Many people contact Fight the New Drug to share their personal stories about how porn has affected their life or the life of a loved one. We consider these personal accounts very valuable because, while the science and research is powerful within its own right, personal accounts from real people seem to really hit home about the damage that pornography does to real lives.
This story shows the realities of what the next generation is facing with porn, sexting, and social pressures of acting like there's no problem with getting caught up in it all. But as it turns out, this 'harmless' part of relationships isn't actually so harmless.
My story begins when I was 13 years old.
I was hanging out with older friends who started talking about sex, and me being a curious 13-year-old, went home later that day and looked up the things that they were talking about. Nothing too explicit, just some words I didn’t know. But that’s where it started.
Fast forward to the summer before my 9th-grade year (currently, I’m in 10th grade) and I had gotten my first high school girlfriend. Life was good and fine, until she started talking sexually to me. I didn’t know what to do so I started to talk sexually back to her, which led to me asking her for nudes, which was the worst mistake of my life. It destroyed her life, and it destroyed mine.
Related: “Send Nudes”: Sexting Is The New Normal For Students Everywhere, Research Finds
It made her lose all self-confidence in herself, and it made me feel like I had the right to get nudes from anyone at any time. Doing that made me feel empowered over women, which is not an okay feeling to have.
After that incident, and after hearing my friends talk about porn, I decided to try out what porn was like. I got instantly hooked. There was no separating me from porn after that, and soon after, it could show in my health, in my mood, and in my grades. I would never have admitted I was addicted, but the fact that I couldn’t go more than 12 hours without consuming it said otherwise.
The more I consumed porn, the more I asked girls for nudes, and the cycle continued. I felt like I couldn’t have enough, and that I deserved all of this—I felt entitled to it. Porn ruined me. It was all that I could focus on, but it gave me no motivation to do anything else and it gave me feelings of depression. That year that I watched porn was the saddest year of my life. The only happiness I had was the few minutes while viewing porn. No other happiness came.
I moved from Texas to Arizona in mid-June, and by August I had stopped viewing porn completely, and I haven’t looked at it since. My life has done a complete 180, and I’ve become happy all of the time, I care about how others feel, and I respect women. Porn not only ruined my life but it made me feel like I was trapped, like that was the only thing I could do. I was purely addicted and it ruined me.
But now, I’m free. And you can be, too.
–B.
This Story is Real Life
Stories like this remind us why we exist to raise awareness on the harmful effects of porn, not only for consumers, but also their relationships.
Research shows that sexters are significantly more likely to consume pornography than non-sexters. Are you surprised?
While porn is often called “adult entertainment,” many of its consumers are well under the legal age, like B in the story above. [1] In fact, the majority of teens are getting at least some of their sex ed from porn, whether they mean to or not. [2] And just like cigarette commercials show healthy people puffing away instead of the cancer-causing reality, porn is offering a completely warped idea of what partners, sex, and relationships are really like. [3] Is that really the best resource for them?
Not only that, but studies have found that when people engage in an ongoing pattern of “self-concealment,”—which is when they do things they’re not proud of and keep them a secret, like what B did—it not only hurts their relationships and leaves them feeling lonely, but also makes them more vulnerable to serious psychological issues. [4] For both male and female porn consumers, their habit is often accompanied by problems with anxiety, body-image issues, poor self-image, relationship problems, insecurity, and depression. [5] How is that healthy, harmless entertainment?
We fight because we believe every person deserves to know the risks and harms of developing a porn habit. In the end, if everyone understood the facts before clicking, we believe they’d opt for reality over toxic fantasy.
