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(Sunday Star Times April 10, 2011/ Guardian News & Media)

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 a copy of her CV and there on the screen WA a grab she’d saved from a porn site.

“”I remember the feeling of being sucked in, really wanting that 2 minute fix, that numbness I get when I use porn, “ says Catherine.  “I was stressed out and I risked being late for the 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 lives.  “Afterwards I just hated myself for giving in and getting off on images that treated women like pieces of meat.  But I kept going back.”

There is much debate about whether porn addiction even exists, but Caroline, a 21-year-old English graduate, has just finished seeing a sex addiction therapist to get her porn habit under control.

Having started watching porn out of curiousity when it became available over the internet in her mid-teens, she and her mates used it as a graphic form of sex education.  She saw nothing wrong with it, particularly as she was raised in a generation of girls for whom it was seen as hip and liberated to to enjoy watching sex.

Then, as she entered a depressed job market after university, it became a from of escape, a default she turned to whenever she felt anxious or bored.  “I’d think to myself: “It’s not going to harm.”  But then I started to loathe myself for giving in and wasting so much time on it.”

While it’s accepted that women are watching - and enjoying - porn more and more, it’s less recognised that some are finding ti hard to stop.  At Quit Porn Addiction, the UK’s main porn counselling service, almost one in three clients are women struggling with their own porn use, says founder and counsellor Jason Dean.  Two years ago, there were none.  While more than six out of 10 women say they view web porn, one study in 2006 by the Internet Filter Review found 17% of women describe themselves as “addicted”.

There is little difference in the ways the genders become hooked, says Dean.  There is the same pattern of exposure, addiction, and desensitisation to increasingly hardcore images.  The main contrast between male and female porn addicts is how much more guilty women feel.

“Porn addiction is seen as a man’s problem - and therefore not acceptable for women.  There’s a real sense among women that it’s bad, dirty, wrong and they’re often unable to get beyond that.”

Orgasm releases a dopamine-oxytocin high that has been compared to a heroin hit, and many regular users of internet porn report experiencing an almost trance-like effect that not only makes them feel oblivious to the world, but also gives them a sense of power that they don’t have in real life.  “The PC becomes an erogenous zone.”

Psychotherapist Phillip Hodson, of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, says women are not using porn as a quick way to have sex without emotional investment, just as men traditionally have.

For may women, it’s a phase that will pass, he says, either because they take stock, it becomes a problem, becomes boring - or their life fills up again with alternatives.


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