From the age of five to twenty, I was addicted to pornography. If you read no further or take nothing else from this testimony, please, please know that there is hope, there is healing, and there is freedom from addiction because as I write this, I am over two and a half years sober from porn and masturbation. Honestly, I can’t help but smile as I write that because I never, ever, thought I would be free, so if that’s you, take heart! 

It can happen for you because it happened for me. 

But first, I have to make clear that I was hardly someone you would pick out as suffused with sexual perversity. I mean, in high school, I was voted “most likely to be a nun” by a margin of over a hundred, if that tells you anything about my perceived sexuality. On the outside, I was near squeaky clean. But looks can be deceiving, and from the stories that have been shared with me, I know that my story is not unique. It is shared by hundreds, thousands, probably millions of others who feel too ashamed to come clean. 

I hope one day they’ll share their stories, but for now, you’re stuck with me.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

My descent into the world of pornography began with just one click. One wayward search on the internet – one misstep – an accident, and that was it. When I first confessed to my parents two years ago, they were stunned. My dad took the news especially hard, because he believed he’d taken every precaution, using parental controls to censor those ends of the internet. And yet, before I’d walked into my first day of first grade, I’d seen pornography. 

Porn is, in point of fact, one of my earliest memories, and the fifteen years I spent immersed in it were both formative and profoundly, inescapably damaging. Frankly, the scars haven’t fully faded, and they may never be completely erased. But I’m reckoning, and I’m healing, and that’s good enough for me.

Now, you may very well be rolling your eyes, thinking, seriously? How bad could watching porn really be? In fact, isn’t porn a great, good thing? A boon to lonely singles, enterprising, sex-positive individuals, and the Las Vegas economy?

It wasn’t for me. 

It wasn’t for me. 

And today, I’d like to make the case that watching porn is actually profoundly, inescapably damaging for everybody by virtue of the fact that it does two devastating things.

It makes you a slave.

And it makes you a master.

At least, that’s what it did to me. 

If you talk to anyone who has watched pornography for any length of time, but especially those, like me, who have given it years of their life, very quickly you will realize that porn is powerful. Extraordinarily so. In fact, studies have shown that it actually rewires your brain through the stimulated release of certain chemicals. It’s like a drug that way, so when people say they just can’t walk away, believe them. Believe me. 

See, more than once during my fifteen-year odyssey with pornography, I’d tried to stop. It never worked. My most determined efforts were never enough. The longest I ever made it was a month, and then I’d fall right back in. Porn was a drug I just couldn’t quit, even as I told myself almost daily that I’d take just one… more… hit.

Now you may have never drunk from the bitter cup of addiction. You may not know what it’s like to be shackled by what feels like an all-consuming affliction. If that’s the case, God be praised! Because for over a decade of my life, I was riddled with anxiety, self-loathing, and shame.

And I didn’t understand. 

How could something that felt so good be making me feel so bad? 

How could the porn that I was enjoying be making me feel so sad? 

Why couldn’t I walk away? 

How could I be so disciplined in every other area of my life, but with porn and masturbation, I was always losing the fight?

In fact, the harder I tried, the tighter the chains seemed to wind until they’d so ensnared my body and befogged my mind that I’d become a slave. I was daily watching and doing what I’d come to hate, but more than that, almost against my will, my tastes had begun to change.

Anyone who’s ever watched porn knows it is a slippery slide. You might start with “normal” sex, but if you linger on porn sites, “normal” very quickly gives way to things I don’t want to describe. Extreme is an understatement of the most generous kind, and I know because for fifteen years, that’s exactly what I put before my eyes. While I’d started with “normal” sex, I quickly began to titrate up, and after fifteen years, you can imagine where I ended up. 

But in case you can’t, let me be clear: I’d left “normal” behind before I left elementary. By middle school, even extreme was becoming banal to me. And by high school, I’d gone so far afield that in order to reach that “high,” I would have to look at things that made me feel like I was dying inside. 

I wish that was a lie.

But gangbangs, rape “fantasies,” beatings, and countless other things had become normal to me, and were it not for God’s direct intervention, I don’t know if I would have ever gotten free.

See, on top of being a slave to that high, I’d gotten used to living a lie. Porn, I believed, would be with me until the day I died, and as long as I was squeaky clean on the outside, I thought that was alright. In brief, I’d given up the fight.

And then in November of 2018, having been cajoled by a friend into attending a conference on sexual integrity in Princeton, New Jersey, I sat in a presentation where Verily Magazine contributor, Mary Rose Somarriba said one, single line:

“Almost ninety percent of porn depicts violence against women.”

It changed my life.

Truly, it was like a lighting rod went through my mind, and while it would be almost four months until porn and masturbation lost their hold on my life, with those words, I once again started to fight because with that one sentence, she opened my eyes. 

It seems cheesy to say I “saw the light,” so I won’t. And in actuality, that wasn’t what happened. Because I didn’t “see the light.” What I saw was the darkness that is porn for the first time in my life. 

“Almost ninety percent of porn depicts violence against women.” 

If you google that statistic, “experts” will tell you it’s a lie. They’ll tell you that that number is way too high. I disagree. 

Because when I heard that statistic three years ago, the first thing I thought was 

That seems too low.

And I would know. 

See, I’d been watching porn since before the first grade. I had thousands of hours worth of pornographic material inside my brain. I’d sat in silence and masturbated to violence and told myself it was okay, so I don’t give a flying fig what those so-called “experts” say. What I know is that for fifteen years, I got off on women’s degradation, their humiliation, their pain. I’d been asleep at the screen, and with Mrs. Somarriba’s words, I was finally awake. 

Put another, more famous way, 

“I once was blind, but now I see.”

And let me tell you, seeing wrecked me. 

Because after fifteen years, I could suddenly see that the chains that held me bound didn’t end with me. They extended down into my phone and computer screen. They wrapped around the men and women that I held in my hands, on demand, who, with a few clicks, were mine to command.

Is that not a slave?

Now, I can already hear the objections being raised,

“But they want it! They like it! They’re getting paid.”

Tell me, how much money would you take to be slapped in the face?

To be gangbanged?

To be raped? 

Because the fact remains that the rate of abuse in the porn industry is extraordinarily high, and if you think for one moment you’ve watched “extreme” pornography and not seen actual rape, then you have bought a lie. 

For me, with the amount of porn I’ve seen, it is all but a guarantee that more than once in my life as I told myself, “They want it. They’re getting paid,” the women that I watched were actually getting raped. 

They were in pain. 

Because of me.

Because of the things I wanted to see.

I kept them in chains. 

It was my eyes and clicks that demanded their degradation, their humiliation, their pain. 

That is a stain that nothing but the blood of Christ can wipe away.

Because for fifteen years, I wasn’t just a slave, but a master–a victim and a victimizer.

That was me. 

That was me. 

That’s what porn made out of me. 

So you see… porn is not a great, good thing, a boon to lonely singles, enterprising, sex-postive individuals, and the Las Vegas economy. 

Porn is slavery. 

Porn is slavery. 

I once was blind, but now I see. 

Can’t you?

Can’t we?

If not… I don’t know what more I can say. I’ve been as honest as I can be in this testimony in the hopes that at long last the rattling shackles of the addicted and pained screams of so many women might finally be heard above the crowing din of porn’s advocates, but I’m not an idiot. I know that most will brush my words away. They enjoy porn and so people like me can go right out and hang. But I hope and pray that even just one person might read my words and come awake. That they might see the darkness of porn which took me fifteen years to face. 

If that’s you, I’ve got nothing left to say but shake the shame, share your story, and break the chains.

If you want to see my spoken word testimony/slam poetry, it is here.