Hardcore pornographic material is now available anywhere, anytime – and research shows people are accessing it younger. Here’s what compulsive use really looks like.

Hayley Allens was 20 when she met the man whose sexual kinks kicked off her addiction
to extreme pornography.

“He was a rebound relationship, after my first love broke up with me,” she recalls now. “He was exceptionally experienced sexually, and into BDSM and all sorts of kinks, which really opened my eyes as to how sex could be.”

Her boyfriend encouraged Allens to post explicit pictures and videos of herself on public forums where people could rate her. “From there, I started to chase the thrill and watch porn myself. Over time it became gradually more explicit and extreme because the dopamine rush would wear off – it was this whole new adventure of ‘What could I try?’ I became hooked.”

At its worst, Allens’ porn addiction meant that she was viewing material every single night, spending hours scrolling porn sites, trying to find a hard-hitting video that would be good enough to satisfy her. “I could be 68 pages in on a porn site, thinking, ‘That’s not good enough; it’s too vanilla; it needs to be graphic.’”

She would masturbate while watching, and also take notes in order to try to recreate what she was seeing on screen with casual relationships. “If I was tired, if I felt sad, if I was bored, porn would be my go-to. It was a nightly routine. And it wasn’t even to spice up my sex life per se – this was something I was doing solo.”

Allens was no drop-out or social recluse: she was holding down a job in – ironically – mental health counselling. “Day to day, people thought I was a lovely, kind person. They had no idea that behind closed doors I was man-mad, sex-obsessed and addicted to porn.”

Bar the enabling boyfriend, Allens’ tale of addiction – and the subsequent breakdown of her relationships and career – is remarkably similar to that charted in a new dramatic performance at The Royal Court Theatre in London, directed by Josie Rourke. Porn Play, as its title suggests, offers a stark look at the effect porn addiction can have on a life. Starring One Day actress Ambika Mod, it centres around Ani, an award-winning young academic being garlanded for her radical revision of Milton’s Paradise Lost, but who has an uncontrollable addiction to violent porn. Over the course of the play, we watch as her relationships with her boyfriend, friends and family – and ultimately her dazzling career – are gradually destroyed.

This may sound unusual, but the reality is that Britain is in the grip of a collective and increasing porn obsession. UK media regulator Ofcom estimates that 14 million people watch online porn, the majority of whom use Pornhub, the world’s most visited website for adult content, with 2 million average daily visits.

British searches for “porn” have surged from 529 million in 2022/23 to 662 million in 2024/25. Each day, there are more visits to porn sites than to Amazon, LinkedIn, Zoom and eBay combined. The average age a Briton first sees porn is 13 (in the play, Ani confesses to having been 11), while porn “influencers” such as Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips are followed on Instagram by millions of teenagers.

Interestingly, as Ani declares in Porn Play, “Women are twice as likely to search for violent porn as men.”

Sophia Chetin-Leuner started writing Porn Play eight years ago, while on a scholarship at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. “I’d never seen a woman masturbate on stage before,” the 31-year-old playwright told Vogue earlier this month. “I wanted to do something provocative.” Her reasoning behind exploring porn addiction, she has said, is because “the internet has just ruined what, in essence, could be a really gorgeous exploration of different kinks”.

The algorithms, she has explained, push “more and more violence”. She says: “By the time people are becoming sexually active, they’ve absorbed so much that it’s shaped their idea of intimacy, their sexual preferences, everything.” As she researched – interviewing dozens of real-life recovering porn and sex addicts in order to draw Mod’s character – the play morphed and developed, examining porn’s impact specifically on women.

In the play, too, Ani’s addiction changes shape. “It used to be fun when it was… But the stuff you watch is so…” her boyfriend Liam says to her early on in the play. At first, Ani defends her porn habits as “the thing that helps me relax, to access pleasure. It helps me unwind. To masturbate after a long day. It’s like my glass of wine.” She asks Liam, “Why can’t I watch porn in the same way men do?”

But then we watch Ani constantly reaching for her phone, so unable to stop masturbating that she ends up at the doctor’s, in excruciating pain from a bacterial infection and broken skin. Her self-sabotage through porn is riveting but disturbing to watch, taking the audience from admiration to revulsion to, ultimately, pity. The audience is never entirely certain why Ani is addicted. The death of her mother from cervical cancer when she was 14? Her early exposure to it, aged 11, and the subsequent algorithmic spiral?

Like Ani, Catherine*, first saw porn when she was a child: in her case, at 9. “Growing up, we had one main computer in a public space in the living room,” she recalls. “Then at school, during sex education, they mentioned the word masturbation. I didn’t know what it was, so I went home and looked it up on Ask Jeeves. I ended up on a pornography site.”

Catherine, now 33 and a stay-at-home mother and home-educator, was “fascinated and curious and disgusted and very confused”. But in bed that night, she had nightmares – after which, “I kept going back to look it up. It was almost as if it was less traumatic looking it up on a screen than having it playing out in my mind.”

Fascinated despite herself, she kept going back, night after night. “I became the master of secrecy. I tidied and deleted things. There were many times when my parents would ask what something was, and I would lie my way through it and say it was spam.”

Throughout her teenage years, Catherine continued to look at porn, finding herself drawn to gay female porn, even though she knew she was straight. By the time she went to university, it was destroying her life. “It was a point where people were starting to get into relationships – but there was no way I wanted to have sex, ever, because it was horrible and violent and degrading.”

Instead, Catherine would compulsively watch porn, four or five times a day, skipping lectures and social commitments. “I would lie in my bed all day, curtains drawn, lying to my flatmates, pretending I was ill. It felt as if the only way to stop it would be if I died.

“The irony was that this was so against my values. I was studying theology; heavily involved at church. And yet this thing was crippling. It was like being a drug addict. I needed it; I had to have it.”

There is, acknowledges Cat Etherington, the director of recovery at Naked Truth Project, a charity that works to combat the damaging effects of porn, “an overdiagnosis of addiction within evangelical Christian circles”. She says: “I would concede that it’s probably due to the moral conflict. They’re quicker to call themselves addicts.”

Nevertheless, she adds: “If you’re doing something and it causes you great distress and you can’t stop, then it’s easy to feel you are addicted.”

Chetin-Leuner, too, has spoken about religion as a theme in Porn Play. “I was talking to a lot of recovering sex and porn addicts, and loads of it was about religion,” she told The Guardian. “They’d either come from really religious backgrounds, or they’d found religion as part of their recovery. I didn’t want to do a play about that, but I understood there’s something about the ultimate patriarch, God…”

Eventually, Catherine confessed her struggles to a woman at her church, through whom she was referred to recovery counselling. Now, she is married with children. “But at the start of our marriage there was a lot of insecurity. I’d never actually been sexually active with anybody, but I’d seen hundreds of naked bodies and had expectations about what you have to look like, how you have to behave, how you’re going to be treated. Even now there are certain things I won’t watch – just like someone who’s an alcoholic won’t go and hang out with their friends at a pub.”

“The difficulty with porn addiction compared to alcohol or drugs is that the effects of withdrawal are much harder to track,” says Etherington. “It may not be such a physical thing, but they [porn addicts] do experience psychological and emotional withdrawal, because of the function the addiction is serving.”

“Underneath the addiction is an emotional hang-up,” agrees Henry*, a university professor in his 60s who describes himself as a porn addict in recovery. “For me, it was a combination of being afraid of loneliness and constantly feeling stressed and anxious. Or it could be being bored or having a task I didn’t want to do. Porn was a relief – familiar territory. But once I got started, I could spend hours watching it. I’d forget to eat; I’d get to two or three am. Once it grabs you by the horns, it’s almost like there’s no stopping it.”

Excessive porn use is not classified as addictive in manuals of psychiatric disorders that include alcoholism or drug addiction in their indexes. That doesn’t mean it can’t be – but makes it harder to define.

“The two really key defining features of the addiction criteria are escalation – which in porn is usually a reaction to desensitisation – and the difficulty of withdrawal,” says Etherington. While the former is relatively straightforward to chart, the latter is harder, which in turn complicates a diagnosis of porn addiction.

Allens has been so damaged by porn she says she “would never ever recommend it to anybody” – even though she believes in “freedom of choice”. She is now writing a book about her experiences, which comes out next May. “If I were to be very bold, I believe porn should be banned,” she says. “I don’t believe it serves any purpose in society or has a positive impact on anybody. It’s very dangerous.”

Psychotherapist Paula Hall, who specialises in sex and porn addiction, says the rise of the smartphone is the key issue behind a “whole generation of people coming through with problematic porn use”. She is working on a pilot study across university campuses, and says more and more young people are reporting problems with porn – including a higher proportion of women.

“It’s become a social dilemma. On the one hand, we have an increasing amount of sexual freedom, which is brilliant. But with more freedom comes more choice. And with more choice comes more problems.”

*Names have been changed

Where to get help:

If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.