Most addictions revolve around a law of diminishing returns. When you hear a recovering alcoholic say something like “Drinking wasn’t working for me anymore,” this is what they’re referring to. It’s as if a switch gets flicked in your brain. Your drug of choice no longer gets you to Point B. Despite all evidence to the contrary, an addict will keep repeating the behavior in hopes it’ll start working again. 

I often complain that my adult life feels like a series of resisted temptations. I know I’m not alone, but that’s not much comfort. I gave up drugs and alcohol for what will hopefully be the last time more than 13 years ago. Six months later, I gave up cigarettes, which I smoked with great rapidity from 13 to 33. More recently I’ve given up processed sugar and sugar alcohols. I’ve dramatically reduced my carb consumption and cut caffeine in half. It never ends. My life feels like one long Lenten season. 

The things we do in private are hardest to part with—behaviors we use to temper loneliness or make ourselves feel better about inadequacies we may have felt during the day. 

I was watching a British crime drama on Netflix the other night in which a teen boy becomes fixated on a young woman whom he repeatedly hires for online webcam sex. He sees her out in public and, unwilling or unable to respect certain boundaries, approaches her for a live encounter. He seems not to understand why what happens on the webcam doesn’t necessarily cross into reality. She lures him into an alleyway, beats the shit out of him, and robs him blind. 

I was initially struck that in this day and age a 16-year-old has this option. I’m not a parent, so I don’t think about what kids might be getting up to on the computer. It’s difficult to fathom what my life would have been like as a young adult with access to webcams and the hardcore images, free for the taking. 

Pornography was long thought of as a male rite of passage. I remember seeing my first porn flick, which belonged to my dad. I watched it alone in the house and thought, “Wow, people actually do this?” I was too young to appreciate porn for what it was and wasn’t, and I knew that watching it was wrong, but I did it anyway. It seemed unthinkable not to take advantage of the availability. Wouldn’t any adolescent boy do the same?

Since then, my relationship to pornography has changed substantially, but 30 years later I still have one. In high school, it was still images in magazines. In college, I shoplifted a gay porn flick from a store in Cambridge, and so began the video years. I bootlegged gay porn films for a while, jumpstarting a library of films by piggybacking two VCRs. In 1991, I was young enough that my use of pornography never detectably diminished my appetite for so-called primitive, pedestrian sex. 

Sometime around 2000, all of this began to shift to the internet. I began building a digital library of illegally downloaded classics featuring deceased gay porn legends like Lee Ryder, Al Parker, and Rick Donovan, but it wasn’t long before the new wave of bareback films began to infiltrate. This new kind of porn was more animalistic: no music, no semblance of a plot, just sex. Sex from multiple camera angles. Underneath. In between. Extreme closeups. Taboo behaviors. 

My relationship to porn—in sync with our entire culture’s relationship to it—has since grown more complicated. We’ve become saturated. Our lives are wallpapered with it, like Times Square in the early 1980s. Increasingly, we don’t understand the differences between the pornographic fantasies we engage in online and the reality of pedestrian sex. We want porn-sex in our bedrooms—hell, some of us want it in our restroom stalls and state parks. We’re on the verge of a huge “advance” with the rapid development of virtual reality porn sites that feature binaural sound. While these new VRPorn sites feature fairly vanilla encounters, it’s only a matter of time before the hardcore stuff creeps in, and then, my friends, all bets are off.

Periodically, people in my recovery circles have told me that they’d encountered someone who’d confessed to being porn-addicted. Despite being classically wired like an addict, I couldn’t really wrap my head around how this would manifest. When I asked for more information, it was usually something like, “He stayed up all night surfing sites and watching, spending money on credit cards he can’t afford to spend.” Or sometimes I’d hear, “I went to hang out with the guy I’ve been dating last night, but we didn’t hook up…he’d already jerked off, like, three times, watching porn online. We ate pizza and passed out.”

The idea of staying up all night, spending big dough, or completely ruining your appetite for real sex because of a preoccupation with porn seemed preposterous to me. Like a drunk that refuses to drink before 5pm or a so-called “weekend warrior,” I always prided myself on being efficient with my pornography. “You gotta get in and out in under a half hour,” I would advise, like it was some sort of a heist. 

The truth is that pornography is a heist. What’s being stolen is our natural libido. Like any other substance that’s a target for abuse, porn presents a rush that cannot be duplicated elsewhere. It works pretty well for a while—and the first taste is usually free—but over time a tolerance develops. 

It’s not rocket science. If watching someone giving head in a video was exciting in the beginning, it won’t be after a while. Naturally, you want to find porn clips that’ll do the job, right? You begin cascading down a slippery slope: group sex scenes, public sex scenes, drug-fueled sex scenes. Before long, you’ll find yourself watching  porn that revels in degradation. We’ll call it neo-violence. It’s subtle at first. Maybe in your mind you think, “Gee, his behavior is pretty selfish.” But it’s not long before his selfishness becomes a turn-on. Many guys end up looking at images online they wouldn’t dare admit to viewing—not to their partners or even their closest friends—for fear of harsh judgment. Down the drain goes your once-healthy imagination and with it your ability to fully enjoy actual sex. The cycle of desensitization is seductive and destructive. 

Pornography is more readily available than real sex—you can carry it in your pocket on your phone. It’s more novel than real sex. And it’s more stimulating than real sex, as a result of something called “supernormal stimulus,” in which stimulating materials with exaggerated features deliver a more intense reaction. Nothing terribly surprising there: the internet has become a supplier of hotter fantasies than anything happening in real life and you don’t have to tangle with all that messy intimacy. If you want to read more about how this works, look up the term “neuroplasticity.”

Am I a porn addict? Tough question. I’m not sure, but I don’t want to tempt fate, either.  I’m no sexual moralist, and I’m not necessarily interested in giving up the activities that define my sexual tastes, which are essentially the same things I’ve liked for 25 years. What I would like to part with, however, is behavior that conditions me to be bored with those things and any other realistic sexual possibilities. Some folks may be content to have the internet as their lover for the duration—the one that always delivers. But having given up a few other things I was convinced would always deliver and realizing how blind I was after the fact, I’m purging the porn. My experience with addiction’s law of diminishing returns tells me I will lose this battle, so why wage it? I’m quitting before it’s too late. I want to reset my inner sexual barometer. I want my imagination back. 

The Grumpy Ghey would like readers to know that in the process of writing this column and doing some additional research about porn addiction, he combed the annals of his outboard drive for all pornographic video files and deleted them, freeing up a surplus of space he’s embarrassed to put a number on…just know, it’s a lot of space.