I struggle.
I am not the only woman who does. Maybe you do, maybe you know someone that does.
I was convinced that I was the only one. I thought I stood alone and that sucked. I was so ashamed of myself and I felt like I was hiding all of the time. The struggle is real, I get it. A boy introduced it to me when I was fourteen. It’s like sinking sand with no escape.
That feeling of being alone changed my junior year in college when a counseling group was started for women struggling with pornography. I walked into that room and it hit me that I wasn’t alone.
Pornography is meant to make you feel isolated and alone. It did for me, but beginning to talk about it has changed my life. For the first time, I feel free and unashamed of who I am. Now, I don’t stop talking about it. It’s a comfortable topic that comes up easily. My friends are just used to it by now.
Probably one of the biggest and longest-held myths in our society is that it is normal for guys to watch porn, and included in that false belief is the idea that girls don’t watch porn.
Newsflash—women are human beings hardwired with sexual desire, and they struggle with porn as well.
Society’s stereotype is all wrong when it comes to this issue. A recent survey shows more of what we already knew: women are just as easily at risk of becoming dependent upon porn as men. The study showed that as many as 17% of women consider themselves addicted to porn, and that half of the women surveyed were internet porn users.
There are plenty more stats where those came from, including one study that found about half of young adult women agree that viewing pornography is acceptable and 1/3 of young women reported using porn.
At the end of the day, it makes no sense to view females as not having sexual desire or ability to be aroused by pornography. One of porn’s biggest traits is that it so naturally appeals to the natural sexuality that we all have as humans. For any of us to think that girls don’t have that same sexual drive as guys is completely mistaken. It’s heartbreaking to think that so many girls feel like they can’t reach out to anyone because of the stigma that porn is just a guy thing.