A woman has revealed how she became dependent on porn after discovering it in primary school – but she has since turned celibate.
Courtney Daniella Boateng, 26, discovered adult websites when she was nine years old – and was soon visiting them daily.
However, now in her 20s and engaged, Courtney has overcome her unhealthy dependency on porn and has turned celibate, committing to abstinence until after her wedding.
She told the BBC: ‘I would always find myself fighting whether I could actually stop and it would literally just leave me feeling so powerless.’
Courtney was very young when she first discovered porn, something she thinks was partially to do with the lack of proper sex education available to her at school.
She told the broadcaster that her classes were heavily focussed on the biology of reproduction, rather than the experience of sex itself.
‘I ended up searching for sex videos,’ she said. ‘It was a very wide door that had just blown open into a whole new world.’
After visiting the sites sporadically, Courtney soon found herself watching porn every day.
Courtney Daniella Boateng, 26, discovered adult websites when she was nine years old – and was soon visiting them daily
‘That was when I started to realise this is having a negative effect on me because I’m doing this way too often.’
Statistics estimate that 70 per cent of men 18 to 34 years old visit a porn site in a typical month – far less than is found in women.
Young people, especially teen boys who make up the largest consumer group of porn, can access explicit sexual content with relative ease, especially given online porn makes up 12 per cent of all internet sites.
A survey from the Indiana University Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction reported nine percent of porn watchers wanted to stop but found they couldn’t.
When people, primarily men, notice themselves withdrawing from their partners and losing satisfaction in sexual relationships, becoming desensitised and needing to consume more extreme content, and setting aside responsibilities in order to dedicate more time to porn, it may be a sign of a porn addiction – despite many leading authorities in psychology and addiction research maintaining it is not a real condition.
However, now in her 20s and engaged, Courtney has overcome her unhealthy dependency on porn and has turned celibate, committing to abstinence until after her wedding
While the issue is more common among men, one in six women have also reported struggling with a porn addiction.
The American Psychological Association, the country’s foremost authority on advancing mental health research and the largest professional organisation for psychologists, does not recognise the habit as an addiction.
Additionally, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the authoritative guide for diagnosing mental disorders used all over the world and authored by the APA, does not recognise porn addiction as an official diagnosis.
The reason is rooted in ongoing debate about what is at the root of a ‘porn addiction.’
One camp of psychologists, including Dr Vincent Egan and Dr Reena Parmar from the University of Leicester, say uncontrollable porn consumption may be more of a compulsion than an actual addiction.