The Las Vegas Porn Show is coming up tomorrow and it started a train of thought for me about WHY PORN? It was an addiction that consumed me for 24 years. So the question – WHY? When did it have a tight grip on me? When did I hit my bottom? What lives were marked by my addiction? How did it start?
I grew up feeling alone and isolated and spent a large amount of time by myself and at the age of 10 found some magazines that sparked an addiction that began to rule my life even at that early age. I thought “Hey, that is what a woman is supposed to be” Everyone looked so glamorous, the men in the pages of the magazines seemed to really like these women and I wanted to be liked by someone. Because of the large amount of time alone I spent most of my hours creating a fantasy world in my head to help with the loneliness I felt. By the time I got to college I had full blown addictions in hand and created wreckage around me.
I went to college as a theatre major and there I tried to fill this void I felt with excessive partying, and it didn’t work. I was at every party, every weekend, and getting into numerous situations I thought would make me feel better, but was lonelier than ever. I got married in college, divorced him, pursued a relationship with someone else that in turn caused damage in his marriage, and had started drinking heavily, and after my sophomore year I dropped out of school and went to North Carolina. Six months later I entered the world of adult entertainment.. I sought out approval from everyone around me, and really used people in whatever way I could. I met my 2nd husband who at the time was married and I began an affair with him. Shortly after, he divorced his wife and then married me. By this time I had an addiction to alcohol, pornography and cocaine. I turned to other men in the middle of my marriage and began to have a series of affairs. As a result of that I became pregnant twice and had two abortions so he wouldn’t find out. I had started to go to Adult bookstores and massage parlors to be wanted by whoever was there. So by the age of 24, I had destroyed my marriage, and asked him for a divorce.
To escape the world I had created around me- I fled to Mexico City and continued to feed my addictions. All the things I thought would give me comfort didn’t and I spiraled out of control. I began a massive string of encounters with men and women that left me alone in hotels waking up not knowing who I had been with the night before, waking up with multiple partners around me, and trying to convince people to watch porn with me. After being in Mexico for a year and putting myself in numerous dangerous places looking for cocaine I found myself one early morning on the side of the road after having been raped and thrown out of a car by 3 police officers and a taxi driver. That week on July 15 1996 a friend of mine called a twelve step program for me and I became sober from drugs and alcohol and have been clean for the past 13 years. Now with all this sobriety I tried to become the perfect person. I would try to have “healthy” relationships with men, I thought that healthy meant living together, and trying to not sleep with other people yet all the while I was stripping and watching up to 5 hours of porn a day on 8 channels. Anything that I thought would make myself feel better I did. I didn’t think I was hurting anyone by “taking care of myself” to try to not act out with other people.
I started booking entertainers into Mexico while I was dancing. Pulling in other women to do what I had done. I became a leader in helping people step into brokenness. I told myself that I had a life everyone wanted, people sought after me, that I had tons of friends so I must be happy, but for some reason that I couldn’t put my finger on, I was sad. I still felt lonely. I felt something missing. In 2002 I thought some time away would do me some good. I went to England for the summer with a friend. I flew back to South Beach, Miami and was at the Internext Porn Convention and looked around me and was so tired. I remember being outside the hotel and a guy was standing on the side of the street protesting porn with a sign in his hand that said John 3:16. I started talking about him and laughing at him with the people I was with. I remember thinking, “I bet he never gets to have sex.” By this time I had become a huge supporter of all things related to the porn industry and began looking at starting a pornography production company with a friend of mine. At the end of the convention, I packed my bags and went down by the pool before I flew back to Mexico. And all of a sudden I started to cry. I had no idea how my life had gotten to where it was – I felt TOTALLY ALONE even though I was surrounded by people.
Guest blogger – Sandra Collins (x-stripper, trafficker, and porn addict)
So…Why Did YOU Choose Porn?