It was an ordinary weekday morning when Caroline first noticed how much pornography was taking over her life. With 15 minutes to go before she was due to leave for a job interview, she opened up her laptop to print off an extra copy of her CV and there, onscreen, was a grab she’d saved from pornhub.com.
“I remember the feeling of being sucked in, really wanting that two-minute fix, that numbness I got when I used porn,” says Caroline. “I was stressed out and I risked being late for my interview, but I pressed play anyway and fast-forwarded it to the bit I wanted. It took two minutes.” But the relief was to be short-lived.
“Afterwards I hated myself for giving in and getting off on images that treated women like pieces of meat. But I kept going back.”
Although there is much debate about whether “porn addiction” even exists, Caroline, a 21-year-old English graduate, has just finished seeing a sex-addiction therapist to help get her porn habit under control. Having started watching porn out of curiosity when it became available over the internet in her mid-teens, she and her mates used it as a graphic form of sex education.
Then, as she entered a depressed job market after university, it became a form of escape whenever she felt anxious or bored. “I’d be stuck at home in front of my laptop on my own all day — and end up surfing for porn, trying to distract myself, eating and then going back for more porn — It was like a constant battle between my sexual urges and my self-control. I’d think to myself: ‘It’s not doing any harm’. But then I started to loathe myself for giving in and wasting so much time on it.”
Caroline is not alone. While it’s accepted that women are watching — and enjoying — porn more and more, it’s less recognised that some are also finding it hard to stop. A 2006 study by the Internet Filter Review found that more than six out of 10 women view web porn and 17% describe themselves as “addicted”.
At Quit Porn Addiction, the United Kingdom’s main porn counselling service, almost one in three clients are women, says founder Jason Dean. Two years ago, there were none.
“I remember getting my first female contacts about two years ago and thinking that was fairly unusual,” says Dean. “Now I’m hearing from about 70 women a year who are coming for their own reasons, not because their male partners have a problem.”
There is little difference in the way the genders become hooked, says Dean: the same pattern of exposure, addiction, desensitisation. The main contrast between male and female porn addicts is that women feel more guilty.
“Porn addiction is seen as a man’s problem and therefore not acceptable for women,” says Dean. “There’s a real sense among women that it’s bad, dirty, wrong and they’re often unable to get beyond that.”
Many users of net porn report experiencing an almost trance-like effect that makes them feel oblivious to the world and gives them a sense of power they don’t have in real life. The PC becomes an erogenous zone.
What strikes you on porn addiction websites is the real sense of despair and loneliness for women caught up in it. Many talk of a problem dating back to their early teens, before they had even had a relationship.
Psychotherapist Phillip Hodson, of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, says that in consulting rooms, the issue of women habitually using porn “is something that has not been aired before”.
“Traditionally, women’s voices have been against porn. It’s seen as more of a male thing because it’s men who are supposed to be visually stimulated. But that doesn’t mean that women aren’t.”
Women can find it hard to reconcile their enjoyment of porn with their intellectual dislike of seeing women used as sex objects. “Porn has an instant effect on the human body, mind and the psyche, even if you disapprove of what you are seeing. So women may find their body is saying yes, even though their mind may be saying no — and that can be upsetting.”
But it’s important not to turn lone use of porn into a catastrophe, says Hodson. For many women, it’s a phase that will pass, either because they realise it’s a problem, or it becomes boring or they find better alternatives.
“I have a problem with the word ‘addiction’,” he says. “Sex is a natural function — and what is an abnormal level of sex to have or to want?” —