Tony is in his 50s and recently did a rough calculation of how much of his life he has spent looking at pornography. “The result was horrifying,” he says. It was eight years. “I can barely think about it. The sense of failure is intense.”

Tony saw his first “hardcore” film on VHS in the 1980s when he was 12. In his 20s, he connected to the internet for the first time, which turned his habit into a “full-blown addiction”. Over the past 30 years, he has just about managed to maintain a double life: he works in a caring profession, is friends with men and women, has had relationships. But there is a part of him he keeps entirely hidden.

“So far, I’ve only told three people in my life about it – two therapists and now you,” he says. “It’s a complete secret from everyone I have ever known. I’m meticulous about covering my tracks, even when in a relationship. My lack of interest in sex with my partner might be the only thing that would cause her to wonder.”

Tony has tried to stop looking at pornography multiple times, but has never managed more than a month without it. He’s tried cutting down, he’s gone cold-turkey – banning himself from masturbating and blocking porn sites. But “the addict brain is exceptionally devious and adept”, he says. He’s also tried therapy, but has found it hard to keep paying for it long-term.

Still, Tony is grateful for one thing: he was young before the internet. “At least I had a normal youth – parties, gigs, adventures with friends. I had girlfriends and a sex life. Boys like me don’t stand a chance now.”

Every statistic related to pornography use in the UK – and globally – is soaring, driven by the ubiquity of mobile phones. About 13.8 million people – a third of all adults using the internet – viewed porn online in May 2023 alone, according to Ofcom. Two-thirds of these were men. While pornography companies don’t report (or acknowledge) statistics on underage viewers, British children, on average, first watch porn at the age of 12. The children’s commissioner for England found in a recent study that much of what young people see is violent and extreme.

Jack is in his 20s and first saw pornography when he was nine. “I was with a group of friends on a school trip. It was a woman giving a blowjob, something I had never been told about in sex education.”

Like many children and teenagers today, porn found Jack before he went looking for it. “It came up through things friends shared, then on flash gaming websites. I saw really bizarre things which evoked both arousal and curiosity. That gradually turned into just arousal and then compulsion grew along with it.”

Soon, the intense stimulation of the pornography he was watching meant he “lost interest in day-to-day life”. It wasn’t so much the time he spent watching porn, but the “hyper intensity” of the content. “Sometimes in a particularly addicted phase I would spend hours watching it each day,” he says. ‘‘But usually it would just be an occasional binge then less use the rest of the time … In terms of how it was affecting me, though? That was not a normal life. The porn stimulus is intense and it leads to desensitisation to the small everyday pleasures that keep us sane and content.”

When Jack started having real-life sexual experiences, “it was very difficult to maintain an erection. Real sex was less intense than the masturbation of a desensitised addict – which is what I was”. Unlike online, “there was no option to click through many possible videos for something new and more stimulating.”

Both Jack and Tony describe themselves as porn addicts. Unlike other behavioural addictions such as gambling and gaming, pornography addiction is not included in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which is compiled by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is instead defined as a compulsive sexual behaviour.

Paula Hall is a psychotherapist who specialises in working with people struggling with their pornography use and has set up a private clinic dedicated to it in London. She has been an addiction therapist for 30 years – and started her career working with people with substance abuse issues. She believes it’s clear that pornography is addictive. “Porn use carries a risk of escalation and that is what hallmarks it for me as an addictive behaviour,” she says. “It’s a condition that causes significant suffering and we desperately need to develop resources for prevention and treatment.”

Peter Saddington is a counsellor with Relate, a charity offering relationship support, who is seeing more people with concerns about their pornography use. “Some people might be masturbating 10 times a day, up to three or four hours a go. They are physically in pain and sleep deprived. I see people who look unwell. The similarities to alcohol [misuse] are very strong … It’s also perceived as more shameful than gambling or alcohol,” he says.

“It’s helpful that it is now recognised as a compulsion by the WHO but we would like to see it classified as an addiction. If it was supported by the NHS, people could ask their GP for help.” As it stands, Saddington believes that shame can be a barrier to accessing help.

“There has been concern that by talking about pornography and sex addiction we are pathologising human sexuality,” says Hall. But, she insists, calling it an addiction is not increasing that sense of shame. “We know that alcohol is linked to violent behaviour, to coercive relationships, to heart disease, but people still enjoy alcohol. So we can acknowledge those potential risks without pathologising recreational porn use.”

Hall is finishing work on a leading study into British pornography habits with Leeds Trinity University. The aim is to help develop an online self-help programme. Out of the 193 people interviewed who felt they could not control their porn use, more than 93% reported struggling with depression. “Very worryingly, more than 40% say that, at times, they feel like ending their life,” says Hall. “In the same way that the gambling industry has been instructed to provide warnings and help problem users, the porn industry needs to do the same.”

Tony says: “I indulge in a compulsive behaviour that I feel totally unable to stop, despite severe negative consequences. I feel like an addict, I emotionally isolate like an addict, and I suffer the consequences like an addict. These websites are specifically designed to target addicts and keep them clicking.”

The algorithms that serve up new content for users “are incredibly powerful”, he says. “They tease out interests and kinks you didn’t know you had … You wouldn’t believe the number of mouse clicks you go through in a session sometimes. It’s not enough to watch the same few videos over again. It’s always more, more, more, new, new, new.”

Tony thinks this has made it impossible for him to commit to a relationship. “Porn tricked my brain into thinking I could have an endless supply of sexual partners. How does one partner compete with that? The version of me that isn’t porn addicted might have made a good husband and devoted father, but I became sexually bored and I always hid my addiction – I was never authentic.”

Pornography is often a factor in relationship breakdown, says Saddington. “For a lot of the guys I see, their partners have brought them in because they found out about secret porn viewing. Or they have become so addicted that they started watching it at work. So they need to change urgently – their world is imploding.” None of the pornography websites I approached for this piece wanted to comment.

Gunter De Win is a urologist who specialises in adolescent and paediatric urology and, each month, travels from his base of Belgium to London, where he is a consultant at University College hospital.

“Three years ago I started seeing more and more young guys coming in with erectile dysfunction related to issues with porn,” he says. “They need pornography to climax with a partner or to maintain an erection during masturbation. And they may have to watch many videos before they find one that turns them on. As a scientist, I wanted to unravel this.”

He is now part of a research group attempting to study the impact of pornography on young men’s sex lives. But, as his most recent report states, it is difficult to assess the impact that porn consumption has had on young men with erectile dysfunction as “it is more or less impossible to find a control group that is not using pornography from a young age and at the same time is not morally against its consumption”.

Teenage boys getting “performance anxiety is absolutely normal”, he says. However, De Win has seen young men concerned that they lose an erection during foreplay – which again, “is all normal”. But by watching porn so young, “they don’t understand the basics”.

De Win believes more research is needed into the impact of widely available pornography in the digital age. “Too much of the research on porn is biased either for or against,” he says.

Cold-turkey approaches such as NoFap, a US-based peer support network that encourages abstinence from pornography and masturbation as a recovery method, can have mixed results for young people, he says. “For some, going cold-turkey can be beneficial, but I see boys who end up with no sexual interest at all, which is also bad for their wellbeing.”

His solution is vastly improved sexual literacy – in sex education in schools and in the medical community – that does not condemn all pornography and masturbation as bad. “Introducing shame and guilt has consequences,” he says. For example, “if someone has a religious background and sees porn as taboo, then maybe this creates shame”. Shame, in turn, means that honest conversations around pornography do not happen.

“What I think might have steered me away from compulsive behaviour around porn might have been frank conversations with my parents,” says Tony. “My mother was extremely kind and caring but with an inability to communicate emotion. So maybe some of my tendency towards emotional isolation is just that I am my mother’s son? It’s hard for me to be sure what is really me and what is me corrupted by porn use.”

For now, nature is stepping in to help. “I’m in my 50s and my testosterone levels are dropping significantly, so that’s been a blessing and I am looking less at porn. I’m thinking now about getting help again,” he says. “But it feels like standing at the foot of Everest looking up at the summit.”

• Some names have been changed.

• This article was amended on 2 July 2024 to correct the spelling of Peter Saddington’s surname.

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