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“The first two weeks were hard,” says 20-year-old student Nico*. “I got physical withdrawals, like insomnia, and I got angry over little things. I couldn’t get those same dopamine hits anymore.” You might think these are the side-effects a recovering alcoholic would experience. But no, Nico’s affliction is the result of something 74 per cent of men in the UK watch at least four times a week, according to a study carried out by Sun Online. That something is porn.
Nico first watched porn when he was 13-years-old. Back then, he only masturbated to nude pictures of women, but before he knew it, he found himself immersed in the world of pornographic films. While it started off with softcore, he soon sought out more hardcore genres – everything from anime, to diaper, and incest fantasies. “Normal porn didn’t do it for me anymore,” he admits.
It was in April last year when Nico decided he’d had enough. “After masturbating for the second time that day, I looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t see myself anymore. Something clicked in my brain. I realised the reason I was watching porn was that I was lonely, and I was trying to escape the stress,” he says. At the time, he was three months away from starting university. “I wanted to fix myself – maybe even get a girlfriend. Since then, I haven’t watched porn.”
Nico isn’t alone in making the decision to cut out porn from his life for good. In a TikTok video amassing over 2m views, sex-positive content creator and HIV activist Jay Hawkridge revealed he stopped watching porn last year. For Jay, masturbating without porn has not only made the experience more enjoyable, it’s even had positive effects on his sex life. “I think porn can be quite damaging if you rely on it too much,” he says in the viral video. “Going completely cold turkey, I feel so much more confident in the bedroom.”
Addiction specialist Stuart Downing can vouch for this, who explains that watching too much porn can distort your idea of what a sexual relationship is. According to Downing, too much porn might also have physical implications like premature ejaculation. As for what might make some men addicted to porn, there are many different factors. “There’s not just one reason why porn addiction happens. It can be problems over communicating with females, social anxiety, issues around themselves,” he adds.
When it comes to tackling a toxic relationship with porn, there is normally a deeper root cause. “Addiction to substances like alcohol allows people to escape and numbs people. As addiction progresses, it becomes a need,” says Downing. “It’s exactly the same with pornography. What used to be a fun time watching it now and again becomes a need.”
Porn can not only have physical repercussions on performance as Downing mentions, but also mental ones on self-esteem. One study carried out on men revealed a correlation between viewing pornography and higher levels of body dissatisfaction. The inaccurate and unattainable standards set by porn make it only natural for many people to feel insecure after watching it, and for 25-year-old Seb*, this was no different.
“It’s bad for men’s body image and I feel like it exacerbated [my] insecurities,” he says. After deciding to stop watching porn, Seb says he feels more self-confident: “I think porn distorts what you think of as normal. The impact on men’s body image is probably underestimated by many people. It’s like watching basketball players and thinking they’re normal height.”
According to an Ofcom report released last year, half of all adults in the UK watched porn in September 2020 alone. It also revealed that Pornhub.com was the most popular adult content site in the UK, garnering visits from a third of online adults in the country. The more the digital world infiltrates the way we live, the more commonplace pornography becomes in day-to-day life, which for some creates issues more complex than they may seem.
For some, unhealthy relationships with porn may be the result of how easy it is to access online. “Porn is pervasive and hard for men to escape. The internet is riddled with porn and even popular sites like Instagram and TikTok can in many cases feel like soft-core porn,” says 31-year-old former porn addict Aaron*.
Aaron struggled with excessively watching porn from his late teens, reaching a point where he was masturbating to it several times a day, with little desire to have sex with his own partner. In an attempt to tackle his addiction, Aaron sought help through therapy.
It was there he was prescribed an SSRI, a type of antidepressant sometimes used to treat porn addiction due to its common side effect of decreasing libido. “Taking Prozac alongside continued therapy gave me control over my desire to watch porn and saved my life and relationship in so many ways,” Aaron says.
In the same way Hawkridge explains in his video, Aaron also saw that removing porn from the equation made his relationship with masturbation healthier. He explains: “Without porn, masturbating is an act which makes me feel much more in touch with my body and emotions.”
“Every single aspect of my life is dramatically better since cutting out porn,” he continues. “I am more emotionally connected to my partner, we fight less, our communication has improved and I am generally more engaged.”
For many who watch porn, their relationships remain unaffected by it. Aaron insists porn should not be labelled as problematic – it’s when you can’t go without it that it becomes a cause for concern. “When it reaches unhealthy levels, porn can destroy you and your relationship,” he says. “It’s scary to say, but during sex my mind would often wander to thoughts of porn. I had reached a point where the definition of sex in my mind was watching porn. Now, I am fully engaged in sex, I love it and it’s a way to connect with my partner.”
*Some names in this article have been changed.
Enjoyed this article? Read more here: Baby, I was porn this way: Chelsea Poe on the life of a pornstar.
Illustration by Eibhlin Enright
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