How one successful man’s fixation on pornography threatened his marriage, family, and career—and how he finally overcame it.
As Told To John McDermott –
George, 54, New Jersey
My first encounter with pornography came when I was 10 years old. My friends tried to show me a copy of Oui, a French nudie magazine. I was raised Catholic, so I refused to look at it, something my friends made fun of me for. It’s ironic because, in adulthood, some men react negatively when I tell them I no longer look at porn, though my reasons have nothing to do with religion.
A couple years later, I discovered my dad’s Playboy. I had no idea until that moment that women had pubic hair. Just looking at the photos, I got an erection. It was a rush. I didn’t masturbate—I would look at the photos, get an erection and then put it back in its place.
Masturbating just hadn’t occurred to me. I didn’t get the thought until I heard other guys talking about it. I didn’t masturbate until I was 15 years old, and when I did, I felt some shame, but also a thrill.
Porn was much less pervasive then than it is now. This was the era of watching porn on VHS tapes on a VCR. Occasionally I would rent an adult movie, which required courage because you had to bring it up to the counter and hand it to the movie store clerk. I had to psych myself up to do it. Guys today don’t need courage to access porn. They don’t have to let anyone else know they’re looking at it.
I got high-speed internet for the first time in my 30s, in my apartment in Brooklyn. I said to the guy installing it, “Is this really necessary? Isn’t it fine to just have dial-up?” He gave me this look and said, “No one ever goes back,” in a real ominous tone. Something about the way he said it made me think he was talking about porn.
Now I could see naked women all the time, freely, without anybody else knowing—and that felt like a great, great thing.
It wasn’t long after that I noticed porn was affecting my relationships. I would be with a girlfriend and fantasizing about a porn scene I had watched. One time I was with a girlfriend and I suggested we watch porn while having sex. She caught me staring at the screen, and not at her, and she said, “Do I even need to be here?” That one felt terrible.
But in general, I thought my behavior was completely normal. I thought I just wasn’t that attracted to the girls I dated. I thought it was completely normal to be attracted to a woman for a little while and then move on to others.
I would start watching porn and hours would go by. It was similar to what John Mayer described in his infamous Playboy interview—looking through hundreds of women until I found the perfect one to get me off. Finally, I’d look up and think, What the fuck did I just do for so long? That was four or five times a week.
Around eight years ago I saw Gary Wilson’s TEDx video, “The Great Porn Experiment,” in which he talks about the effect internet porn is having on men. In the video he uses the phrase the Coolidge Effect, a term coined in 1958 by animal scientist Frank Beach in a literary article titled “Sexual exhaustion and recovery in the male rat.”
Behavioral and evolutionary psychologists have studied the mating habits of animals and concluded that when a male animal has one female mate, his interest in her will diminish over time. But when there are a variety of female mates to choose from, the male will mate over and over, until he’s completely exhausted. That’s the Coolidge Effect.
Men are wired to want a variety of sexual partners. Porn offers the illusion of an infinite number of sexual partners, which is why it’s so intoxicating for men.
When I heard that, it rang true. The porn I was watching was affecting me in ways I hadn’t considered. I started reading more about the subject, on Wilson’s website, Your Brain on Porn, and the first-person accounts on r/pornfree, a Reddit forum for compulsive porn viewers, and I thought, There’s something to what Wilson is saying.
I only watched porn two or three times a week at this point in my life. I had a wife, a house in the suburbs and three daughters. I didn’t have a lot of time to myself to look at porn. But it still had a hold on me. I looked forward to being alone and being able to watch porn.
Porn had replaced other joys. I used to enjoy music more. I used to enjoy good movies and TV shows. I looked forward to reading a good book. But now, whenever I had a few hours to myself, my first thought was I can watch porn.
What a waste of a life.
I stopped watching porn cold turkey. It was far more difficult than I expected. I started dreaming about porn scenes. If my wife was asleep, I found myself wanting to go into another room and watch porn.
After about a month without porn, my consciousness became clearer. The cravings subsided and I noticed I was more present with my daughters. I had more energy. I took more pleasure from ordinary life.
I made it six months before slipping and watching a porn video. Every time I watched porn, I noticed for a day or two afterward, the imagery would stay with me and I would want to watch it again. After a few days away from porn, the images would fade, and. I would be able to talk to my child without naked women running in my head.
I’m a grown man who knows what actual sex feels like. I have a wife and had a number of girlfriends before that, and yet it was hard for me to stop watching porn. I can only imagine what it’s like for young men growing up now. I’m very moved by the accounts of young men who write that they’re twenty-six years old, they’ve never had a girlfriend and they’ve been watching porn for twelve years and they can’t stop. Guys who chose porn over their wives, until their wives got fed up and left them.
Some of these guys have never had sex without porn playing in the background. They have a long road ahead of them.
Some dads worry that their daughters’ boyfriends will have sex with them. I worry that their boyfriends won’t want to have to sex with them or won’t be able to. I worry my daughters will blame themselves and feel unattractive, when the truth is it has nothing to do with them. It will be because years of porn watching have addled these boys’ minds—and their hearts. My daughters are too young for this discussion right now, but the oldest is entering adolescence and I think about how to broach the subject with her. …
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