The damaging effect of pornography addiction cannot be fully emphasized, as a teenager has been battling the habit since she was eight years old.
The victim, Rebecca
A woman, 19, has been battling a porn addiction since she was just eight and says an early desire for ‘vanilla’ p*rn that eventually turned hardcore led to a string of abusive and violent relationships.
Rebecca has spoken of her 11-year addiction to pornography which she says she first started watching when she saw a movie where a young girl had been kidnapped.
Rebecca, who only wanted to be referred to by her first name, said she was confused by the ‘deep feeling’ the movie brought, and went searching for that feeling again, the now 19-year-old told Tom Tilley for Australians on Porn, to air on Monday at 9.30pm on ABC 2.
'When I first started watching porn, I would just watch kind of I guess “normal” or “vanilla” p*rn, just heterosexual, just run of the mill,’ Rebecca told the ABC.
‘And then as I got older it started becoming more violent, more aggressive and demeaning, I guess. I would watch it kind of multiple times a day and I felt like I couldn’t stop.
‘I think I definitely lost control of my sexuality watching the really violent porn and things like bestiality.’
Rebecca said her porn addiction escalated by the time she was 16-years-old when relationships turned violent. She began to fit the submissive role she saw women portrayed as in pornography, she said, and began asking partners to choke her which they were ‘always more than willing to do’.
Because of what she’d seen, Rebecca said she thought it was normal for relationships to be abusive, and that she’d been sexually assaulted ‘several times’ by her partners.
‘Looking back now, a 16-year-old shouldn’t have been engaging in really violent sex where there wasn’t a huge amount of respect or love involved,’ Rebecca said.
‘Retrospectively I wish I’d never seen it.’
Still today, the 19-year-old is battling her addiction and visits a psychologist in the hopes of one day enjoying sex without violence.
‘I just would like to have a respectful, equal relationship,’ Rebecca said. ‘And a life where I feel good about myself and my sexuality and I can engage in sex in a really healthy, respectful way.'