TESTIMONY

 MALE 34 YEARS

My first exposure to porn was when I was in grade six. I was friends with an older male who was a fellow tenant in the place where we used to stay. On a certain day he called me to see ‘’something interesting’’ in a certain magazine he was viewing. This turned out to be m first exposure to soft core porn. I would continue to be exposed in high school, some of my school friends would bring magazines containing erotic themes for us to view. On certain occasions, a friend would invite us to come and watch soft core pornographic films at his place. All of us thought these videos were good to equip us with appropriate knowledge to enable us to sexually fulfil a woman when the right time came. This seemed to be the ultimate goal for manhood, to be able to sexually satisfy a woman.

 This of course was a misguided ambition. What I first looked upon with disgust and shock became interesting and exciting to watch and led to another new problem, habitual masturbation. 

After High school, I moved to live with an uncle in a new town. There was an interesting observation I made about him. On Saturdays nights he would tell us not to switch off from certain foreign T.V channel on the decoder (he had a separate television set in his bedroom which used the same decoder in the living room). We got inquisitive and stayed late to see why my uncle was insisting on this and we discovered that on Saturday nights that particular night was for screening pornographic movies. So we too would stay up late watching porn in the living room.

At 19 years I moved out and started to stay on my own however my habits continued to haunt me. I had no television set hence I would visit certain neighbours and request to watch movies on Saturday nights. These neighbours least suspected what I was up to. They would tell me to wake them up after I was done watching as I left the house, they did not know that I was accessing the Saturday porn movies in their home.

My struggle continued to my work place. Our country had just experienced a boom in usage of internet and technology, and more companies now provided free Wi-Fi at the workplace. I started to search for and access pornography at work, it was messy. At some point the I.T department started to restrict access to questionable websites due to heavy traffic of users. Somehow I still managed to get a site that could not be detected by the system and hence continued to watch. 

My struggle continued. At one point a workmate remarked that internet data on a particular week got finished up before the expected time. Out of embarrassment I confessed to him that I had been downloading large files of porn videos. My workmate let my mishap go excused because he told me he would not judge my use of porn since I was married and it was probably for my benefit. I tried to be more careful though I still struggled.

By this time I could say I was heavily addicted. I would request from my boss to get Saturdays off in order to be able to attend church services and I would promise to do my workload on Sundays. While my colleagues thought I really wanted to be in church on Saturday, the real reason was that I needed enough time alone at the office to watch porn when everyone else was off and not at work. I would come late home from work and tell my wife I had been working on unfished business. My spiritual life got affected too. I remember missing a very important church program I was supposed to attend while I remained home for two hours watching porn. I had promised myself to watch for a few minutes before going to church but soon found that I couldn’t leave. I felt so horrible when I realised what had just happened. 

My relationship with my wife became turbulent and strained.  While I had a collection of porn videos on my laptop to which I had intended to watch with my wife I never could get her to watch. I was afraid that she could start behaving like the women in those videos. I was scared of what porn would do to her yet I was already facing a lot of problems myself. I developed erectile dysfunction and I suddenly became interested in flirting with other women. This led to a lot of disputes in my marriage. I would forget many things she would have asked me to do for her because when the urge to watch started, I would be so engrossed in it and be led to watch for many hours even up to early hours of the next morning.

Thankfully I’m on my recovery path now though I still have to continue in this fight. I am happy with the path of restoration in which I’m now on. However I have this to say pornography is a deadly enemy, no one should fall in its vicious path.