writers.

When I was 14 my father was arrested for watching child pornography. Social services told me that based on his online activity, which included teen incest fantasies, I was at risk. He defended himself by saying that he’d just been watching “normal” porn at first and got in with a “bad crowd,” talking about it as if it was something that had happened to him passively, and not something he was actively responsible for. He didn’t apologise or seem to think I deserved any explanation; all he was interested in was painting himself as a victim in the whole situation and making sure everyone believed him. I was told there were 5,000 images but he never faced any legal consequences except the arrest. At first I occasionally kept in touch with him, thinking maybe he’d just made a mistake, but as I got older I realised the harms of pornography and that even if he hadn’t known for a fact that the girls were underage, he’d still behaved repulsively, and at 16 I eventually cut off all contact with him. Unfortunately, he had been my least abusive parent, so overall my life got worse. I hadn’t even known that child pornography existed before his arrest, and I resent that I had to learn such horrible details at a young age. Social services had also told me that the girls in the images “looked like me,” and now whenever I meet a women who looks like me I am reminded of his collection and can’t help but wonder if she was abused and part of it. I wonder if those girls are alive today and where they are and what their side of the story is. I resent that he never apologised or made any indication that he would actually stop. I hate knowing that he’s still out there, and that apart from my cutting him off, he faced no consequences.

I was exposed to pornography in my early teens, and it quickly became a habit for me to escape from the difficulties of teenage and then young adult life (with emotionally distanced/challenging parents). I didn’t know any differently and couldn’t understand how other people could get through life without such an escape.

I was in a relationship from the age of 16 and kept my porn use hidden due to my intense shame and compartmentalisation of it. It was a barrier in our relationship for many years obstructing intimacy – and inevitably with high negative impacts on my partner.

Eventually my porn use escalated as it inevitably does, to include webcams, dating sites, paid sex, and same-sex encounters (opposite to my sexuality). It became an unbearable and uncontrollable hidden life that I couldn’t escape from.

I have worked with therapists and 12 step programmes since 2014, and in 2018 was able to reach long-term sobriety which has lasted until now. With a full disclosure to my partner along the way and subsequent rebuilding, I was able to start building up intimacy and honesty into life and escape from shame.

Now, four years later, I have been de-centred in life and felt the familiar urges of my addiction return, as if nothing had happened in the last four years. I found this site while looking for recovery resources to get back on track rather than take a step I would deeply regret down to me very core.

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to share my story. Porn and sex is an insidious addiction that will separate you from a full life and intimacy and hold you back in shame. There is a way out which requires a lot of effort, soul searching, humility, and probably even some desperation. But if you can take those steps then you will open up a life you only dreamed of before.

I became addicted to viewing porn. The term addiction may seem like a way of letting myself off the hook for my own failings. It may seem like an exaggeration- but I couldn’t stop. I tried to. I found it impossible. The trigger of seeing any pornagraphic image would send me off into obsessive, secretive, out of control viewing again. It was often not about sexual relief it was just a numbing and futile experience. In the end (before I got help through SAA) I was averaging over 6 hours of viewing a day. It was utterly destroying my life. Nothing satisfied and it all became more and extreme and unpleasant. I kept trying to stop but I couldn’t. It was an obsession and values I thought I had were changed by it. The dopamine hit of engaging with porn was so deeply conditioned into my life that it became very difficult to experience joy elsewhere.
I have experienced a huge and welcome change since I stopped looking at any porn. Very soon after I stepped away from it all I began to feel better and also to recognise the terrible harm the industry does to those (often) trapped within it. Women in particular are far too often brutalised not just on camera but across their experience of being in the industry. Many of us look the other way and pretend it’s not causing the dreadful harm it so clearly is.
I am so grateful to have stopped.

It all started when I went with a colleague to work away from home for a short time. He took me to a ‘Private Shop’ where he bought something and encouraged me to do the same. I declined but later returned alone and bought a mild porno book. Later I picked up an abandoned ‘Health and Efficiency’ magazine, which led me to buy top-shelf magazines from newsagents and then to send away for harder materials. With the advent of the internet, I started searching for things. I never really liked them but felt compelled to search for harder and harder sites, even though I knew it was wrong and risked destroying my marriage and family life. I went to great lengths to cover my tracks. I never told my family – they would be too badly hurt for me to allow that to happen. Finally I asked God for help (I had always been a baptised Christian believer) and found forgiveness and the strength to stop, hopefully for good. I now sometimes sing to myself the song I learned in childhood: ‘It is no secret, What God can do.’ Thank you for the opportunity to tell someone.

[Please note; this story may be triggering. Please read with caution. TWs include: mentioning of rape]

The trauma that pornography has inflicted upon my life is too plentiful to go into in one short message – but one thing I recalled recently (a flashback completely out of nowhere) was happening upon a video of two women being raped on a mainstream porn site. I can’t describe my feelings at the time – it’s almost as if they’re locked away.

I have so much anger in me (on the surface of things, over stupid, superficial stuff) and have found myself wondering how much of it has come from this one experience that I still feel numb about to this day.

Whilst I suspect that a video like this probably wouldn’t crop up on a mainstream site nowadays, I feel angry when I consider that any 13-year-old (or much younger) can still access any kind of pornography at the click of a button.

Our venture scout leader provided porn videos for our group to watch. Most of us were under 18. This sexualised the group inappropriately and normalised a culture of sexual abuse and grooming, which, as it was the 1990s, I felt powerless to stop or escape from.

When I was in my 30s and seven months pregnant with our first baby I stumbled upon a porn site while looking for something else on my husband’s computer. The site was called Seventeen implying very young women/girls. My husband was my soul mate but had never mentioned this to me. I was devastated, partly due to the secrecy, partly because he was essentially using vulnerable girls. I told him and he said he was sorry and would tell me if he wanted to return to it but I could not get over it. I tried not to raise it with him again, but it stayed like a wedge in our relationship. Recently, 20 plus years later our second son brought his 17 year old girlfriend to meet us and it brought the porn use back to the front of my mind. I asked if he had used it since and he had. Told me which web site and I looked at it (YouPorn). It was women categorised as milf, teen, lesbian, ebony, big tits, like products in a shop. Women being humiliated all over this mainstream site. This whole massive issue has almost destroyed the lovely true partnership we began with. He is still my husband and loves me, I like being with him too, I like most of him but have lost much of my respect and trust for him. It is so sad for both of us. We are changed by this issue. I have had years of depression and anxiety which I am sure has not been helped by feeling I don’t entirely know this man who used to be my best friend but became someone I wasn’t sure I could trust and who seemed happy to access resources that may be abusing young women.

I was 13 years old when I was first exposed to porn online. Led by curiosity, it wasn’t long before I found myself consuming increasingly graphic porn that was violent and degrading towards women. Porn taught me that I existed solely for male pleasure. My innocent childhood fantasies about what it meant to be in a loving relationship evaporated and were replaced by toxic beliefs that my value lay in my sexual availability. Not only that, but porn had normalised male domination and control to such an extent that not only was I completely blind to its dangers, but I was actually drawn to it. BDSM porn had taught me that coercion, control and domination/submission were not dangerous, but exciting. The vulnerability this created in me, the loss of childhood years that should have been filled with joy and deep connection with my family, and the negative impacts on my self worth and sense of safety in the world is something it has taken me years to recognise and when I did, it hit me like a ton of bricks. All the nights that I had spent crippled by anxiety, self-loathing and depression, all the times where I had crossed my own moral boundaries and the relationships where I been unable to see unhealthy patterns and behaviours were the fault of porn.

In addition to creating vulnerability and impacting the way I behaved, porn made my thought life almost unbearable. Intrusive, objectifiying thoughts about others and hateful, unkind thoughts about myself plagued me, no matter how hard I tried to will them away.

With porn creating a dopamine-filled escape for me, I withdrew from my family, avoided dealing with complex emotions, and ultimately lost the opportunity to develop emotional resilience as I should have in those crucial, developmental years. I believe that porn traumatised me and damaged my brain, and my battle with depression and anxiety continues over a decade later.

At the time, I knew that something was deeply wrong, but I was blind to the role porn had to play in my declining mental health and wellbeing. The inability to understand why I wasn’t ok only added to my despair, and my strongest memories of that time are of consecutive nights spent crying myself to sleep, and hoping that somehow I wouldn’t wake up.

I’ve been free from porn for a decade of my life now, but there are layers of damage that I am still uncovering. I’m terrified at the digital landscape that faces young people today, and the ever escalating levels of violence in porn. I hope my story can play some small part in compelling those with influence to change the story for the children across the world who desperately need protection from the threat porn poses to their lives.

When I starting looking at pornography on the internet in the late 1990s I quickly became hooked, at the time I was a young teenager. I was completely unprepared for what I was looking at – it felt thrilling, curious, exciting but it was also shocking and actually with hindsight it was actually quite traumatic. It was a problem that grew out of control over a 20 year period and I would watch pornography and masturbate to it 1, 2, 3 or more times a day. It was out of control. It became a secret I had to keep hidden from everyone – my family, my friends and later on my wife. At a young age I was exposed to indecent images of children on the internet through chat rooms. I didn’t ask for these images but it tapped into a natural curiosity at that age. I didn’t know what my problem was – I just assumed that this is what everyone did – everyone must have a secret like this? But my self-esteem suffered, my sense of self worth suffered. I was so ashamed of myself but didn’t know how to get out of this trap. I got to the point where I gave up trying to fight the addiction and just went with it. Obviously, things got worse – my use got more extreme and risky.

Nearly 20 years after getting addicted to pornography I was arrested for viewing indecent images of children. I lost my career, family members, my standing in the local community, large amounts of savings. It is now very difficult for me to find meaningful employment. I have some very restrictive conditions enforced by the courts and police.

Once I was arrested I asked – for the first time in my life – why? Why was I doing this? It was only then that I began to explore the reasons and I found out that I had an addiction. This started a journey where I received therapy, counselling, psycho-education and peer support. I’ve been in recovery from pornography addiction ever since and I want to share this story because so many will ‘sleep walk’ into huge life crises because they didn’t know they had an addiction and didn’t know where to turn / where to get help.

I consider myself to be a normal / ordinary person. I am married (my married survived thank goodness), with a young family. I was in a professional job prior to my arrest.

All people – especially young people – need to know the dangers of internet pornography / cyber sex. Not only is it highly addictive, but it warps perceptions of sex and intimacy. I’m sharing my story because I don’t want anyone to end up in the position I have, but sadly I don’t see that enough is being done by governments or educationalists to prevent what I believe is a secret epidemic in our society. We must speak up.

I first came across pornography aged 11-12. My friend told me about this film that was only 15 rated, but had naked ladies . This made me curious. I then went home and tried to find it myself. What I stumbled across was an online world of pornography that I was in awe of, it was like some special under-world that I had come across. Some of the things that I saw made me excited, yet others shocked and disgusted me and made me feel almost sick. Yet as I explored this world more and more, I found that the things that first made me gasp in shock and disbelief slowly started to become attractive and sexually stimulating. Eventually, this same content became the only thing that would ‘do the job’ for me.

By the time I was 16 it was a part of my life almost daily. I hid this part of my life from others, and whilst I would joke with friends at school and church about the issue, I would never disclose how much porn I watched, and the way in which I felt I almost ‘needed’ it to function and to cope with my feelings and as a comfort. Eventually by around age 18 I realised it might be a problem when I realised, I had to use it to comfort myself and without it I would become angry and frustrated. This soothing use made me feel worse with the shame that it created that I couldn’t get a girlfriend and had to use this stuff just to function. This I learnt, was the fault of pornography. This led to depression as my self-esteem was brought so low that I felt that I had no worth as a human.

So I decided to actively try and stop. But I found that I could not. Having started watching pornography at such a young age, it felt as though it had become ingrained as a learnt behaviour that I couldn’t seem to shake. Pornography had become a coping mechanism that I needed to function when I felt low but would just make those feelings worse. Worst of all, I realised that my attitude of women had changed. I felt that it was my right to touch women and initiate ‘touching’ even non-consensually. This made me reach a real low where I discovered that this wasn’t what girls wanted, but it was the only way I knew how to ‘talk’ to girls.

Since my first exposure to pornography, it took me over 10 years to rid myself of porn use. It’s effect on me, my mental health and attitude to women has ruined my life as a teenager and young adult and still deeply affects these aspects of my life to this day.

When I was growing up (16-18yrs), it was found out that the boys in our area had created a private Facebook group, literally with hundreds of boys in it, sharing intimate images of their girlfriends or girls in the area, all without their knowledge or consent. Many of these girls were underage. It was like they were swapping collectible cards or something and used as a bonding experience between them, at our expense. It was like they didn’t even view us as human. I got quite depressed after hearing about this and it made me very afraid of men. It was disgusting that this was happening and that so many boys were involved – it was so normal to them and exposes just how embedded this culture is. I think growing up with pornography had completely de-sensitized them and re-wired them to see women as objects to be exploited. Alot of the girls who were exposed never fully recovered. They either moved away or became much quieter/smaller versions of themselves.