Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families

by Pamela Paul

  Kenneth, the married consultant and father of three from New Mexico, always saw himself as a good guy; he didn’t get into pornography until well into adulthood. He liked to find women who didn’t seem hardened by the industry, almost as a way to distance himself from the reality of what he was doing. To maintain the illusion of innocence and willingness, Kenneth sought out progressively younger women, girls who looked under eighteen. All the while, he rationalized: “The thing is, I never paid for porn. Maybe it’s my Scotch upbringing, but my rationalization was that if I didn’t pay for it, I didn’t have a problem.” Kenneth built up a range of excuses to suit his mood. It’s not such a big deal, he would tell himself. I can stop anytime. Everybody’s got something they battle.

  Eventually, Kenneth was after seriously underage porn. “I was looking for … thank goodness I had a hard time finding it, but I was looking for younger girls,” he says. Not prepubescent girls, per se, though he came across kiddie porn on one occasion. “It was scary for me because I was turned on and also because it obviously depicted kids who had been abused and tricked,” he says. “It’s pretty transparent. It’s not as if these kids were being paid five hundred dollars a day to pose. You could tell they were stressed out about being naked in front of the camera.” The father of a young girl himself, Kenneth became stressed as well. “I knew my relationship with my daughter was at risk.”

  Desensitization and Dissatisfaction

  It’s not as if most men intend to get into bestiality, child pornography, or rape reenactments. Desensitization is a major stage in becoming addicted to pornography. According to psychologist Victor B. Cline, the desensitization phase occurs when “pornography which was originally perceived as shocking, taboo-breaking, illegal, repulsive, or immoral, though still sexually arousing, in time came to be seen as acceptable and commonplace…. There is an increasing sense that ‘everybody does it’ and this gave them permission to also do it, even though the activity was possibly illegal and contrary to their previous moral beliefs and personal standards.”6 Even if extremely hardcore material was repugnant upon first, second, or third viewing, after so many hours spent online, reveling in strip clubs, hiring prostitutes, transgressing another step into the forbidden, and tucking yet another secret into their private “other” lives, the forbidden no longer disturbs the way it once did.

  When Liam got broadband Internet access in August 2000, things quickly spun out of control. “I was venturing into hardcore things that had scared me in the past,” he recalls. “I was starting to scare myself.” Though he considers himself a gentle person, Liam became drawn to violent images, particularly of rape. Repulsed and terrified by his curiosity, he nonetheless kept clicking back, and soon started to fantasize about rape even when he was not looking at pornography. “It was impossible to reconcile this with my own conception of myself,” he says. “I’d always gotten along well with people. I never treated people violently. Just to think of myself as having these kinds of thoughts was awful.” Liam tried to rationalize it. It was stress. He told himself he was just looking. But at night, unable to sleep, he would anesthetize himself with pornography, masturbating at the computer until he was physically and emotionally exhausted.

  For some men, venturing into extreme pornography turns into a dare. How far can you go? For others, it becomes a matter of indifference. Donovan, fifty-five, the former CEO of a large international corporation, was between marriages when he confessed to a friend his frustrations with dating. “Why bother?” the friend advised him. “Just go online.” He referred Donovan to call girl Web sites. Over the next couple of years, going online and ordering prostitutes became a weekly endeavor. On several occasions, he hired prostitutes to have sex with dogs in front of him, having cultivated a taste for bestiality online. But as his pornography consumption increased, his satisfaction waned. “For me, sex became less and less gratifying,” he recalls. “In seeking the perfect experience, I had to go deeper and more degrading. I became depressed and empty.” Pornography addiction was like a no-win search for the perfect car or perfect house—you’re never happy with whatever you can actually afford. “You’re seeing this fantasy physical being and you try to lay that ideal onto an actual human being—who may be more in every other respect than the physical—and you’re not satisfied when she doesn’t live up to it. You don’t see the reality, just the ways in which that human being doesn’t live up to the ideal.”

  Pornography offers an intensity of stimulation difficult to parallel in the world of matrimonial sex. After his fiasco of a marriage with the drug-addled Hayley, Leo retreated to the sanctuary of pornography, looking at magazines and videos for hours at a time, dating only casually. Then he met Abby, one of his coworkers, a divorcee with a young daughter. Leo developed an immediate crush. They had a storybook wedding and began what Leo hoped would be a “normal” life. Early on, he says, he was honest with his new wife. He told her he looked at pornography and showed her a box of magazines in the closet. Leo says Abby was okay with it because she loved him. According to Leo, Abby said, “I’m cool with that.”

  That’s not quite how Abby sees it. Abby, now thirty-eight, had never dated anyone who used pornography before, not that she knew of, at any rate. Before she and Leo bought their first home together, she and her daughter moved into his house. While cleaning it up, Abby came across a closet stuffed with Playboys. She threw them out. “I thought now that he’s getting married to me, he’s not going to need these anymore.” Later, when they moved to their new house, her five-year-old daughter found a pornographic magazine in their bathroom. Abby scolded Leo. It was one thing to hide them in a closet, but it was not permissible for pornography to be lying around for her daughter to see. Still, she tried not to badger him. She even went so far as to watch pornos with Leo. “I thought that was part of the deal at that point,” she says. “I figured, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Inside, however, she felt “creepy.” She realized she must not be enough for him.

  Abby wasn’t enough, according to Leo. He had gotten used to getting something more from his women and quickly became dissatisfied with their relationship. “I went from crazy Hayley to this wild dating and suddenly I was a dad,” he says. Having their first baby together dampened the sexual dynamic, and after their second child, sex slowed to a dribble. “I convinced Abby I was doing her a favor. She had no libido, which I felt like was my license to use porn.” He used more and more of it as time went on. “What happens with porn addicts is that whatever you looked at three weeks ago is no longer exciting,” Leo explains. “I became more specialized. I got into girls around eighteen years old. I wanted to see young girls in their panties.” One day, he got up the guts to steal some panties from a friend’s house.

  “Couldn’t You Be More Like a Porn Star?”

  Bit by bit, addicts transfer their pornographic expectations to real life. Donovan, the former CEO, lost his job due to pornography and destroyed two marriages during his years of abuse. Both wives were selected solely on the basis of their looks and sexual adventurousness. He introduced his first wife, a model and actress, to pornography, asking her to watch videos and emulate them afterward. At first she was game, but over time, and especially after she got pregnant, she balked. Feeling betrayed, Donovan began seeing prostitutes and other women, watching pornography alone during his free time. The marriage ended after five years. His second wife, whom he met five years after he had turned to the Internet, fit the same mold. “One thing I can say about porn is you get this image of femininity in your head,” he explains. “My choice of women to date and ultimately to marry was utterly superficial.” When he and his wives or girlfriends went out, Donovan would dress them in provocative outfits. In the bedroom, he kept them well supplied with sex toys and lingerie. He bought breast implants for both wives and for four of his girlfriends on the side and in between marriages.

  When not asking women to conform to their fantasies, sex addicts often try to get their women to play along wit
h their fantasies of other women. After four years of marriage, Leo took Abby to a strip club. This was during her “accommodating” phase. They sat down at a table and Leo said to Abby, “See? It’s not a big deal.” He leaned forward in his chair and watched intently. One of the women came out on the main stage, then migrated to a smaller stage by their table. Leo reached out, touched the performer’s leg, and cooed, “You’re just oh-so-smooth.” At that point, Abby realized his problem wasn’t about inanimate objects, as Leo made it out to be. Here was a real person. Abby ran to the bathroom. There, a few strippers asked why she was crying. “Every man who comes in here is dirt,” one stripper consoled her, and the others joined in agreement. Abby asked them why they did it. “Because we can take advantage of them and take their money,” was their response. When she got back to the table, Leo didn’t notice she had been crying. He was watching the show.

  Abby started listening to Christian radio, and at her urging, she and Leo began attending a new church regularly. Leo even became a lay speaker at their church, all the while smoking pot every night and surfing porn for hours. Abby quietly seethed inside, unable to handle Leo’s dual nature: good Christian on the outside, porn-frenzied pothead at home. When she reproached him, Leo accused her of being a Jesus freak. So she joined a group for wives of sex addicts. “Over and over you would hear women say, ‘My husband is such a good Christian, you just would never think he would do this,’” Abby recalls. “But all these men were into porn, going to strip clubs, lying to their wives, cheating on them.”

  Then Abby had a hysterectomy, forcing her to abstain from sex for six weeks. Leo turned to pornography for hours on end. “It has nothing to do with you,” he told her. “We’re just not having enough sex.” Abby retreated. “I felt like I was unattractive, uninteresting,” she recalls. Their sex life had been good early on, but had steadily gotten worse. Leo became obsessed with various fetishes and scenarios, trying to pull Abby into his world. One day, he was online looking at life-size sex dolls and told Abby he wanted to get one. “When you’re not available, I could use this,” he told Abby. “I’m being replaced,” she thought to herself.

  Abby’s feelings echo those of other women involved with addicts. Elizabeth, a thirty-eight-year-old pharmacist from Florida, felt terrible throughout her two-year marriage. “I’m not an unattractive person, but he made me feel horrible. I had never been competitive before, but with him I was constantly checking out other women to see who my husband was lusting after and how I measured up. I felt like my arms were too flabby, my butt wasn’t hard enough, my calves weren’t shapely. I was compelled to exercise all the time.” Such feelings are not unfounded. Many men describe a waning interest in their wives and growing annoyance at their wives’ efforts to draw them in, subtracting time that could otherwise be devoted to pornography. For those men who hide their habit from their spouses, covering it up requires elaborate efforts. At the very least they’ll pretend to be sexually excited by their spouses while closing their eyes and picturing pornography in their minds.

  Like many recovering porn addicts, Liam admits that he began to look at his wife differently. It wasn’t as though she were unattractive. But she was in her late thirties. “When you’re seeking out the perfect woman in a picture, with very particular attributes, it’s hard for people to measure up,” Liam explains. “You cultivate a taste and the average woman—even if she’s your wife—doesn’t turn you on anymore.” It became difficult for Liam to have sex with his wife without playing an internal movie screen of pornographic images. When that didn’t work, he tried to get his wife to copy behaviors from pornography. Obsessed with oral sex, he insisted she swallow his semen and say she enjoyed it—just like the girls in pornography. His wife’s displeasure was evident, but irrelevant.

  “During that period of my life, sex had nothing to do with expressing love or affection,” Liam recalls. “I became more selfish, because with porn, it was all about me—me feeling better, me getting more pleasure, me getting more excited. It was completely self-centered. After all, porn wouldn’t make any money if it weren’t effective. Where would the money be if porn was about giving to others and behaving selflessly?” The self-centeredness pervaded all areas of his life, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally. “My entire orientation became focused inward,” he says.

  Porn Sex vs. Real Sex

  The majority of sex addicts eventually turn off their wives or girlfriends altogether or tune themselves out. Rachel, a thirty-four-year-old mother of three from Michigan, describes sex with her husband as oddly disconnected. “I obviously knew where his body was,” she says, “but where was his mind? He would sort of be there at first, but then I didn’t know where he went. I don’t want to sound wacko, but he was just not there with me. Especially leading up to orgasm and during orgasm. At a certain point, I realized I was just a tool. I could have been anything or anybody. I felt so lonely, even when he was in the room.” Elizabeth’s husband became obsessed with mutual masturbation. After a while, she didn’t want to rely so heavily on what seemed to her like a disconnected act. “Why should it be him getting himself off and me taking care of myself when we’re together?” she wondered. “It takes all the intimacy out of the experience.” When they did have sex, her husband insisted on ejaculating on her body rather than inside her. “Just the way they do in porn films,” she says. “Ironically, he thought he was the greatest lover ever. He saw himself as this fount of pleasure.”

  Rachel’s and Elizabeth’s experiences are common. Psychiatrist Jennifer Schneider’s study of ninety-one women and three men, all of whom had spouses or partners seriously involved in cybersex, found that discovering a partner’s online sexual activity results in feelings of hurt, betrayal, rejection, abandonment, devastation, loneliness, shame, isolation, humiliation, jealousy, and anger. More than one in five of those surveyed had separated or divorced as a result of their spouse’s cybersex addiction. Half reported their spouses were no longer sexually interested in them, and one-third said they were no longer interested in sex with their partner.7

  For Miles, the exhibitionist, pornography fantasies and his sex life began to overlap. After looking at fetish sites for flashers, he became convinced that every woman who passed him on the street would expose herself at any minute. Driving down the freeway, he would find himself thinking, “Some woman is going to lift up her shirt.” The idea became all-consuming. At his workplace, he would tell himself, “Okay, I’ve been working with this woman for three or four years now. I bet I could get her into bed.” Every thought he had was about sex. Every thought was about women wanting to do something sexual. Every thought was about getting them to do what he wanted them to do.

  He and his wife had an active sex life, but he was keen to integrate pornography, especially the humiliation and degradation he enjoyed online. He would ask his wife to verbally abuse him while they were making love, to talk about having sex with black men instead of with him, to taunt him that his penis wasn’t large enough. For a while, his wife played along. She would tell him that she wished Miles were black, she wanted black men more than she wanted him. But one night, after the usual routine, his wife said, “Miles, I don’t know why you want me to talk about other men and specifically black men, but I want to have sex with you” Only Miles wasn’t making love to his wife. “I was just masturbating with her,” he explains. “All the while I was thinking either about porn or trying to make her say things she didn’t want to say. I was really just using her—she was like a masturbatory accessory.”

  Omission and Deception

  Wives and other family members are frequently kept in the dark until an addict reaches a breaking point. Many compulsive users deny their problem even to themselves up until they enter recovery, and some deny it during relapses. A number of men who had never paid for pornography, always borrowing videos or looking at free porn online, used their lack of expenditure as an excuse: “If I never spend money on it, I can’t be an addict.” Others felt
as long as they didn’t “hurt” anyone, there couldn’t be anything wrong. They would tell themselves they were just being more open and honest about the sexual nature of man than all the hypocrites, even as they made attempts to hide their habit from spouses, colleagues, and themselves. The majority admit to compartmentalizing their addiction, whether unconsciously or through careful deliberation. “I would separate it out,” recalls Clay, the forty-six-year-old recovered addict from Atlanta. “For me, it was like balancing the scales. I’m doing bad stuff, but I’m also doing good. I started volunteering in the community for the local AIDS organization, while at home my wife had left me because I was spending hours a day looking at pornography.”

  Addicts work out rationalizations or alternate between denial and justification. Time and again, Leo promised Abby he would quit looking at pornography. “It’s been difficult to stop,” he confesses. “I’d go for long periods without it. I would purge—no magazines, no nothing. White knuckling.” Abby would begin to trust him again and then wham! he says—she would find something on his computer. “The Internet is the source of all evil for a porn addict,” Leo explains. “You’ll be on eBay and then suddenly you realize you can type in XXX. You can be off it for ten months and it’ll take ten seconds to lose it. ‘I’ll just check it out,’ you’ll say.”

  When Abby left Leo the first time, he called some friends from church to seek advice. “Oh, that’s just normal guy stuff,” they told him. After that, Abby didn’t want those friends hanging around their house anymore. Leo even went and told the pastor about the source of their marital problems. “She’ll just have to learn that all men struggle with pornography,” the pastor advised. Abby quit the church. “It truly bothered me that all the while, Leo continued to go up there and give sermons and I kept hearing from people, ‘He’s so wonderful, he’s such a great Christian,’” she says.