BENGALURU: Life was good for 32-year-old Nagendra Kumar (name changed), the CEO of a reputed city firm. In a span of two months, however, he not only got divorced, but also shut down his company and suffered health issues, all thanks to one addiction: Pornography. Kumar is among the several struggling with this addiction. And experts see a minimum of six to eight patients dealing with this addiction every week. According to experts, 25 per cent of such cases involve children as young as 12 years old.
“At Nimhans’ Service for Healthy Use of Technology (SHUT) clinic, I see one or two cases a month, most in the 20 - 25 years age group,” said Dr Manoj Sharma.Agreed psychologist Anitha Chabbi who said she sees five cases of addiction a week, at least two are related to porn.
How does it start?
Doctors claim that most porn viewing experiences begin with sheer curiosity. The first noticeable symptom is distance from friends. Partners find them always on their laptops.Clinical psychologist Dr Ashwini SN said, “In one case, the wife suspected that her husband was having an affair as he was always glued to his phone. Later, she looked at his browsing history and realised that he was addicted to porn.”The most common reasons, Dr Sharma said, people watch porn is to relax or to compensate for a rocky relationship.
An addict who wished to be anonymous told CE, “Besides staying up all night to watch porn, I had even started viewing it at work. I never felt like going out.”
Crackdown on sites
The Indian government has blocked 827 websites with pornographic content. Several porn sites have launched altered URLs for users to access their content.Meanwhile, a study showed that traffic on a porn site had grown 121% between 2013 and 2017, the highest for any country. Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai are said to rank highest in number of porn users.
Back in the olden days, there was a slower awakening in finding out more sex and sexual practices. Psychologist Dr Deepika NS attributes this to a lack of availability of such things online back then. “Now you don’t need to wait for your parents to go to bed or wait until you are on your own to access such content. Smartphones allow you privacy anywhere,” she said.
This ease of access, however, comes with many problems. Besides intimacy issues, one can also experience infertility and unnatural sex, doctors said. “What we see is an increase in the number of women who are not happy with their genitalia, and men who are worried about the size of their penis,” said sexologist Dr Padmini. “Before pornography, when did you ever see another woman’s private parts? When did you see another man’s erection? You didn’t have anything to compare yourself to. Now you can,” she further explained. This has often led to a dysfunctional relationship with sex. “It encourages young boys and girls to have different opinion and expectation of sex,” she added.
Men vs women
According to Dr Manoj Sharma from Nimhans, it is mostly men who seek help. “It could be due to taboo or many other reasons that women get less addicted to porn, or approach doctors about this addiction,” he explained.He also added that a case report identified that porn use leads to an increase in cases of infidelity online. Porn use led to lesser intimacy, which some felt of as mistrust in relationships, and was considered equal to infidelity.