Pornified

by Pamela Paul

  Psychologist David Marcus runs several groups for compulsive pornography users in San Jose, California. “This is a burgeoning problem,” he says. “Kids and young adults are exposed earlier and more intensely than ever before. It may start off innocuously, and slowly it starts to serve a different function. A kid goes online to explore, checks out pornography for fun or to get off, and then at some point the kid is stressed out and goes online to relieve that stress. Once you use pornography as a way to cope with stress or anxiety, you’re exhibiting high-risk behavior. Pornography becomes something more biologically based and can cause real problems. You’re no longer going online just for fun.”

  The Rush

  Just as with all pornography users, casual or habitual, fun is generally where it starts. Sex addicts typically describe the feeling they experience as a kind of a trance, a zone where they lose sense of time and place. Euphoric, high, thrilled, excited, and obsessed are words commonly used to describe the rush induced by pornography. “Once we start to drink in that image, we lose control,” explains Tony, a thirty-eight-year-old addict from San Diego, now in recovery. “The consequences often don’t stop us.” A forty-seven-year-old from Missouri describes pornography as a “powerful drug”: “It’s mind altering,” he says. “More mind altering than alcohol or any other drug I’ve used. My brain will—it’s hard to explain to someone who’s not an addict—I almost get the chills. Just thinking about pornography or thinking about thinking about pornography gives me a total rush. Maybe it’s just the chemicals in my brain, the release of endorphins.” In A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction, recovered addict David Mura writes: “In pornographic perception, the addict experiences a type of vertigo, a fearful exhilaration, a moment when all the addict’s ties to the outside world do indeed seem to be cut or numbed. That sense of endless falling, that rush, is what the addict seeks again and again…. Those who stand back from the world of pornography cannot experience this falling, this rush. They cannot understand the attraction it holds. But for the addict the rush is more than an attraction. He is helpless before it.”4

  Many addicts follow a common pattern, using pornography sporadically and then succumbing to addiction when their use transfers online. Kenneth, a consultant from New Mexico, went much of his adult life without pornography. He looked occasionally during high school and college, and as a soldier in Vietnam, but never bothered to buy it. It wasn’t until 1994, depressed over his younger brother’s sudden death from cancer, that Kenneth began looking at a serious amount of pornography. Not coincidentally, it was at this point that he got Internet access. “I went into a trancelike state,” he recalls. “I would be high on porn. In another world, removed. If I was on the Internet for six hours, the time would fly. It would be three in the morning and I had no idea time had passed.”

  Maybe it was because he was depressed, maybe it’s because his father was an alcoholic and addiction ran in his family. Kenneth’s not sure why he got sucked in. “In New Mexico, we’ve had a tremendous expansion of Indian gambling casinos,” he explains. “So along with that come the problem gamblers. Why can some people gamble, walk away, and be fine while others become gamblers? Certain people have problems in their lives and are looking for something to make them feel better. Some people get it from gambling, some from alcohol, some from the thrill of looking at porn. The chemicals it released in my brain made me feel better.”

  Often, men describe the high as a numbness, which is followed by shame, self-loathing, and frustration, particularly for addicts who have tried but failed to stop. Those feelings of anger and self-hatred then drive the addict back to pornography. Getting off on porn—hunt, chase, orgasm, relief—becomes their way to self-medicate pain or disappointment. As the forty-seven-year-old Missourian puts it, “It’s a quick fix. For people who are emotionally sick, pornography fills this need. We have this empty hole inside and porn fills it. In the long run, it never works and keeps you coming back, but in the short run, it’s a powerful, quick cure.”

  Not surprisingly, some pornography addicts suffer from other forms of compulsive behavior, frequently with drugs and alcohol. The porn buzz and the drug or alcohol high create a heady combination. When Leo, a forty-two-year-old technology consultant from Dallas, met his first wife, Hayley, at a party during his sophomore year of college, he and a friend, wildly drunk, attempted a three-way. The menage a trois flopped, but Leo and Hayley launched into a nine-year-long party that encompassed two years of marriage. Their relationship was tumultuous. Hayley would watch pornos with Leo, already a compulsive user, even though she was jealous. She lived in constant fear Leo would leave her. Then there were the drugs. Leo had been smoking pot every night at the end of the day since he was eighteen. During the first year of their marriage, he and Hayley added crystal meth and amphetamines to the mix. With crystal, Leo could have all-night sex parties, whether with pornography or his wife; he would be high for hours on end.

  Still, on the outside, they seemed like “normal” people. They held steady jobs, had a nice house, a nice car. Leo attended church fairly regularly. But their private life began to spin out of control. When Hayley became more interested in drugs than sex, Leo decided he wanted “off this train.” He decided he wanted to stop doing drugs and Hayley decided instead to leave him.

  See the Girl, Play with Her

  Relationships with women are often complicated, even destroyed, by pornography abuse. Over time, addicts almost inevitably find it hard to differentiate between the women in pornography and the women in real life. Kenneth, the consultant from New Mexico, struggled with what he was doing. “I had a hard time rationalizing it,” he says. “Because even in the midst of it, I knew it wasn’t good for me. I knew it affected the way I related to women.” In spite of his best intentions, Kenneth, a married man and father of three, began to have trouble relating to women in the real world. “I objectified them,” he explains. “It makes sense. If you meet someone and you’re preoccupied with women’s anatomy because you spend time looking at porn, then in the real world, you spend a lot of time looking at women’s anatomy.”

  Kenneth found it hard to form new relationships with women, socially and professionally. People would drop clues, which he would either ignore or shamefully realize during dark moments. Women would leave the room when he entered; they avoided eye contact. “Part of my denial was that I thought my obsession wasn’t obvious to everyone around me, but it clearly was,” he says. In one instance, he got a contract to work in Texas. The engineer he was working with turned out to be an attractive woman. She never complained directly to Kenneth. But when the company never hired Kenneth again, he knew he had caused a problem. “I’m ashamed to admit it, but I know I made her uncomfortable,” he says. “I was checking her out constantly. I never said anything to her; I was too preoccupied with trying to look down her blouse.”

  The equation becomes eerily simple: the more pornography viewed, the higher the bar for all women. “Gradually, you need more perfection in terms of the look,” Liam, the forty-something father of four, explains. “You’re looking for a certain kind of thing, a certain beauty. In my case, it was breasts, but it could have been anything. Literally—and I’m not exaggerating—any woman I would meet in the course of the day, I would first evaluate on the basis of her breasts. That didn’t happen before porn. It hadn’t happened since I was a teenager. I hadn’t been the kind of guy who always had to make a comment on a woman’s appearance. But I became that kind of guy.” Pornography, Liam says, makes an object out of everybody. “It takes a three-dimensional human being with feelings—someone who could be your daughter, sister, or mother—and basically says, this is a creature that is only intended to satisfy your sexual desires. It becomes your natural way of thinking. A very common progression addicts describe is that it gets to a point where you can’t even look at a woman without first rating her for her physical attributes. You’re no longer conscious you’re even doing it. It just happens.”

>   For the addict, pornography becomes the means to “get” someone, to “have” her and control her. Sex is the means to an end, and the woman is a tool who performs the transaction. While the objectification of women is a major topic of discussion in recovery programs (and therefore it’s not surprising to hear it articulated by men in those programs), every sex addict was able to offer specific, highly personal descriptions of his own inability to relate to women as a result of pornography. One recovering addict from Washington State explains, “I definitely objectified women when I was using porn. The way I looked at women at the time was, ‘What can I get out of you?’—and that was all I cared about. There was no other value in interacting with them.” As a result, he felt uncomfortable around women, had no real female friendships for years, and split up with his wife. “There were times when I thought women could tell what I was thinking,” he says. “They knew something was wrong with me.” Other addicts concur: “I didn’t care for women as people.” “I found it hard to interact with women in the workplace.” “When they had a nice personality, it might make it easier to fantasize about them, but I didn’t give a shit about who they were as individuals.” “Women all blended together.”

  You’ve Seen 1,000 Women, You’ve Seen Them All

  Faced with problems in the real world, addicts find the women in pornography to be a welcome refuge. When Walter, a Texas-based program manager, remarried at age thirty-nine, he experienced a tremendous amount of stress. He had joint custody of his son and daughter from his first marriage, which had ended two years before, and his second wife, Diane, had full custody of her own two kids. Blending the families was a strain, and Walter began drinking heavily and getting into raging fights with his new wife. He felt incapable of handling the complex problems posed by his new family and, at bottom, impotent and insignificant.

  Walter had never been into pornography, just occasional glimpses when he was single and a brief fascination with magazines when his first marriage started to crumble. But now he was working long hours and traveling for his job. “Internet porn became attractive to me as a way of medicating,” he explains. “I was able to feel wanted by all these women at a time when that feeling was not being presented in my marriage. I felt desired and needed.” The lower he felt, the more he looked, the better it made him feel. The women in pornography, Walter says, accepted him. As long as they were looking at the camera and he could make eye contact and pretend they wanted him.

  The women in pornography are interchangeable, it doesn’t mean anything, addicts tell their wives. It’s just physical. Their words echo the words of many pornography users, casual and habitual. But despite what wives get told, there is an emotional component to pornography—the satisfaction of a need to feel desired, to transgress, to be a man, to fill whatever’s missing from the psychological cocktail he equates with happiness. The addict conforms to a twisted logic depending on his current attempt at self-justification or rationalization. I love women, he’ll boast to himself and to other men. That’s why he looks at and admires them. Those women don’t matter, he’ll tell his wife. They’re just images.

  Looking back, Walter is astonished at the myths he bought into while enmeshed in pornography. Still, many of the men he talks to now don’t think that what he did was so heinous. Look, they tell him, it’s natural for a guy to look at porn, especially when he’s married. He needs variety. Let’s face it, they’ll say, a wife just isn’t enough. But Walter doesn’t buy it anymore. “That’s a bunch of crap,” Walter says. “I’m sorry. Men are supposed to be strong and porn is just a self-esteem weakness. Porn is there to make men feel like men, and women are there to please us. Porn helps men justify all the other things men want to believe about themselves.” The truth, according to Walter, is that men don’t like to admit the whole reason they go for pornography, which is that they know they couldn’t get those women otherwise. “Look at the men in topless clubs,” he says. “These are not the kinds of guys who can get a good woman, the women there are generally not worth it, and no real relationships are ever going to come of it. It’s an act of desperation.”

  Yet when men are operating through the veil of addiction, pornography feeds that desperation. Clay, forty-six, from Atlanta, says that with over thirty-five years of using pornography—an average of three hours per day—he has wasted about three years of his life. Work started slipping as Clay felt his ability to concentrate loosen. He couldn’t hold steady conversations. “I didn’t know how to have adult relationships with anyone,” he recalls. “Everything felt shallow. It was as though women were not real people, not individuals. I didn’t feel any kind of attachment.”

  Meanwhile, Clay’s wife grew frustrated, having assumed he would stop using pornography once he settled down. For her, Clay’s porn signaled the possibility that he might have an affair. In some ways, Clay admits, it was a rational fear; many sex addicts progress that way. But Clay had no interest in realizing his desire with another human being. He had no desire to connect. The more upset his wife grew, the less he desired to be with her. Why bother arguing, having long discussions, struggling to get her into bed, when he could just log on and masturbate? Pornography became his escape. Cold, sure, but easy. He detached himself from what he was seeing. “I would see some young girl in porn and then read a horror story in the newspaper about sex trafficking in eastern Europe, but I just mentally discarded the connection,” he explains. “I couldn’t let myself feel anything toward these women other than the means to satisfying my desires.”

  When Clay’s wife left him and he went into recovery, Clay retreated even further. Since their separation more than five years ago, he hasn’t even gone out on a date. Fearful of his inability to connect with people, Clay believes he’s still not ready for normal relationships. The messages he picked up from pornography, the portrait of women he embraced for so many years, the disconnection he feels—none of it has gone away. “I’m lonely,” he says with a sigh.

  Consistent heavy viewing takes its emotional toll. Men report going through a period of ennui—as excited as they were at the onset, pornography becomes like a drug necessary to maintain a plateau. The highs become harder to achieve. Boredom sinks in. After years of hiding his pornography habit from his wife of ten years and from his four children, Liam felt his sense of self, his whole life, being shut off. He became emotionally distant from his family while growing frustrated, easily agitated or provoked into bouts of fury. The stress of his double life—clean-cut Catholic family man on the outside, pornography addict on the inside—grated against his conscience all day, every day. “I wanted to think I was this good guy,” he recalls. But there were these aspects that didn’t gibe with the person I wanted to be.” Liam felt strangely disconnected. “On the surface, you can describe looking at pornography as physically connecting with other people. But, of course, none of them matter. None of them care about you. None of it is real. It’s a very solitary experience.” Liam nonetheless was compelled to push on. He wanted to see women getting raped.

  Upgrade, Downgrade, More, More

  Miles, the thirty-three-year-old military man from Indiana, saw his first nudie magazine at age six and never looked back. When he got the Internet, his tastes shifted to scenes depicting humiliation and degradation. “The specificity online is unbelievable,” Miles says. He would look for videos in which a husband watches himself cuckolded by a black man and his white wife. He became interested in rape porn and forced sex and bestiality. (“I didn’t like that at first, but then I got into it.”) The key to his arousal was finding the “forbidden.” Sometimes a video he downloaded looked a bit too real; he wasn’t sure if the woman was acting or was truly in pain. “While you’re in the middle of watching, it’s hard to be rational,” he says. “I would try to tell myself, ‘Okay, that’s not reality. Women don’t really want to be victimized.’” Regardless, his enjoyment was very real.

  In addition to soaking in online pornography, Miles frequented strip clubs; soon he
was paying escorts to strip for him, and ultimately he hired prostitutes. When he got married, he didn’t stop. He had affairs with several women and with one man, even though he doesn’t consider himself homosexual or even bisexual. There was one particularly worrisome habit. By his late teens, he had begun exposing himself. One afternoon, when he was nineteen, he was at his brother’s house watching pornos when he got very excited and wanted to … he wasn’t quite sure what—something beyond the usual. He went into the garage and began masturbating, deliberately leaving the garage door up, which made it more titillating. A neighbor called the police and Miles was cited for public indecency.

  Other incidents followed. One morning during the spring of 2003, Miles, then thirty-two, was driving on the interstate when he felt compelled to stop his car alongside the road, get out, and masturbate. This lasted for a minute or so, then he got back into the car and headed to work. But a passerby had reported the incident and a sheriff’s car began to follow him, accompanied by a fleet of police cars. Guns drawn, the police ordered him out of his car. As he lay on the ground, face in the dirt, hands cuffed behind his back, he thought to himself, “My wife will be crushed. My boss will find out. The military will know. It will be in the newspaper.” He was overwhelmed with fear and shame. The rape porn, the violence, the racism, the bestiality—none of it had bothered him the way his own public degradation did.

  The heavy user is not likely to think there is anything out of the ordinary about his escalating tastes. As discussed in chapter 3, studies by the University of Alabama researchers Zillmann and Bryant found that prolonged exposure to pornography leads people to overestimate the incidence of almost all sexual activities—particularly sodomy, group sex, sadomasochistic practices, and sexual contact with animals.5 Max, a thirty-four-year-old investor from Virginia, recalls, “When I was a kid, Penthouse would meet the need. But as I got older and porn became Internet-based, I started looking at a lot of amateur pornography with multiple women and group sex. At first, I didn’t seek it out. I guess about fifty percent of the time I was looking for something in particular, and the other fifty percent of the time I was just looking around and came across new things. I came across homosexual stuff, and to my surprise, I was curious. Same thing with bestiality and child porn, though those didn’t become particular interests of mine. I did get interested in young teen stuff, girls on spring break and that kind of thing. I would tell myself the person was of age while I was looking at it. But I would question it afterward.”