“My name is Sergio, I am 27 years old and I have been an ex-user of pornography for more than two years. Of my entire life, I have really lived 13 years seriously, the rest I have spent as an addict to the pleasure of porn.
“When I was 11 years old, a classmate in computer science class showed me a virtual video game that I ended up being addicted to over the years. Not much later, a worldwide controversy was unleashed with that video game, which was sanctioned for the lack of control over minors. In that game, millions of people were connected all over the world, and the controversy consisted of the fact that they started sharing pornography websites. And I was one of the victims. I accidentally clicked on that porn link and it opened a tab in my web browser. I was 13 years old.”
“Through that website I was able to see explicit sexual relations for the first time in my life. I immediately noticed my addiction to pleasure. Day after day I watched those porn videos at night, and one day I wanted to watch gay porn, fetish and more… My daily masturbations increased. My studies began to suffer. I had no energy, I was always sleepy, tired. I don’t know how it is possible that today I have two average degrees with all this on top of that.”
“At the age of 20 I started living alone in another city, away from my family. As I continued to be addicted to porn, my daily dose began to increase and I began to experiment with real sex. Over time I started to stop watching porn because I lost interest in it and instead became a user of porn-induced sex.”
“Until one day, after another sexual experience, something woke up inside me. I realized that I had hit rock bottom and when I got home, I started looking into how to quit porn addiction. And why did I start looking for how I hate quitting porn addiction and not sex? Because sex addiction came through pornography.”
This testimony of Sergio, provided to this newspaper by Dale una Vuelta, an entity born eight years ago when they detected the problems of addiction to pornography and which offers help “to stop the harmful consumption of sexual images”. In that time they have served around 5,000 people, most of them addicts, but also parents of teenagers, who do not know how to act when faced with the consumption of porn websites by their children. Or women who discover the hours their husbands or boyfriends spend watching these websites and who then want to put into practice some of the actions they see in those movies. And the numbers don’t stop increasing. According to the few studies that exist on this addiction, it is estimated that almost four out of ten teenagers who consume porn have a “real” risk of becoming addicted. In the case of girls, two out of ten
Alejandro Villena, psychologist expert in sexuality from Dale una Vuelta, talks about a real epidemic, with dire consequences. Both for the addict, as for his family, and also for society. Many of the violations that are registered every day have their origin in the consumption of porn. And, above all, group sexual assaults, of which there are more and more. Websites that show gang rapes are some of the most viewed. Also pedophilia…
Is there a profile of the porn addict? It is very variable, but there are some points in common. Boys are more addicted and, moreover, it has been proven that they “need more and more”. They start with hard porn (everything is already hard, Villena explains) and at the same time look for even harder, more violent videos that go beyond the limits. What limits? “A few days ago I was treating a boy who turned to us when he realized that he only wanted to watch porn with children”.
Many of these teenagers share insecurities, fear, difficulty managing feelings and poor social skills. Many live in unstructured families, with few rules, hostility and even violence. The room and technology become the spaces in which to take refuge, explains Villena.
Personal relationships are reduced to the maximum and the feeling of loneliness settles inside him. Porn addiction promotes this feeling. And while the consumption grows (hours and hours, masturbation after masturbation) empathy fades away, the fact of understanding the rest, taking its place. This explains the objectification of women and growing up thinking that they like to be humiliated and beaten. “The woman stops being a subject to become an object. And this narrative is very damaging and harmful”, explains Villena.
