By Jessica Harris
I was thirteen years old when pornography found me. I hadn’t gone looking for it. While online, researching for school, I found a video website filled with educational videos. Right there, mixed in with clips for children, was a hardcore porn video masked by a blurry picture and benign title.
One click took me from having very little knowledge of sex to witnessing a hardcore orgy. One more click dragged me to a porn website filled with graphic ads, rotating videos, web cam feeds, and a chat room.
That was the beginning of a years-long struggle with pornography- a struggle made all the more difficult by the fact that I am a woman.
My mom caught me a year or so after I started. She was typing in a web address when a porn site auto-filled in the address bar. I was the only child in her home at the time, so she knew it was me. She pulled me into her room, crying.
“Jessica, why are you doing this? Please tell me. I didn’t have desires like this until I was married. Tell me why you’re doing this! Did your friends tell you about it? Did you learn about it in school? Are you just curious? What!?”
I snapped back and told her that I was just curious. She made me promise to stop.
I told her I would. I didn’t.
I learned how to clear the internet history and kept on watching. We never spoke about porn or sex again.
By the time I reached my senior year of high school, pornography had taken over my life. I watched it every day after school, always clearing the history and then typing in typical websites so she wouldn’t notice. At night, I would sit up and watch the cable channels we didn’t get, waiting for porn scenes to break through the static. At school, I would spend my lunch breaks as a teacher’s helper, sitting at a computer reading erotica.
I was losing sleep, struggling to keep my life together, and ridiculously moody. I recognized that pornography was destroying my life, but felt things would be ok if I could just “get it under control.” I quickly found out that I couldn’t control it no matter how hard I tried. I tried to stop and found I couldn’t. When I looked for help, everything out there was for men. So, I continued to struggle alone.
As I went off to college, I hoped I would get caught. I thought if anybody could help girls like me it would be the staff at a college. It wasn’t information I wanted to volunteer, but if somebody asked, I would be able to tell them yes, I was addicted to porn.
Even being afraid of getting caught didn’t help. At college, I would stay up all night watching pornography while my roommate slept behind me. Then I would sleep through my morning class before starting my day.
A few weeks after starting college, I was summoned to the dean’s office. Unbeknownst to me, the internet at the college was monitored. Clearing my history wasn’t enough to hide my porn use, and my internet log-in had been flagged. My internet history report indicated hours of watching and searching for pornography.
After lecturing on the vile nature and harms of pornography, the dean turned to me and said, “That being said, we know this wasn’t you. Women just don’t have this problem.”
They assumed I had given my internet password to men on campus and made me sign an agreement stating I wouldn’t do it again. I went back to my dorm room, completely devastated and confused.
Women don’t have this problem…
Then what was I? What was wrong with me?
After some thought I decided that somewhere women do have this problem- the women in porn. If I couldn’t get help to stop watching it, then I had no choice, I thought, but to join it. It was the only way I could make sense of my life. Just like the moment that had started it all, in one moment, I went from pursuing medical school and the American dream to feeling I had to be a porn star.
I began an online relationship with a man, told him exactly who I was, and gave him the log-in for my school’s intranet. He had access not only to me, but to every other female college student on that campus. It never once occurred to me the danger I was putting myself and hundreds of other women in.
One day, he asked me for pictures.
In four years, I had gone from being a relatively innocent 13 year old who knew little of sex, to a 17 year old sending my pictures to a complete stranger. I had become pornography.
Our relationship continued even after I left the college and couldn’t send pictures any more (my mom still had dial-up). We would continue sexual role play via e-mail for nearly a year. The following Fall I went to a different college, with a different message.
The internet at this college was completely filtered. Attempting to access porn sites would alert the staff. I felt I could finally get it under control, but the thing about pornography is it lives in your mind. You store pictures and videos like a hard drive and they replay at the absolute worst times. I didn’t have access to new content, but I had years of old stored up in my memory.
I thought this was how the rest of my life was going to be- a constant battle to get the images to stop. Then, there was a special all-girls meeting at the school and the dean staff stood at the front and said, “We know some of you struggle with pornography… and we’re going to help you.” It was the first time I had ever heard that before- that women could actually have this problem.
It was one of the scariest things I have ever done, but I confessed that night. The staff responded, not with disgust or judgement but with encouragement. They told me that what I had told them was brave and that they were going to help me.
That open conversation began a long process of finding freedom. It wasn’t as easy as just stopping. It took nearly two years of one-on-one mentoring and community for me to develop healthy emotional coping skills, relationships, and break the hold pornography had on me. I had to learn how to deal with intense emotions- like anger, frustration, sorrow, and even joy- without turning to pornography. I had to learn what it looked like to have healthy relationships with real people.
One of the most damaging lies I had heard in my life was that women didn’t have this problem. Knowing that wasn’t true and that I wasn’t alone was foundational in helping me find freedom and healing. Now I speak out on the reality of women struggling with pornography. Sometimes the most freeing thing for them to hear is they are not alone.
If this story sounds all too familiar or it is one you don’t want told in your house please start the conversations with your children today. These conversations should be open and safe for your child to ask and speak. For more information about how to talk to your children about sex check out our book Other books that will help you with this critical subject are How to Talk to Your Kids About Pornography and
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