I was recently on the BBC – Here is my Porn Addiction Sheffield Radio Broadcast.
Read the audio transcript and listen to the audio here:
Porn Addiction Sheffield Radio Audio files
Transcript
Ian Baker
My name’s Ian Baker. I’m a psychosexual therapist and a sexual addiction therapist, as well as working with couples and individuals.
Interviewer
So the reason I came knocking at your door, Ian, was I wanted to find out if you’re seeing more people coming to you for help with addiction to porn and from those people, you’re seeing is the age of those people getting younger?
Ian Baker
I think it’s fair to say when you when you asked those questions I was going yes, yes, yes and in a strange way there’s an excitement that someone wants to know because it is increasing in Sheffield. We’re probably university based and get a lot of students coming through the door. Now they primarily walk through the door and if I stay with (only) men walking through the door with issues regarding performance anxiety or not being able to get an erection and the one thing that’s coming through is, again in answer to your question, through the through the roof is delayed ejaculate. So when working in a psychosexual way, one of the things that we ask people is where are they with their use of pornography.
It’s a very powerful stimulant and then we start looking at lifestyles and use and maybe the first time they’ve been asked and I go, there’s so much we can do and I can help you, but I need to remove all the stimulants, not masturbating, not having sex, going back to a base layer to listen to your body.
And that’s when it starts to bring in people looking at their porn use. And I go, I can’t do this if you continue watching porn, you can go back to porn afterwards and then when we start to see their relationship to porn we start to see a problem.
And that’s not for everyone, because some people walk through the door and they go, Yep, stopped it. Not a problem, and quite quickly we’ll start to see erections coming back or lessening in performance anxiety, but others for the first time might discover that actually, my request for a short-term change in lifestyle and usage of porn is highlighting something that they can’t stop.
Whether we call it problematic porn use, compulsive sexual behaviours or the umbrella term of sexual addictions, there are many ways we can work with it.
But yes, they’re younger walking through the door and as we were discussing earlier when we’re looking at correlations between erectile dysfunction and men we were talking in 99, looking at the data and research in an age range of 18 to 59-year-old men.
About 5% would experience erectile dysfunction and we go to 2010 and research in Brazil, 35% of men 18 to 40, we’re getting erectile dysfunction.
And then in 2018, a UK survey of 2000 men surveyed under the age of 31 and 250% of erectile dysfunction, and we start looking at correlations, the way that pawns become more accessible.
Interviewer
My next question is going to be why? Why are we seeing that and I think this is where the correlation comes in, right?
Ian Baker
Absolutely. In terms of the accessibility to porn we used to call it the AAA effect, you’d be affordable, accessible, and anonymous.
So if I think back to a 16 year old and walking around Wolverhampton, I think we all knew where that door was with the blacked out front windows and men going in with raincoats on. But no, now it’s on your phone. It’s done.
I was when I was growing up. It was a Betamax tape played and shared and then with that.
The latest research coming out of the College of Sexual Relational Therapists and the in the journals that we read, we’ve actually gone to this this, it’s seven days a week.
It’s the fact that this is more acceptable. There’s an approximation as well which is. Is this actually real? There’s the ambiguity of it. Is this problematic because everyone is doing it now?
And they are.
The point of data will tell you it would take you 160 years without sleeping to watch all their content. But is that a problem? And then there’s the accommodation and the ability to act out in real time. But what is real?
So if I was to send you 12 red roses in the post, is that different to 12 red roses as an emoji? And that’s the question?
The acceptability is also highlighted by the fact that we’re getting some data here for you: in 2017 Ofcom, 28% of 10 year olds have a social media profile and nearly every child under the age of eight. In America 98% have access to mobile a device at home and that was in 2018. So the ability to access this and be with it and grow up with it is there.
And then when you walk through the door to see a therapist or psychosexual therapist you’ve got a problem, you’ve got anxiety, and we’re starting to ask all these questions that may have never been asked.
All that’s the first time probably going well, you tend. We’ve got a problem with the Poor news..
Interviewer
And do people when they come to you, are they quite willing to kind of say, yeah, I’ve got a problem, or is it dependent on the person?
Ian Baker
We use the word Porn, there’s 22,000 genres of pornography my naivete saw that (the term) Fortnight Porn had jumped 19,000 places. It’s like me watching Tommy Vance doing the Top 40 in the old days.
Well, what’s fortnight porn? So I had to go on Google and search it. ’cause I’m I’m not playing Fortnite.
I didn’t know what it was. Oh, it’s the game. And then you start looking at the sub categories. So when someone walks to the door and let’s say the age of 2021, with a bit of social pressure to say the least about being a virgin and say, I’ve spent my whole time really enjoying watching porn but I wish to have vaginal penetration, sex, intercourse and they can’t.
And you know what? What porn have they been watching? You’ll hear young men, kids saying “actually, when you asked me, I realised I had a problem when I was 16 because the porn people were talking about in the playground wasn’t the porn I was watching” and that’s when you start to see them reflecting and that’s where you help someone look at what they’re doing, what they’re watching.
And so if at a young age, let’s say from the accessibility data, you’ve been watching **** ****** **** from the age of 10, and that’s before puberty I think there’s a chance that that actually could be a kink that you’ve actually got and people are in distress that that’s something that they’ve got which is not about an erection for vaginal penetration.
And when they come to it, they realise they can’t be aroused. So that’s why I keep coming back to it could be problematic porn use.
We won’t know until you stop watching. It could be discovering of your sexual template without it being, for a better word, taken over or hijacked by porn and the way the dopamine receptors work.
Or it could be something that you can’t put down, and now we’ve got what could be called an addiction to porn.
Interviewer
You talked about how there are not that many of you in the UK actually working in this field. What do you see happening over the next, say, 5 to 10 years? Do you think that the demand for your help, support and therapy will go up?
Ian Baker
Every month, every year! When I started training and what I thought was a niche is 80% of what I do now and I speak to colleagues around the UK in different parts, whether it be South End to North Wales, South Wales, Edinburgh, etc. We’re all busy, when we talk we’re seeing what’s walking through the door is an increase in erectile dysfunction, a substantial increase in delayed ejaculation which we work with.
And they were looking at the correlations of will raise this relate to your porn use and then we’ll start working on is it active control.
Is it problematic and supporting them on that? Some of the most complicated things I’ve seen is when someone going to get support from someone who’s not well versed in how to support it and something is not worked on is the effect on the partner and I’ve seen some partners in really bad places because they’ve been given for want of better help, it’s actually not helped. And so as a collective and people I work with we’re always reviewing what we’re doing, but always looking at best practise.
We’re always feeding back about how do we help people and get better at what we do, because behavioural addictions across the spectrum of gambling and shopping they’ve only been around for 30 years. It’s the new kid on the block and this is to do with neuroscience, this is working with brain functions. This is understanding more than ever dopamine and when we say dopamine, there’s five types of dopamine, and then you start going well dopamine plays many roles as testosterone plays many roles, and so we’ll keep educating yourself keep looking at the research.
And that’s why the International Classification of Diseases under the World Health Organisation did a review and said there is a problem, and we need to tighten the research, get people focused ’cause there was a really good critique that the research was all over the place. It was too much of a shotgun approach and yes, we can see a problem we’re not really pulling it together.
Gary Wilson and bless him, ’cause he passed away last year. Gary Wilson and the data that he holds on your brain, on porn is outstanding. We can see that watching porn creates 24 dopamine receptors on a person’s optic connexion and it is cool versus 4 dopamine receptors in what, in this world, you might want to call real contact. More than contact it gives you choice and you’re not doing things you don’t want to do or finding those are probably not being aroused, what you’d like to be aroused, and that delayed ejaculation and there’s early research coming through, is starting to show that this is actually a problem.
I don’t think ever going to be able to prove, and I’m not sure it actually gonna help that. It’s causation. The correlations exist, and that really helps educate people.
Interviewer
And that’s what my final question is why did you say yes to this interview?
Ian Baker
It’s the education. I mean, it might sound strange but we all do this because we want to help people, and in psychosexual and sexual addictions, you want people to be with their sexual template, with the freedoms of choice to express it and how they want to live.
And that gives them great mental health, watching what’s going on, if we can educate people more, if we can just get the message out there.
Do you think you’re drinking too much? Your mates at the pub might go, do you really need your 10th pint tonight?
You’re always going to get feedback, but you’re always going to get someone talking to you.
It could be taking too much coke. Are we doing this or doing that, we don’t have that conversation about porn and when I think about the people walking through, what we’re doing more and more is education.
And I don’t think that’s our preserve. So that can actually start by yourselves. Others, let’s start talking about it. Let’s take away the shame about it. Let’s educate ourselves about it.
Let’s keep looking at the critique of what we do, because that helps us. But that question is we don’t have to do education on our own.
We can get the conversation going, we can get it around the dinner table, we can get it in the football matches, we can get it in the netball courts, we can get it in the classroom and that would be great.
And when you asked the question about the young people walking through the door, young adults, they’re asking for help about the sex life at the age of 21.
We didn’t used to do this.
So don’t be afraid because there’s a lot of support and help out there.