Garza, pictured with her husband Willow Neilson, describes her decades-long struggle with her pornography addiction that began when she was 12 years old and living in the LA area. Photo / Instagram
Garza, pictured with her husband Willow Neilson, describes her decades-long struggle with her pornography addiction that began when she was 12 years old and living in the LA area. Photo / Instagram
Warning: Graphic content
An author has written in great detail and with brutal honesty about her struggle with pornography addiction in a provocative memoir.
Erica Garza, 35, charts in her book, titled Getting Off, her relationship with pornography that began at the age of 12 and lasted into her early 30s.
The addiction was broken in part due to the love of her now-husband, Willow Neilson, with whom Garza has a child, according to the Daily Mail.
Garza's porn addiction began while she was growing up in the Los Angeles area and needed to wear a back brace due to her scoliosis for which she was bullied, the New York Post, which has obtained a copy of her memoir, reports.
"What I got was an elaborate mixture of shame and sexual excitement," she writes of her interest in porn.
She describes in an essay written for Salon in 2014 how her habit began with watching soft-core pornography on Cinemax after her parents went to sleep.
As she matured, so did the internet, and she later moved on to watching more hardcore material on her computer.
One distinct mention in her upcoming book is the release of the sex tape made by Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.
She was 15 when it was leaked to the public.
Boyfriends and sexual partners thought of her as a "cool girl," due to her open relationship with pornography, she writes.
"It felt like a relief for me because we had a sort of wall between us, and we didn't have to get as [emotionally] intimate as we could have," she writes.
Starting from the age of 17, when she lost her virginity, she details how she had sex with men that would leave her feeling 'broken, unlovable, worthless and used'.
In one anecdote in the book, per a preview from The Cut, she describes watching porn after intercourse with a partner, called Clay, and 'getting off' twice on her own despite not reaching orgasm with the man.
"I give myself two orgasms in the wet spot of the bed.
"Once, to a three-minute clip of a teenage cheerleader having sex with her stepdad on the kitchen counter while her mom showers upstairs, and then again to the thought of what a miserable s**t I am to allow a guy like Clay to use me for sex."
Garza managed to overcome her addiction, she writes, through the love of her husband, therapy and yoga. Photo / Instagram
In the same segment, she describes her favorite scene: "My favorite porn scene of all time involves two sweaty women, 50 horny men, a warehouse, a harness, a hair dryer, and a taxicab.
"You can put it all together in a dozen different ways and I bet you still can't imagine just how revolting the scene actually is."
In a different essay written for Salon, she describes how she went down a rabbit hole of watching videos of "gang bangs," or scenes in which multiple men have sex with a woman, which culminated in her fascination with a video in which 620 men have sex with a single woman.
In other segments, she describes her turbulent and promiscuous 20s during which she struggled to find ideas of love and intimacy in favor of orgasmic pleasure.
"My sexual habits were sick and shameful. My thoughts were sick and shameful. I was sick and shameful. But nothing would stop me from getting off," she writes in The Cut.
She describes how she was engaged to a man who encouraged her to attend Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous - but she rebuffed him and instead went on to sleep with multiple men.
At another point in the book, she writes of how she struggled to figure out the root cause of her addiction.
"I had lived a pretty normal life, I thought. I had good parents who loved me the best they could, and I'd suffered no sexually traumatic events. Was I fundamentally flawed?" she writes.
Garza traveled to Bali, Indonesia in an effort to curb her porn and sex addiction. There, she met her husband. Photo / Instagram
Eventually, Garza decided to go to Bali, Indonesia in an effort to kick her porn habit.
There, she met her husband, who is 39 and works as an app designer, the Post reports.
She writes that he started asking her about why she was addicted to porn, which helped her analyze the root causes of her addiction.
She also went to therapy and practised yoga in an effort to help curb her addiction, she writes.
Now, she says she uses porn only "healthily".
She writes in an essay for Good Housekeeping: "As new parents trying to function on little sleep and rushed meals between diapers and feedings, we sometimes use porn as a catalyst to slip into sexy time with ease.
