Sean Russell, 30, used to watch hours of adult videos at 13. He reveals the impact of porn’s addictive grip — and why its effects are worse for teenagers today
In the cavernous church of Our Lady Immaculate I sat in a wooden pew and looked up at the stone Jesus above the altar until I was called forward by the priest for confession, far out of earshot of anyone – we didn’t use those little booths like you see in the movies for school-time confessions.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said, just 13 years old.
“Confess your sins, young man,” he said.
“I stole my brother’s Pokémon cards and I lied to my teacher about my homework and I’ve been watching videos I shouldn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
Lesbians, mostly, lots of boobs and scissoring and sex toys.
“Adult videos,” I replied.
And I’d watch them again, probably as soon as I got back from confession and was alone — because I’d started and a habit was formed and it was all really rather fine, even if I did feel the need to confess it back then.
It was the time of running home from school to lie on the floor watching endless reruns of Friends and The Simpsons and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or playing video games like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. I’d grown up with Myspace and MSN Messenger, and among it all I was part of the first generation that had easy accessto online porn. When I was 13, in 2006, YouPorn had just been founded, and in 2007 Pornhub would go live. What did adults know about it? This was a generation that thought if you minimised a screen it was gone, but it wasn’t, and I first saw a video because a page had been minimised on the home computer, not closed — the 21st-century equivalent of finding your dad’s mags. Yes, you had to wait a few minutes for the thing to fully load, and the video quality was poor, but it was easy – so long as you had time before anyone came home.
The video that was minimised was just a beautiful brunette woman stripping and dancing and masturbating on a sofa. I watched it in the hallway, where our PC was, wide-eyed and nursing a rager while listening out for my mum’s jingling keys in the front door. I watched it many times, every day after school. I just had to keep going back and pulling out the keyboard drawer and finding the same website and clicking “I am 18 or older”. It wasn’t long before I ventured beyond that video into the wider world of online porn, of lesbians and orgies and anal, and Babestation on TV at 10pm and torrenting videos and sending them to my friends. Everyone spoke about it at my all-boys Catholic state school. I recall one saying he yanked it every single day, which seemed excessive, and others used to talk about what unbelievable thing they’d watched last night: “She had the biggest boobs you’ve ever seen.”
Porn is like social media – the more you watch, the more desensitised you become
One friend took to making a sound with his cheek on the freezing-cold school football field which he said sounded a lot like wanking and suggested using hand cream throughout the day so your hands were smooth for when you did it. There were debates about the best receptacle, whether a tissue was enough or perhaps a sock — some got condoms to try out a “posh wank”. All this competed with PSHE classes (personal, social, health and economic tuition), our “sex education”. I remember learning about stickleback fish and being told about their mating rituals, presumably to ease us into relationships. We’d sit there listening to an awkward teacher while drawing cocks in our textbooks and then run home and watch basically anything we could imagine. The real sex talks wouldn’t come until we were at least 16, by which point I’d been watching porn for three years.
The thing about porn is it starts with a desire. You are into a particular thing and so you’d go to that category and watch something. You may put in a search if you were after something even more specific — blondes, say. But soon that just doesn’t do it for you any more. So you go to the homepage of your selected site where an algorithm throws up a load of videos and you start going through the pages one after another: page 1, page 2, page 21, six tabs opened and not even a wiggle down there. Suddenly you’re watching a Japanese orgy and saying, “This’ll do.”
Every now and again you come across a grail of a video. Something you enjoy so much you want to return to it again. But the problem is you close the video as soon as you’re done. In the moments after you don’t want to see it any more and it becomes shameful to your now pure eyes, even if there’s nothing wrong with it — take it away. And if you don’t write the name down you’ll lose it for ever – every guy has that one video that got away. You should be in incognito mode (intended for gift shopping apparently), and so the internet history is no help at all. This causes you to scroll even more on the search for that grail you’ll never find and instead you’ll find everything else.
This is how porn sites work. It’s no different, in many ways, from social media. It competes for your time. And the more you watch the more desensitised you become, the more you scroll along looking for something to grab your attention. This much we know. But how does that affect a teenager? These are the statistics: men are four times more likely to watch porn, while a third of young men are likely to have watched porn from 13. We also know that people are having less sex, and that the sex that is being had is changing with the rise in prevalence of things such as choking.
I understand these statistics. Porn is how my generation learnt about sex. Not the sticklebacks, not even movies or books or “birds and bees” talks from uncomfortable parents — it was online porn. You may tell yourself that your teenager doesn’t watch, but they probably do. You have some sort of child filter? They can get through it. I knew I could get around just about anything because I was dealing with a generation that typed with their index fingers and didn’t understand how copy and paste worked. Plus, it’s not just on porn sites these days, it’s on social media too and it’s on forums, and if you know where to look it’s all too easy. And while we have censored Roald Dahl and put trigger warnings on Ernest Hemingway, underage porn consumption is barely mentioned because we all want to imagine our children are angels and ignore the crusty socks.
At 15 I was terrified of sex. I remember being with a girl in my bedroom: we were watching Family Guy and we were close together, and then we started kissing and she reached for my trousers and I ran to the bathroom.
“I just need the toilet,” I said and walked out at an unnatural angle to hide my boner which pushed against my jean zipper. Once it was settled down I came back to the room and I found some excuse to end the evening. Why was I scared? Because this is what porn taught me: I should last an hour and do ten different positions, that a woman should have an eyes-rolled-back-in-her head, body-shaking orgasm, that I should take control, that I should hold her in certain ways and make certain noises, that she should shout out in pleasure, that I should have a humongous penis if I wanted any hope of pleasing her. I know porn mags existed for a long time, but can you imagine what it’s like being exposed to that for two or three years and then being presented with a real-life woman who wants to take things further? And this was back in the days when you needed a desktop or terrible laptop. Now teenagers are constantly on their phones — in 2019 Pornhub estimated that 12,500GB of porn were uploaded to the site every minute.
Russell: “Talk to young men about what sex is really like – get them to realise sex and porn are different”
When I was 18 I took a woman back to my university house. We had met in a club and were drunk. She was sexy and we’d spent much of the night dancing and kissing. When we got back to mine I found a condom and put it on and then realised I’d no boner between my legs but a length of rope wrapped in rubber.
“I think I’m too drunk,” I said. But it wasn’t that; it was performance anxiety: the fear of being bad at sex, of being too quick, or too slow, or too small. It was the fear of the inexperienced, but also the fear of someone who had watched thousands of hours of porn. Every male friend I have spoken to says they’ve had a similar experience at some point and we laugh about it — but back then I didn’t laugh.
There comes a time when watching porn is just easier. There is no expectation, no pressure, no judgment. You just do it and it’s over and you can go to sleep. After the woman left my room I loaded up Pornhub and had no problem. It doesn’t surprise me that the amount of sex men under 30 are having is going down. While porn can’t provide all the answers to this decline, it does become a safe place: why risk flirting, failure, rejection, disappointment when you can just watch porn?
Growing up with this perception of sex is not healthy. I don’t believe all young male porn users come away as incel misogynists, but certainly many come away more ignorant of reality. It doesn’t take long to find violent porn with slapping and choking and gagging, for example — one 2021 study shows 1 in 8 videos suggested to first-time visitors to the most popular porn websites in the UK is violent. And if I turn to porn to learn about sex, I may come away thinking that all of that is part of it, that all women want it. Now, some people will and some won’t, but if you grow up thinking choking is what is expected you may not wait around to find out if it’s what someone wants or not. Just like you’d assume some marathon-long session is the norm. In fact, a 2016 UK study found 44 per cent of young men aged 11-16 who consumed porn said it gave them ideas about the sex they wanted to try.
This appears to affect women too, perhaps because of their own watching but also because they think it’s what men want now. One friend tells me a woman tried to choke him, which he neither wanted nor invited, and I’ve been in a situation where a woman made noises I felt were fake — as much as I’d like to take credit — and copying the sounds porn stars make.
It wasn’t until my first proper relationship, when I was 22, that I relaxed and began to leave those anxieties behind, and my second relationship was even better. I realised that sex was best when two people are relaxed with each other and can share what they want, and can laugh at the badly attempted positions and the odd funny sound — although for a long while into my mid-twenties I still had to have the lights on as I was so driven by the visual. Real sex is reciprocal. It’s arriving too quickly, occasionally, and lasting too long, occasionally. A friend and I laughed when we discovered we had had the same experience: our girlfriends changed position unexpectedly and, well, that was the end.
Your first time will probably be more like Will’s from The Inbetweeners, pushing off the bed frame with his socks on, or Simon’s when he can’t get it up because Jay told him he should have a wank before sex to get the easy one out. That’s fine — sex shouldn’t be scary.
I’m not against porn. I still use it and I think it offers an outlet for so many people to explore their kinks and sexuality, and why not? I wish the industry was safer and more remunerative for sex workers, and platforms like OnlyFans can help with that, but I am certainly not against the idea of it. Anyway, it’s always going to exist.
Would I stop myself watching when I was under 18? Yes. But what would have stopped me? I’m sure regulation can help — part of the proposed Online Safety Bill suggested putting the emphasis on porn websites to ensure their users were not children by running checks beyond, “Are you 18?” If I had had to sign up to get access, I wouldn’t have watched so much, and child filters in the meantime at least restrict usage. But also talking to young men about what sex is really like is necessary — get them to laugh about it and themselves, and realise sex and porn are different. Sticklebacks will not work, although I hope this is already outdated.
Chatting to some male friends on a night out recently I brought up the topic. All of them had been frightened of sex because of porn, and all of them came to embrace what sex truly is. The key was simply to take it less seriously. We also had the same thoughts: when we were growing up there were fewer sites, and smartphones were in their infancy. Could we even imagine what it would be like now to be 13? We were limited by slow internet on a family PC — in our later teens, we’d have laptops of our own, but to have access constantly, what would that have meant? Probably that the algorithm would have been even more pervasive, not to mention social media having moved on since the days of Myspace. We were all glad we didn’t have to deal with that.
Shows like The Inbetweeners were very important to my understanding of reality, but the actor Simon Bird has said they wouldn’t be able to make it these days. That’s a shame. It was valuable for me to see I wasn’t the only hapless guy and that maybe that was normal and I could laugh at myself. The first time I had sex — successfully — at 18 was an awful, minute-long affair of drunken fumbling and missionary, but it felt great. After some time and having formed proper relationships in my twenties, porn became something separate from sex and it was wonderful. This is what we need to teach young men. This is what I wish I’d known when I was 13.
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