Young, female... and a porn addict

A worrying number of young women are using porn regularly — and they’re more likely to get hooked than their male counterparts

CONSIDER the profile of what you may regard as a typical porn addict. They’d be male for sure. Right? Wrong. Just last week the Workplace Relations Commission here upheld a decision by a company to sack a female receptionist for accessing hard core porn websites at work.

The company, which provides services to children and families, stated that the websites depicted violent scenes of non-consensual sex acts and the abduction of girls. It may be shocking, but while it’s accepted that women watch porn — at least one in three visitors to such sites are estimated to be female — it’s less recognised that some find it difficult to stop.

And the sad reality is that, just like with men, being bombarded with degrading and unrealistic depictions of sex can have a detrimental effect on women’s love lives, leaving them feeling empty, not empowered.

It’s a situation Emma Turner found herself in. A classic ‘good girl’, she won prizes for her academic achievements throughout school before being voted deputy head girl. Now as she faced a disciplinary panel at her university, she was struggling to think how on earth she was going to explain

this to her proud parents. The reason? Moments earlier, Emma had stared in abject horror at a document listing every website she had visited on her laptop in her halls of residence since starting her degree.

It spanned ten sheets of A4, and there, highlighted in an orange pen, were all the pornographic sites she’d visited. Emma, now 24, cringes as she recalls: ‘I’d been caught red-handed by the IT department. All I wanted was for the ground to swallow me up.

‘I’d never kept track of the hours I spent looking at porn. Now, here was the evidence right in front of me. In my shock, I could half hear it being explained that it was in the contract of my hall of residence that I didn’t use the university computer network to use or download any pornographic material.

‘Just as I was expecting to hear the words telling me I was out, the Warden said: “Of course, we know it wasn’t you. Do you know how any of the male students might have got your log-in and password? You realise it’s illegal to share them, don’t you?” ’

ALTHOUGH Emma couldn’t believe her luck at getting off the hook, it confirmed her darkest fears: there must be something terribly wrong with her, because women don’t get addicted to pornography, do they? Only now, six years after the near-miss that almost derailed her education, can Emma, who works in TV production, see the effect porn had on her life.

Brought up the youngest of three children, her curiosity was piqued when she stumbled across porn while researching an art project when she was 15 — but even more so when she borrowed a copy of Fifty Shades Of Grey.

‘I found myself turned on by the descriptions of sex and started searching online for clips,’ she says. ‘Until then, I’d thought porn was something teenage boys used. No one would ever have suspected me because I was a goody two shoes.’

When she went to university to study languages, Emma’s porn use turned into a habit. ‘With no parents to hide from, and with a lock on my door, I could look at it as often as I wanted,’ she admits. ‘I found myself looking at it when I woke up at night to help me get to sleep and two or three times during the day.’

Indeed, it seems women experience the same pattern of exposure and addiction to hardcore images as men, according to Gary Wilson, author of Your Brain On Porn.

‘Since sexual arousal releases the highest levels of (feel-good chemicals) dopamine and opioids, the potential for sexual conditioning, or even porn addiction, is possible for both sexes.’

And it’s increasingly being recognised that women may have a higher risk than men of addiction. This is because, as women who have shared their experiences with Wilson have pointed out, they don’t need as long a recovery period after climaxing as men. As a result, women have reported going on ‘porn binges’. While some therapists hear women say the violence of porn makes them too afraid to have sex, others like Emma found the exposure made her highly sexed. ‘After I started watching more porn it was all about onenight stands. Sex became like starring in my own porn film in my mind.’ What at first seemed liberating, started to feel soulless, says Emma. ‘The men loved that I was up for all the things they’d seen. After a year or so, the novelty wore off. I realised, here I was, an educated young woman, behaving for free like porn stars who were paid, or forced, to pretend they were enjoying it.’ Indeed, the main difference in the way men and women use porn seems to be how women feel afterwards. According to social worker and church pastor Karin Cooke, who has spoken to young women like Emma for her book, Dangerous Honesty: Stories Of Women Who Have Escaped The Destructive Power Of Pornography, many feel desperate because they think they are struggling with porn alone. Karin says: ‘It’s a taboo subject. Women feel isolated and have no one to talk to. It can start to dominate their thinking because they live with the constant fear they will be found out.

‘Porn provides an escape, an immediate hit of pleasure. It usually starts as an avoidance technique, either for failure, depression, loneliness, stress or boredom. But after using porn, those problems haven’t gone, and now women are also dealing with the shame, guilt and discomfort. And so they turn to porn again.’

Yet psychosexual counsellor Krystal Woodbridge insists that, in moderation and within a loving relationship, porn can benefit some women. ‘For some, it enhances their intimacy with their partners. It’s something they can do together,’ she says.

However, for those who are not in secure partnerships, porn can be destructive and dangerous, teaching young women to comply with acts they see on screen.

In one academic study, it was found that nearly 90 per cent of 304 random scenes showed ‘physical aggression, principally spanking, gagging, and slapping’, while half contained ‘verbal aggression, primarily name-calling’.

This is particularly disturbing when you consider how Swedish research recently discovered that, like teenage boys, teenage girls use pornography as their principal source of sex education. It found that a third of 16-year-olds browsed porn websites, 43 per cent fantasised about mimicking what they saw, while 39 per cent had gone on to try them.

It’s meant that violent sex acts have become the norm, at the expense of more tender gestures. Angela Clifton, a sex and relationship psychotherapist, says: ‘What it’s not about is love, teasing, sensuality, massage, eroticism or emotion.’

The human cost of trying to live up to ‘porn sex’ is obvious when you speak to young women like Philippa Bates, a 20-year-old student. Her last boyfriend began turning porn on during sex, saying it would give them ideas.

‘It got to the point where I felt like I could have been anyone. I started to feel degraded,’ she says. ‘I also felt that whatever I did for my boyfriend was never going to be enough.’

PROFESSOR Gail Dines, author of Pornland, says the more porn girls watch, the more coercion features in their love lives. ‘It grooms girls into accepting male sexual mistreatment as normal,’ she says. ‘Women don’t become more sexual or liberated. They get more open to porn sex in which they don’t get any pleasure in return. It becomes all about pleasing the man.’

Since she left university two years ago, Emma has been single and intends to stay so until she finds a meaningful relationship.

‘I felt such a freak. Now it’s a relief to see other women saying: “I’ve been to and come back from that place, too.”’

SOME names have been changed