Addicted to Pornography

by
Dick Clarke, North Wales

London in the 1960's... The London I Grew Up In

This eventful period of time is affectionately called the 'swinging sixties'. Along with a multitude of other young people, I didn't realise until years later that our morals and our culture had been 'swinging' in the wrong direction and that we had swung with it!

Sex drugs and rock and roll were the main pursuits of young people. There was a breaking away from what they felt were the shackles of the past.
The Vietnam War was widely reported in the newspapers and, for the first time, on T.V. Young people wanted to show they had an opinion about it and took to the streets of London to demonstrate. Rebellion was in the air and people voiced their disgust at the American government sending their 'young boys' to go and die for a cause they could not identify with. Protest marches, sit - ins and mass rallies were all common occurrences.
A well-known slogan of that period, 'Make love not war' was the rallying call of young people. The now legendary Woodstock music festival in the U.S.A. showed the world that young people wanted a different world to live in than the one they had inherited.
'Flower power' was the new ideal. 'Free love' was also a new concept. Loosely translated it meant you should have the right to sleep with anyone you wanted to if it felt like 'the right thing to do'.

The music scene at that time helped fuel this new way of thinking. There were many new role models for youth to look up to. Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, just to name a few. Some of these 'stars' had been involved in drugs and scandal, extra marital affairs and so on. They were often idolised by the younger generation of which many followed their example. Protest songs aimed at the governments of the day were played over the radio and on T.V. Bob Dylan's song, ' The times they are a changin' caught the mood of how young people were feeling.

Boundaries were pushed to the limits in the literary world too. Censorship became a key issue. The infamous 'Oz' magazine, pornographic in content, often ended up in the hands of schoolchildren. Though the publishers fought a high court battle to continue to publish it, Mary Whitehouse, a staunch campaigner for viewers and listeners and a thorn in the flesh of the pro pornography campaigners challenged them in court with the charge that this was obscene material under the obscenities act. The publishers were found guilty and jailed. New 'glamour' magazines came onto the market, Playboy, Penthouse and Mayfair. The image these magazines promoted was a kind of 'current affairs with sex'. The real message was that women were there to be used for the pleasure and gratification of men. Pornography became a multi-million pound industry in a very short time.

School & Work

It was in this climate of confused moral standards that I attended secondary school in London. I believe it was there that the seeds of my addiction to pornography were sown. Some of my friends always managed to get hold of glossy girlie magazines and we would look at them in the playground, the boy's toilets and on the bus going home from school. These were in abundant supply and with our hormones running riot as twelve and thirteen year olds, we almost ate them for breakfast!

It wasn't until after I left school that I came across hard core pornography. My sister's boyfriend handed the first hard -core picture I saw to me! My normal use of pornography as a school leaver though was 'soft-core'. However, both are addictive and both do the same amount of harm to the mind. It is a deception to believe otherwise.
When I started work, I had money to spend. I would look out for any shop that sold second hand magazines. Usually these were seedy little places and I would watch over my shoulder to make sure that none of my friends, or anybody I knew, was around before I went in. I spent long hours in these places and quite a bit of money even though I didn't earn much as an apprentice butchers boy.

An altered view

What I didn't realise in my youth was the effect this had on my mind. These soft porn magazines changed my view of women. Previously, I had no problem. I respected women. But now I viewed them as objects of sexual desire, on show for men's gratification. What I saw and read in these magazines portrayed women, as wanting only one thing and that was sex. The poses and the facial expressions encouraged the readers to think that they were positively asking for it. This is the big delusion of pornography; seeing women or men as objects to be used and not as sensitive human beings. Pornography changes the way you think. Even the shame of my mother finding magazines under my pillow didn't shame me enough to stop. Little did I know, I was well on the way to addiction.

Bad Experiences

I had my first sexual encounter with a woman when I was sixteen years old on a New Years Eve. She was six years older than I was and the experience stayed in my mind for a long time to come. It was a bad experience. As a sixteen-year-old I wasn't fully developed. I don't think she meant to be hurtful, but what she said about my physical size had a lasting effect on my mind and affected a number of relationships for years to come. It also drove me deeper into pornography. The fantasy was better than the reality and I used the fantasy more and more to help me escape the hurt and inadequacy I felt inside.

Drugs, Sex & Life At Sea

In 1970, I joined the Merchant Navy. Up to that time I had not taken any drugs. I knew about the drug scene as some of my friends in London had jacked up with speed and smoked cannabis, but I'd always steered away from it as it scared me at the time. However, most young guys on board the ships I sailed on were into drugs and it was almost impossible to belong to this peer group if you didn't use them. We used to 'score' (purchase drugs) in Southampton to last us until we got some more abroad. When I was on the South African run with the Union Castle Line, we used to buy LSD in Britain to take over and sell to the young white, South African people we knew in Cape Town. They in turn would supply us with large quantities of 'Grass' (or pot as the straight's called it) which came down the coast from Durban. This was very potent stuff that had been dipped in opium and we smoked a lot of it in clay pipes. It can cause short-term memory loss and poor concentration as well as the usual paranoia. I am still suffering the effects of it today. Even my own teenage kids call me 'The space cadet', which means being up in the clouds when people are talking to me! I have to work hard at keeping myself focused on the conversations I have with people.

I spent ten weeks on the QE2 doing the New York trip. I knew two guys on board who were into speed and amphetamines. When they had no more left, they got so desperate that they stole morphine from the lifeboats. Another two guys on one of the Union Castle ships were heroin addicts. When they ran out of stuff they would shoot anything into themselves including contact 400, and whisky. They stole from other crewmembers (an unforgivable crime amongst the crew!). One thing I learned about drugs above all else is that they bring out the selfish nature in a person. I never touched drugs, which needed injecting; I saw them destroy too many friends. Given time though I probably would have done. But drugs and drink on board ship, which I thought helped suppress my low self-esteem, left a legacy of damage.

It wasn't long after I joined that I was introduced to hard-core porno. It was so easy to come by in the navy, as passenger liners often visited the Scandinavian countries where hard core is freely available. I sampled almost every kind of perversion in these books. From straight sex to sado masochism and bestiality. Some other types of Perversion I saw is too sick to mention.
Hard-core paper back books were also in circulation, and this type of literature can be just as damaging because words have a habit of sticking in the mind the same as pictures do.
Pornography is a world of fantasy. The men and women in the films / pictures / books do not have the same day to day trials as normal people. They are nearly always sexually satisfied and the women nearly always have multiple orgasms.

I went with many women while I was in the navy including prostitutes. My mission was to have sex with as many as possible to prove to myself that I had the same prowess as the men in the magazines. I did forge a good relationship with one or two but was in general unfaithful to them.

Penis Envy

Many men suffer penis envy. For me, it became a thing of torture in my mind. I wanted to be like the super studs I saw in the magazines. I couldn't accept the fact that I had the same endowment as the majority of men. This drove me to go on to read more and more porno books. In my sexual encounters, I played out in my mind the fantasy of being some of the men I'd seen in the magazines.

The Search for Spiritual Truth

Although this rubbish was going on in my life, I had a tremendous desire to find what the meaning of life was and who could give me the answers, if there were any to be had. I strongly believed there was some kind of force or power outside of myself. I didn't believe we had evolved. Being at sea, I saw so much beauty and power that it ran against my own logic to think we had evolved from a bunch of apes. I would ask myself logical questions such as, "Why, if we are in a continual state of evolution, don't we see creatures, which are half ape and half man / woman. Some of them should be talking and others learning to talk. There should be lots of them swinging from the light bulbs in the very room in which I'm sitting!"
Neither did I accept the big bang theory which seems to go something like this; "In the beginning there was nothing. Nothing exploded and there was something". No, it didn't do anything for me. I felt that the harmony and unity we had in nature was the design of a greater power.
Some of my drug-taking friends were searching for answers to life too. One of them introduced me to a book called 'The Third Eye'. A Tibetan monk named Lobsang Rampa wrote it. The title of the book referred to the spiritual life and talked about how we were all one with each other and Mother Nature, including the animals etc. I felt I had found what I was looking for! I read another great book of his which showed how one could use telepathy to communicate with cats and other assorted animals. I was well annoyed to discover from another friend that Mr Rampa was a fraud. He wasn't a Tibetan Monk at all. He was a retired carpenter from Rochdale or somewhere else up north!

I read about astral travelling (an out of body experience). I did it once while tripping on LSD and scared the life out of myself, almost literally!
When I got home on leave, I desperately tried to impress my own brother and sisters with my eastern philosophy, guru image and cool spirituality. I wore my Afghan coat, which I'd bought in Turkey (all the rage for hippies at the time). It was raining so the coat got wet. My family was not impressed. The coat stank to the heavens. My brother in law with his dry sense of humour said, "How long have you been wearing that dead goat on your back then?" How could I tell them about telepathy with cats now?

I seriously considered joining up with the Hare Krishna cult, but I had a wonderful head of hair and I didn't feel like having it all shaved off with a bit left sticking out of the middle which was the way the men in the cult wore theirs. It might sound funny, but I was very serious about it at the time.

I continued to read more eastern religious books and alternative books like, "Was God an Astronaut?" I quickly decided he wasn't. What possible need could a powerful being like God have for a space ship to zoom around in? I know I was spaced out half the time, but not that much!
Reincarnation interested me. People came back to earth after they died if their Karma was bad, to live another life until they finally achieved the state of being totally good. However, I discovered a big flaw in this philosophy. Most writers claimed they had been people of great stature in their former lives. People like Henry VIII, Abraham Lincoln or Mary Queen of Scots. I didn't once read of anybody coming back as ' Ted, the fireman from Blackheath ' or 'Mavis, the cleaner from Bolton'. In the end I finally agreed I was somehow one with the cosmos and everyone in it but....
There was one major question I still needed to have answered. What assurance did I have that I'd found the true way of life? I didn't feel I had real peace. I was still getting drugged up to the eyeballs, still verged on the edge of alcoholism, still saw no purpose for my existence. If I had no doubts about it why was I still so unhappy? What if I was wrong? Even the eastern religions I'd read about were vague as to who God was, if there was a god at all. Being one with everything and everybody in the Universe was OK but why, if that was true, were so many people hating each other. These were questions that developed in my mind and I came to the conclusion that I had no assurance about the afterlife and certainly no idea as to who God was.

New found life

After leaving the navy, I lost my way for a while. I could not settle in a job and was unhappy with my life. My navy friends had warned me that if I left to go ' Shore-side' I would miss the sea. They were right! The first job I got was on a building site in winter. I had recently returned from South Africa where it was 100 degrees in the shade and I had a wonderful tan. I remember clinging for dear life, in a gale force wind, to some kind of scaffolding structure, looked at my hands which had turned bright yellow and thought, "God, what have I done!"

A couple of years went by and I met a girl and moved in to live with her and her two children. One day, a guy came around who was a friend of hers and unexpectedly began to talk to me about Jesus Christ, while rolling a cigarette. I took an instant dislike to him. He quizzed me about God. I disliked him even more. I had been a churchgoer in my earlier years and had even served as an altar boy. I knew more about church than he did! I believed in God but since discovering some of the eastern religions I thought I had a pretty good knowledge of the spiritual life. He said, "Do you know who Jesus is?" I replied curtly, "Of course I do, I went to church". After lighting up his cigarette he pursued his line of questioning. I can't remember the other things he said to me because he got right up my nose. I do however remember what I said to him in a burst of anger. I exploded, "Who the bloody hell do you think you are sitting there in your insincere self satisfied and two-faced, telling me that I need to find God when I don't particularly feel I've lost him!" I felt sorry for the guy as he got up and left.
However, one night as I was walking with my girlfriend to a pub in town, I had the most amazing experience of my life. Right there in the street, I was flooded with a feeling of peace, it filled me from the inside and I knew without a doubt that Jesus Christ had come into my life. It was like heaven had exploded in my soul. It was a new beginning indeed, as on that very evening, my girlfriend met up with her previous boyfriend and we split up! OK I admit, it hurt! But nothing could take away the feeling I had in my soul. God had come and made himself known to me!

I wish I could say that from then on I was free from my addiction to pornography and lived happily ever after, but I can't. Life isn't like that and problems don't disappear overnight. What I can say is that when I came into a relationship with Jesus, the healing process began. However, I experienced peace in my mind for the first time in years from the feelings of low self -esteem and inadequacy. I felt clean inside and my spiritual life grew. I was accepted and loved in the local church that I attended. Young people like myself who had been into drugs but were now free of them went to the meetings that were held nearly every night of the week. Hippies, straights, old people, middle aged people youth and children. There was no age barrier. It was one big family and I knew this family of God was world -wide. We laughed and cried together.
We all recognised that as Christians we were by no means perfect and so we were able to pray for one another and ask God to help us through the tough times we had, and to forgive us when we were unfaithful to him. Above all, I felt loved and accepted by God. I also knew he had forgiven me for all the lousy things I'd done in my life.

I worked in a supply depot with 600 other men and women. Most of them knew me as a bit of a hell raiser, one of the lads. My conversion(rebirth) caused quite a stir. When I started reading the bible at break times it raised a lot of eyebrows and the heckling(teasing,baiting) began. I didn't care; I was hungry to know more about Jesus and the Holy Spirit. I knew I had received a new life. Everything felt new. It was what I'd always hoped for and more! Sometimes the sense of Jesus being all around me and yet inside me was so powerful that I could hardly contain myself.

Married life

Two years after my conversion, I met the woman with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. We got married in the hot summer of '76 and had our first child ten months later! Over the next few years we had three more lovely children.
We have been happily married now for twenty-three years. For most of our married life we have had people come to live with us with many different problems that we were able to help. We also ran a registered (listed with the Government) home for people with mental health problems.
During these years we had our problems as most couples do but we have been able to work through them with God's help.

The Effects of Pornography

Pornography had a lasting effect on my life rather like scar tissue. The cut has healed and the effects of pain have gone but the scar remains.

Since becoming a Christian, I have slide backwards occasionally. Temptation is very real and in times of weakness I had been drawn back to pornography like a magnet. This produced a lot of guilt in me. I kept it a secret from my wife and everyone, which had a negative effect on my relationships. It was fear and guilt that kept me silent. Eventually the burden became too great and I broke down and confessed to my wife. She forgave me, prayed with me and I found the forgiveness of God. Love, acceptance and forgiveness have allowed me to find freedom.

The End Bit

Addiction is a hard thing to break in any form, but it can be broken. There are certain things that need to happen so that the addict can stand a chance of finding a way through the maze of emotions and daily battles he/she faces.
From my own experience, admitting to myself I had the problem was the first big step I took. Secondly, I broke the barrier of the fear of telling others. Fear can control the mind if it is allowed to do so. This was definitely the hardest step to take. Once it was out in the open and into the light, the burden of fear and secrecy lifted. The fear, I remember, was that of being found out. Once I told my wife, fear no longer had a hold on me.
Thirdly, I knew I needed to talk about it with somebody apart from my wife.
In a Christian context, I knew a dear couple of Christian friends who also happened to be counsellors. They were non-judgemental and were able to keep a confidence. This was extremely important to me when I was feeling so vulnerable.

As I mentioned earlier, the healing process has started and it continues. I am very aware that everyday I need to be careful about what I watch on T.V. or look at in the bookstore. There is an even more dangerous element for the porn addict these days. The Internet. Cyberporn they call it. Before I knew Jesus Christ, I had no control over my desires. This addiction to pornography controlled my life. Now I have a choice and I choose God's way. Through the relationship I have with him and because of his unconditional love for me I have freedom and a new life.

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