Inside Addiction to Pornography
Posted by Kurt Smith, MFT, AFC on Sun, Oct 31, 2010
Part 1 of 2
Are you a little curious? Want to look inside addiction to pornography?
If you're a woman, you most likely are more than just a little curious. You could be searching for all the information you can get your hands on so you can try to understand why your man has an addiction to pornography.
If you're a man, you're probably just a little curious how your addiction to pornography compares to how other men deal with pornography.
At Guy Stuff we work with addiction to pornography every day. We help men overcome pornography addiction and help women learn to deal with it. Just for clarification, women can struggle with pornography addiction too, but as you'll see below it looks a lot different for most women than it does for men. However, at Guy Stuff our work with addiction to pornography is primarily with men.
WHAT'S ADDICTION TO PORNOGRAPHY LOOK LIKE? Good question. Let's start to look inside pornography addiction with a couple of real-life examples. All of the excerpts that follow are from the article Porn Addiction Destroys Relationships, Lives published in the San Francisco Chronicle.
- A 50-year-old married physician views Internet pornography for hours at home, masturbating five to seven times a day, then begins surfing porn sites at the office and risks destroying his career.
- A woman spends four to six hours a day in Internet chat rooms and having cybersex, and eventually starts arranging to meet online strangers for casual sex in the real world.
- A man spends many hours a day downloading porn, filling multiple hard drives, and devotes a separate computer just to pornography.
- A married couple view pornographic movies together as part of their loving relationship, but the husband starts spending more time watching and less time with his wife, who feels left behind and rejected.
You can see from these examples that pornography addiction doesn't just involve men. Also, like any addiction it can start innocently enough, such as the couple trying to improve their sex life, but it can quickly get out of control.
HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE A PORNOGRAPHY ADDICTION? Specific numbers are hard to come by, but here are some statistics that can give some us idea.
- The National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity estimates that 6 to 8 percent of Americans - or 18 million to 24 million people - are sex addicts. And 70 percent of sex addicts report having a problem with online sexual behavior.
- ComScore Media Metrix, a company that measures Internet usage, reports that more than 70 percent of men age 18 to 34 visit a pornographic site in a typical month.
- In 2008, Nielsen Online reported that one-fourth of employees use the Internet to visit porn sites during their workday. Online porn sites report that highest usage is between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
This starts to give you a little bit of a look inside addiction to pornography. Obviously there's more to it than this. In the next article we'll look deeper into understanding the causes of pornography addiction.
Learn More about Addiction to Pornography from Guy Stuff:
* This is the first article of two on addiction to pornography. In the next article we'll look at the causes of pornography addiction. Sign-up for our Blog on the right side of this page so you don't miss out on the secrets in the next article.