How we got hooked on porn, engaged in extra-marital affairs — Married men

Despite the public aversion some Nigerians have towards pornography, it has become an addictive pastime for many married men. This habit not only heightens their obsessive appetite for sexual exploration but also fosters unrealistic fantasies that can lead to extramarital affairs or cause physical and psychological problems, reports Saturday PUNCH.

On a restless night in 2019, Nicholas Onyeabor tossed and turned in bed, his mind flooded with intrusive thoughts as he struggled to find even a moment of sleep.

That night was just one of many for the 41-year-old, self-described former pornography addict, as he grappled with insomnia on his thorny path toward recovery.

On that night, his wife, Adaobi, slept peacefully beside him, unaware of the tangled psychological battles her husband faced as he fought to overcome his porn addiction.

Now a father of three, Onyeabor traced his addiction to Internet porn back to 2008, during his final year at one of the federal universities in the South-West.

The native of Abiriba, Abia State, who was raised in a strict, conservative Christian background, admitted that while he was hooked on porn, he firmly believed that his cravings would diminish as soon as he got married.

“It all started one night in February 2008, when I was 25,” he told our correspondent, with his brow furrowed.

“That Friday, I went to an overnight browsing session at one of the cyber cafés on campus to work on my final year project. After a couple of hours, I was done gathering the materials I needed for my research, but I came across a website that we now call a hookup site.

“When I clicked on one of the links, it took me straight to a porn site. Due to my upbringing, I was afraid and quickly closed the window. But an hour later, I returned there and began to view the images on the site. By the end of that night, I was entering certain sex-themed words into Google, which led me to different websites where I viewed explicit photos.”

As cyber cafés—once common across Nigerian cities—gradually disappeared, the rise of internet-enabled mobile phones provided many users with unrestricted access to explicit content that was previously more difficult to obtain.

This was the situation Onyeabor found himself in because accessing those sites was just at his fingertips.

“As of the time I got married in 2014, I was so addicted to porn that my phone and laptop had files dedicated to all kinds of adult material I saved from the internet, and I would pleasure myself almost daily.

“My wife knew nothing about this. I mean, how do you tell your loving wife that you get off to hardcore material online? It was a shameful thing to divulge. You see, we were a dedicated church-going couple, and things looked good on the surface,” he blurted.

Descent into addiction

Onyeabor revealed that his pornography addiction drastically altered the dynamics of his marriage, leading to a decline in his physical attraction to his wife.

He explained that for him, sexual intercourse became a dull routine—a mere obligation—that no longer excited him.

“I just went along with it, my mind was elsewhere,” he admitted to our correspondent. “I had cultivated an imagination of what ‘real sex’ was supposed to be like, and Ada wasn’t close to it.”

The 41-year-old said what made him start looking for a way to quit was when he realised he was having issues maintaining an erection, adding that he was in his late 30s at the time.

He said, “I tried a few suggestions someone gave me, but I soon found out that I could only get my ‘little man’ up if I looked at porn shortly before playing with madam.

“I think it was an article I read or a video that made me realise that I was addicted to porn and had to quit it. It took me more than a year of going ‘cold turkey’ on porn.

“I began to have sleepless nights, and sometimes, I had relapses too, but I finally kicked the habit. The other issue later resolved itself.”

Porn fuelling erectile dysfunction

The Addiction Centre, an online guide for addiction and recovery, defines pornography addiction as “a compulsion to watch porn and not being able to stop” and identifies one of its chief symptoms as having “cravings if you have gone without porn for any amount of time.”

A research work presented on July 16, 2020, at the European Association of Urology Virtual Congress, found that excessive pornography consumption was associated with a higher incidence of erectile dysfunction, a condition where males struggle to achieve and maintain an erection.

Some experts opined that while quitting pornography was not the easiest approach to take, they described it as a fast way for addicts to retake control of their lives and start feeling better.

Recounting how he became hooked on Internet porn, a married father of two, Kolapo Adigun, told our correspondent that a friend introduced him to a sexually explicit DVD collection in 2011.

Adigun said, “Back then in the early 2000s, when I was in secondary school, the only porn we knew were the ones in booklets with photos of nude models or the ones we snuck into cyber cafés to look at.

“I wouldn’t say I was addicted to those, though. It was when I saw all those multiple porn flicks burned on a DVD at a friend’s place that I got interested.

“From there, I began to download adult videos from different sites just to get off. At the time, I thought it was better than having multiple sex partners.”

When Adigun tied the knot with his wife in 2012, his cravings for explicit material continued unabated, and he eventually resorted to the very act he thought he would be safe from—having extramarital affairs.

“After we got married, I frequently indulged in it at the office where there was a free internet connection. On some evenings, I would be so charged that I would rush home to make love. After a time, I just got bored with the thing and had fun with hook-up girls who could spice things up. On some nights, I was still sneaking out of bed to indulge in porn.

“I will never forget the day my wife caught me touching myself in the bathroom while I looked at porn. She felt bad. It caused problems in our marriage. She no longer trusted me. For months after that day, whenever she saw me smiling alone at my phone or laptop, she would ask, ‘Are you watching your blue film again?”

‘I fell into porn after being sex-starved’

Our correspondent spoke to another married man, who disclosed that his descent into pornography and masturbation started after being sex-starved by his wife of four years.

The Ogun State indigene said, “I battled with pornography as a young boy in secondary school.

However, I stopped after I got married. At the initial stage of the marriage, I enjoyed sex with my wife and it was always fun.

“But suddenly, I discovered that she lost the desire for it, even though we don’t even have any child yet. When I demand for sex, she tells me that she is tired. It really got me pissed off and before I knew it, I relapsed into porn and masturbation again just to relieve the urge. Now, I am hooked on it and I don’t even care whether she gives me sex or not. I just go to the bathroom and jerk off.”When our correspondent asked him if his wife was aware of the situation, he said no.

“She has no idea of it. I am also hoping to break off from it, but it has been difficult,” he added.

From soft to hardcore

Investigations by our correspondent showed that both the nature of pornography and its public accessibility in Nigeria have evolved significantly over the past two decades.

In the 90s, visual pornography entered the mainstream with soft-sell local and international magazines. Still, their circulation was often confined to certain social strata, and users had to contend with static erotica (sexually explicit content in a non-moving, still image format, such as photographs, drawings, illustrations etc).

While some of these materials were pictorial, others came in the form of lewd stories, which aided the user’s repertoire of fantasies about specific individuals, whom they considered objects of erotic desire.

At the time, X-rated movies were available to Nigerians only in the form of foreign home video cassettes and late-night cable channels, which were readily subscribed to by upper and middle-class citizens.

For the majority of other citizens, however, porn was inaccessible due to strict home video censorship.

But x-rated video cassettes were often rented at affordable prices from video clubs, which adorned virtually every street corner at the time.

In the early 2000s, the era of video cassettes rapidly gave way to the use of VCDs and DVDs, which provided porn users with upgraded and arguably more deviant forms of explicit content.

Unlike static porn, explicit media were more stimulating, and users quickly got bored viewing the same clip repeatedly.

To attract more customers, DVD marketers began selling dozens of explicit content packed in a single disc to cater to a growing demand for variety.

While their Western counterparts dug greedily for sexually explicit clips in adult bookstores, many Nigerian fans of hardcore porn would often patronise those VCD/DVDs hawkers in stalls and carts in public venues across cities.

During this time, cyber cafés flourished in Nigeria, with many patrons addicted to pornography booking overnight browsing sessions to fully satisfy their cravings.

Although much of this explicit online content was video stills and soft porn, many users resorted to sex webcams in chat rooms and slow video uploads, which in most cases, introduced viruses to the computers used by cyber cafés.

This changed in the late 2000s with the advent of high-speed internet, which introduced a new phenomenon: galleries of short porn clips.

These provided users with an endless stream of explicit videos, offering a few minutes of stimulation at a time, all accessible through a monthly subscription.

Starting in 2009, as more Nigerians gained access to internet-enabled mobile phones, porn tube sites became the go-to destination for many.

These sites allowed users to freely download hardcore content without the constraints of censorship or the fear of public disapproval.

Now, with the ubiquity of high-speed internet, smartphones, online photo-sharing services, social media sites such as X (formerly Twitter), and messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, porn users have a wide variety of access to materials that invariably fuel their addiction.

Caught after the act

A banker and father of three, Peter Durojaiye, told our correspondent that he changed his mode of viewing porn after his wife found an explicit video on his phone.

He said, “That night, I had downloaded some porn videos and got off with them before hitting the bed. But I didn’t remember to cancel the last video I watched before sleeping.

“To cut a long story short, my wife took my phone, maybe to check something, and saw that video. It was our pastor that settled that matter.”

When our correspondent inquired if he had quit porn since then, he responded, “No. I only stopped downloading such videos on my phone. Now, I view them only via the X app so that it doesn’t show on my browsing history.”

‘My view of women changed’

A computer engineer, Wole Daudu, who described himself as a porn user rather than an addict, pointed out that the explicit content he often viewed online changed his general perception of women.

Speaking with our correspondent, he said, “I first came across porn when it popped up while working on my laptop, and out of curiosity, I clicked on it. For me, it opened a kind of window to sex in a way I didn’t see before. The way I talked and looked at women changed, my thoughts became focused on sex, hot girls, buttocks, breasts, and getting off. I began to see women as mere tools for pleasure.

“I tried to introduce some of the styles I was seeing to my wife and she was okay with them at first. It was one day when I was choking her as we were in bed and she shoved my hands away that I knew she wasn’t enjoying it. It made me feel some kind of guilt.

“If you look at porn, you will see the way the women are treated by men. They are slapped, punched, choked and spat upon. The temptation is for the viewer to emulate these with their partner or wife. That, for me, was where I drew the line.”

A married woman who gave her name as Efe, in a message published by The Cable in September 2016 complained that after she got married, she found out that her husband was addicted to pornography.

She added that the results of medical tests conducted to unravel the cause of their infertility revealed that her husband also had low sperm counts.

“Even when we try to exercise our conjugal rights, it is always frustrating, because he can hardly maintain an erection. I have been hiding this shameful secret and I have also tried justifying his action by thinking that all men are into pornography. He has stopped sharing our matrimonial bed with me altogether,” she wrote.

According to research published by the Utah State University and the Journal of Sexual Research, some of the negative effects of porn addiction include a loss of interest in real partners, decreased intimacy, a loss of erection, delayed ejaculation or complete inability to orgasm during sex, and alarming new sexual tastes due to porn fetishes.

Daily masturbation, extreme content

In a Facebook support private group named Sex, Porn and Masturbation, which our correspondent joined, a member, Richard (surname withheld) wrote, “I struggle with porn and masturbate every day. I watch porn even after sleeping with my wife.

“I don’t know what to do and I don’t even want to pray because I feel guilty inside. I confessed to her and now she is saying she wants to leave me, please help.”

Another member and father of one, who preferred to be known as Godson told our correspondent in a private message that he had viewed extremely explicit content.

“When you start you will think, ‘Okay this is enough, it’s time to stop,’ but it’s not that easy because your brain keeps demanding more of it. It’s like a drug that you keep returning to. I have seen terrible things on the internet while searching for something new to excite my fantasy.

“I have seen little girls being defiled by big men. I have seen bestiality videos and even rape porn. This thing messes up the mind. It’s better not to start it than pulling out of it,” Godson wrote.

Most visited websites

Although the Nigerian public spaces are largely conservative and pornography is openly frowned upon by religious and traditional leaders, there are indications that there is a high demand for sexually explicit material among citizens online.

Data shared by StatiSense in a post on X on July 25, revealed that two porn popular sites, ranked third and sixth, respectively, among the most visited websites by Nigerians via mobile devices.

In another data posted on the same day by StatiSense, a porn website (name withheld) was the 12th most visited website by Nigerians.

The data for February 2024, also indicated that three popular porn pages are among 10 most visited porn sites in Nigeria.

Similarly, StatiSense data from 2019 showed that Xvideos and Xnxx were among the 10 most visited websites in Nigeria.

However, our correspondent could neither independently verify if the users, visited the sites more than once nor confirm the demography of the site visitors.

A review of one of the sites reveals a vast collection of both short and long videos, organised into 60 major categories to cater to a diverse audience with various fetishes.

Some of these categories seen by our correspondent include solo, anal, teen, teacher, doctor, office, missionary, virgin, brunette and blonde.

Other categories which users were expected to select from were Asian, Black, Arab, Indian, African, Nigerian, Naija, cam porn, lesbian, gay, AI, hardcore, and incest.

The site also features hundreds of registered users from around the world who upload amateur explicit videos and photos to attract views and hookups.

Conversely, the site appears to integrate literary, visual and graphic porn to appeal to its visitors.

The site has a genre section, which includes diary, essay, fantasy, fiction, news, poems, sex jokes and a plethora of explicit videos with over 140 themes.

Some of the listed themes on the site indicate extreme and violent content such as horror, domination, bestiality, rape, torture, monster, prostitution, aliens and slavery.

The dark web

Findings by our correspondent revealed that many internet users, both single and married, usually access extreme porn and sexually deviant content through what has been called ‘the dark web.’

It was gathered that links to the dark web are placed at reputable sites or they might be targeted at users of an age through spam emails, fake notifications, or misleading ads, who through a click are redirected to a site they never intended to visit.

Shedding more light on how the underground web operates, an SEO and AI for business tech expert, Ndubuisi Ubani, explained that the dark web is sustained by blackmailers who use sex video leaks, sexual content creators and cybersex enthusiasts.

He said, “Cybersex enthusiasts are those who request and are willing to pay for or fund sexual content online including child porn, bizarre and customised sex content, sex parties and orgies.

“You also have on the dark web people with alternative sex needs – people in relationships (including married folks) who engage in threesomes, partner swapping, polyamorous relationships, swingers, etc. The darker corner of the web contains porn sites, child pornography sites, human and drug trafficking sites, dark markets for illicit/counterfeit goods, community forums, etc.

“Though the dark web was once hidden, it’s now easily accessible through mainstream social and communication platforms due to mobile dominance, private and untracked communication as opposed to messing around in real life, where users can be caught in action or mocked by others.”

Explaining further, Ubani revealed that dark web contents like porn are not only consumed on mainstream porn sites but also on social and private messaging apps like Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat, MonkeyApp, dating apps, video sharing and streaming sites, and AI apps capable of turning photos/videos into porn.

He pointed out that the porn ecosystem on the dark web is animated by people’s curiosity, escape from pressures of daily life such as marital problems, and exploration.

“Overall, the perceived discretion when using the dark web can be intoxicating, creating a false sense of safety. Over time, the hidden nature of these activities fuels addiction, making it harder to break free.”

Continuing, he said, “The more users indulge, the deeper they sink, isolating themselves in a shadowy world that promises pleasure but ultimately leaves them disconnected, vulnerable, and trapped in their private darkness.

“In the end, addiction to the dark web (porn) is a choice and a personal battle. While we can’t force anyone to change their habits, we can offer guidance and support. Ultimately, a combination of education, prevention, and treatment is essential in addressing this complex issue.”

‘Porn desensitises the brain’

The President, Association of Resident Doctors at the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Calabar, Cross River State, Dr Victor Essien, in a phone interview with our correspondent, highlighted the importance of recognising the complex interplay between watching pornography and its impact on the brain and behaviours of married men.

He said, “Recent studies suggest that excessive consumption of pornography can alter the brain’s reward circuitry, affecting emotional and relational well-being. One of the most significant effects of pornography on the brain is its ability to hijack the dopamine reward system.

“Dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and motivation, is released during the viewing of sexually explicit material. Over time, the brain adapts to this heightened stimulation by desensitising, leading to a need for increasingly graphic or novel content to achieve the same level of arousal.

“This cycle can result in a diminished capacity for experiencing pleasure from everyday activities and can negatively affect a married man’s emotional and sexual connection with his spouse.”

Essien further explained that frequent pornography use could foster unrealistic expectations about sex and intimacy.

“The scripted and exaggerated nature of pornographic content often fails to align with the realities of a committed relationship, potentially leading to dissatisfaction and unrealistic comparisons. This can create a barrier to genuine intimacy and communication, as a man might find himself less present or engaged with his partner.

“Additionally, some men may experience guilt, shame, or anxiety related to their pornography consumption, which can strain marital relationships. Addressing these feelings through open communication and seeking professional help can be crucial in mitigating its adverse effects on marriage.

“While not all men will experience negative consequences from watching pornography, its potential impact on the brain and marital relationship warrants thoughtful consideration. By promoting open dialogue and understanding, couples can navigate these challenges together,” he added.

Divorces, incest linked to porn addiction

Speaking with our correspondent, a cyber-safety advocate and publisher of Internet Safety Magazine, Rotimi Onadipe, noted some of the negative consequences of porn addiction, which he said include divorce, irresponsibility, sexual abuse and incest within the family.

He said, “Porn addiction can destroy marriages because the man no longer enjoys sex with his wife. When a married man is addicted to porn, he will also be addicted to masturbation and this will prevent him from enjoying the marriage again, because he doesn’t need to persuade the wife again. He’ll just lock himself up in a room or a private place to get sexually satisfied.

“Now, this repeats itself each time he has a sexual desire and if there’s no place for him to do this, he could sexually abuse someone around him, even if it’s his daughter. Such an addiction also makes men irresponsible in the home because they spend most of their time, energy, data subscription and money invested in porn and masturbation, leaving the major things they ought to do at home undone.

“In some homes, this addiction in fathers also affects the children. There have been cases of married men exposing their children to porn, either knowingly or unknowingly and this is where incest starts within the home because the children too begin to practice it within themselves.”

Onadipe advised that husbands and fathers addicted to porn should not keep silent due to shame but opt for professional counselling to be helped.

‘Porn addicts need therapy’

An addiction counsellor and founder of the David Folaranmi Foundation, David Folaranmi, in an interview with our correspondent, faulted the widely believed notion that marriage was the escape route from pornography addiction.

He said, “I once felt that way too but having counselled several married men who opened up to me about their continuous struggles with porn, I can categorically tell you that marriage isn’t the solution.”

Folaranmi explained that research had shown that frequent consumption of pornography could alter expectations about sex and intimacy, leading to dissatisfaction, strained relationships, decreased sexual satisfaction and emotional distance between spouses.

He added, “Men who use pornography as a coping mechanism might become less likely to engage in meaningful conversations about their sexual needs or concerns. Pornography can lead to infidelity. Often, men who consume pornographic content, tend to have multiple sexual partners.

“If you are struggling with pornography and you want to come out of it, then you must acknowledge the impact of pornography on your life. Reach out for professional support from therapists specialised in addiction.

“Study educational resources on pornography addiction; be accountable to your spouse; build an inner circle of people who understand what you are going through and be accountable to them; avoid being alone or in lonely places; and address any underlying issues – emotional or psychological. Understand your triggers and come up with coping mechanisms to break the craving cycle, and finally, pray about it.”