When I use the term “porn addict”, is the first image that springs to your mind a man or teenage youth glued to a computer screen?
If so, think again. One in three visitors to pornographic websites are now women – and as many as one in five say they are hooked, according to a study by the Internet Filter Software Review.
While it’s accepted that women are watching – and enjoying – porn more and more, it’s less recognised that some are also finding it hard to stop. In fact according to the porn counselors I have spoken to there is little difference in the way the genders become sucked in. There is the same pattern of exposure, addiction, and desensitization to increasingly hard core images.
Like male addicts, women can also become isolated by their habit – or find it impossible to achieve orgasm any other way. Some will end up straying into risky behaviour – like cybersex. But if anything, the women are even more isolated than men.
After all, the received thinking is that women are less visually stimulated than men, and only turned on by sex as as part of a meaningful relationship. It means that the main difference between male and female men porn addicts is how much more guilty women feel. It’s seen as something that guy’s do. For men, porn has traditionally been seen as a normal part of growing up. Traditionally, girls are not supposed to want to even sneak a peak.
I believe this is what accounts for the real sense of despair and loneliness of the women who get caught up in porn. After all, whatever material they are attracted to, it’s hard not to also notice the demeaning treatment of women forced to gag on penises, or being sprayed with semen – or gagged or tied up as they are penetrated by two or even three men at a time.
This conflict is deeply disturbing to many women who think they are liberated, yet are getting involved in an industry that routinely humiliates their own gender in way we would not what to see animals treated. Maybe that that’s part of the reason that every women addicted to porn believes she is the only one struggling with the issue. They feel more freak-like, more in despair, more alone – and even less able to seek help.
As Crystal Renaud, of Dirty Girls Ministries, one of the few former female porn addicts to come forward and share her story, says; “Porn and sexual addiction has always been referred to as, “a man’s problem” “But for women it’s an unspoken struggle. “We have to give them the opportunity to say: “Me too.”
Editor’s note: Parents, I hope you will recognize the need to protect both your sons and daughters from online pornography. For help, check out our parent resources here. Tanith Carey is author of “Where Has My Little Gone? – How to Protect your Daughter from Growing up Too Soon”, available on Amazon.com price $14.95.