“I lost whole days to pornography,” recalls therapist Andrea Johnson, “but I think I just knew there was something toxic in it for me. There were the mental health impacts—the way I felt disgusted after, like a hangover. It affected my confidence a lot. I quickly found in a matter of months that I lost the ability to have a full sexual response in the real world without the assistance of porn. I couldn’t orgasm without it. Nothing would do it.”
“I’m not anti-pleasure. I’m not anti-sex. But online porn is a sewer. I don’t want it near me,” adds Johnson, who eventually found the determination to go cold turkey, and has taken a zero tolerance approach to porn for herself and her husband ever since. “Sure, I spent a lot of time in support groups and most of the time I was the only woman. But I think there will be more and more women who struggle with a porn compulsion.”
The vast majority of men and women who watch porn as a masturbation aid don’t become compulsive users. Still, the worlds of psychology, psychiatry and counselling have, in recent years, tentatively begun to understand the darker consequences of the compulsive use of pornography. Anecdotally at least, it is an overwhelmingly male issue.
But on the periphery is a growing awareness that women too can be affected, one recently in the limelight thanks to a surprise chat show confession by Billie Eilish. The 20-year-old musician revealed last year that she started watching a lot of porn when she was 11, that the violence in it gave her nightmares and, as she put it, “really destroyed my brain”.
The pull towards porn
That women might well be affected by porn use is, of course, to be expected. To not think so would be to follow a prudish conception of women as less sexual beings. What may be surprising to some, however, is the scale of use. According to statistics handily produced by PornHub, the world’s biggest porn site, three in 10 of its users are women.
Some may think that women are less drawn to pornography because they’re less visually stimulated. Instead, they are overwhelmingly the readers of the kind of printed erotica that made Fifty Shades of Grey such a phenomenon. But a 2007 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study suggests that women are actually more visually aroused by a wider range of sexual imagery than men are.
“About one in five of the cases of porn addiction we deal with are women. They’re struggling with finding relationships unsatisfying, or have lost their libido [for real sex], or just gone down the porn rabbit hole,” explains Andrew de Roza, a psychotherapist with Promises Healthcare in Singapore. “The impact of compulsive porn use on women isn’t observed as yet, but there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t be much the same as for men. We’re not yet seeing the results of what is a worldwide pandemic of porn—with the high Internet speeds of the kind we have here in Singapore providing a sexual super-stimulus that’s way beyond anything our brains are wired to handle in the real world.”
Because the study of compulsive pornography use is in its infancy, quite what the impact of this pandemic will be in a place with high Internet speeds can only be imagined. But it’s not likely to be good—even beyond the negative impact that porn use by their male partners can have on some women.
There is, after all, the simple matter of physiology for a woman. Noah Church, author of Wack: Addicted to Internet Porn and content director of Remojo, a new app designed to help users quit porn, points out that if a man’s viewing is at least potentially ring-fenced by the number of times he can orgasm, a woman can reach the same high multiple times—a high that has been found in some to offer a sense of elation comparable to a hit of heroin.
“Physically over-stimulating sex toys are also more commonly used by women now, which just underscores the conditioning they get from greater use of porn,” adds Church. “They’re both about the pursuit of that intensity—an intensity that’s great enough to temporarily wash away other feelings or that’s just greater than anything daily life can bring.”
Dallas-based Gabe Deem, one-time porn addict and the founder of porn addiction recovery community Reboot Nation, attributes increased porn use to the adaptability of the industry itself. “The porn industry is always aiming to provide novelty, something else to click on to, so there will increasingly be content that appeals more directly to women.”
Studies in the US already suggest that girls are more likely to watch porn earlier than boys. This can be put towards sexual curiosity—in part because they enter puberty earlier—heightened testosterone levels, and, perhaps most concerning of all, because they have come to regard pornography as a form of self-education: this is how sex is done.
When use becomes abuse
“Porn is systematically designed towards escalation, to indoctrinate the viewer towards more extreme content,” suggests Johnson. In fact, a 2017 German study found that the more women used porn, and the younger they were when they started, the more they wanted to engage in submissive sexual behaviours.
Johnson adds: “I developed a tolerance to what would be considered soft-core. It was strange for me, as a woman, that I found myself having a sexual response to what I’d find horrific in real life—gagging, beating, being spat on, the kind of behaviours you see all the time in porn. You only have to think about it for a moment to see that porn is exploitative.”
As a result of porn exposure, women have also reported a heightened sense of inadequacy about their sexual performance, which only serves to drive them away from real-world relationships and back to porn. And there they may stay, in mind if not also in body. Women who consume porn are more likely to think about porn during real sex and may need to do so to become aroused—the female equivalent of PIDE, or porn-induced erectile dysfunction. In some cases, they may come to prefer to orgasm using porn than having sex with a partner.
“Female sexuality is, in contrast, considered bad or dangerous. Women carry that narrative around with them”
Given this, it is surprising that the impact of compulsive porn use by women isn’t more widely discussed already. “Women tend not to compartmentalise their sexual behaviour like men do,” explains Dr Robert Weiss, founder of the Seeking Integrity clinic in Los Angeles and of the first recovery programme specifically for women with sex compulsion issues. In or out of a relationship, women are more likely to feel a sense of shame over their porn use and so are less likely to talk about it.
“I often wonder if my addiction to porn would have got to the place it did if I’d had the opportunity to hear of other women’s experience with it because there’s still this huge misconception that women can’t even be drawn to pornographic images,” says Erica Garza, the author of Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction, who first started watching porn at age 12. “When we hear about young boys exploring porn, it’s normal. Female sexuality is, in contrast, considered bad or dangerous. Women carry that narrative around with them.”
The historical shroud of embarrassment around female sexuality may also be why women think of their possibly innocuous porn habits as being those of an addict. Shame, indeed, may be the most solid point of distinction between male and female compulsive porn use.
But when could porn use be classified as an addiction? The clinical community is divided over whether it can ever be seen through that lens. In fairness to clinicians, there is much yet to be understood, and what we know of compulsive porn use is fraught with gaps and contradictions in relation to the behaviour of men and women.
Blurred lines
“The field is so new. There’s just not enough research for there to be agreement yet. Some say it’s not addiction but hyper-sexual behaviour, and, to draw a parallel, not everyone who can drink more than the next person is an alcoholic,” explains Tham Yuen Han, the clinical director of Singapore’s We Care Community Services. Only five percent of We Care’s clients who are wrangling with compulsive porn use are women. “Sexual behaviour is very complicated and there’s no clear norm. That will always be so. But we’re already seeing a trend of the last few years that the accessibility, convenience and anonymity of online porn is driving case increases.”
The compulsive use of pornography—addiction, if you want—might be connected to all manner of other mental states: far from being about the desire to repeatedly chase that high out of sheer sexual enthusiasm, research suggests that porn addiction may, in a mutually reinforcing way, be closely linked to depression, anxiety, loneliness, emotional malaise and self-esteem issues. This may especially be the case for women.
“The sexual gratification was only one part of it all for me,” Garza stresses. “I was incredibly socially anxious and porn quickly became an escape method [from the stress].”
Dr Anna Sevcikova, a clinical psychologist at Masaryk University, Czech Republic, who studied women’s porn use, suspects that women possibly are more likely to use porn for mood management too—like a glass of wine after work each evening—rather than for reasons of sexual disorder.
“It’s not about how often you use porn or even what porn you use. What it comes down to is whether your porn use interferes with your ability to function”
Likewise, some claim that comparing porn’s effect to drugs is misleading as there is no information on the neurochemicals released while watching porn. Sure, the brain lights up in different ways than it does when consuming other media, but that doesn’t tell us much, and certainly not that it’s bad.
Another theory has it that porn rewires the brain by making it accustomed to high levels of stimulation, in turn making everyday pleasures pale in comparison. A vicious cycle of seeking ever greater stimulation follows.
And there’s yet more disagreement. Some, like Weiss, say a porn-addicted woman who needs “meaningful treatment” is much more likely to be acting out a childhood sexual trauma. Other experts dismiss this—though da Roza says that some of his female clients do end up traumatised as a result of the hardcore porn they’ve seen.
In short, we’re just at the vanguard of understanding porn addiction and there is not much clinical consensus on the matter. Garza reckons this problem is compounded by the fact that, unlike other addictions, “it’s really hard to reach rock bottom with sex and porn addiction. In my case, I just started to see that all of my relationships faltered. For others it’s sexual dysfunction. For yet others, a kind of emotional malaise. The line between enjoying porn in a ‘sex positive’ way and finding that one’s consumption has become more a hindrance to life isn’t always clear.”
“It’s not about how often you use porn or even what porn you use. What it comes down to is whether your porn use interferes with your ability to function—whether you’re failing at school or don’t have the social life you want, or find yourself watching it at work. That understanding is personal,” suggests Weiss. “You won’t hear me say that this is a moral issue. Or that porn is bad. That’s like saying alcohol is bad. It’s not. The issue is how it affects your life.”
Surprisingly perhaps, the answer for Garza wasn’t to take an all-or-nothing approach. She met her future husband, who had a drinking problem, and so felt she could open up. There were a lot of relapses along the road to recovery, but porn gradually became less purposeful, less necessary. “Now I know when I’m looking at porn as a form of escape and when I’m doing so just because I want to. It’s weird to get to this point, but I actually find porn a bit boring now,” she says. But she has a five-year-old daughter and is worried about what a future of ubiquitous porn streaming will do to her generation. “I’m preparing myself to talk to her about this kind of thing,” she says.
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