In a provocative new memoir, Getting Off, Erica Garza, 35, from LA charts a struggle with addiction to casual sex and pornography addiction. Photo / Instagram
Warning: Graphic details.
An author has revealed how her sex addiction saw her host parties up to four nights a week so she could meet men, boast about hating condoms and ruin a relationship with a man she loved by cheating on him with a man she met on holiday and a French waiter.
In a provocative new memoir, Getting Off, Erica Garza, 35, from Los Angeles charts a struggle with addiction to casual sex and pornography addiction, which she battled for more than two decades.
"What I got was an elaborate mixture of shame and sexual excitement I had come to depend on since I was 12 years old," she said.
In her 20s, Garza would throw house parties up to four nights a week so she could meet men, attracting them by showing off her easy attitude to online porn.
"After I'd had enough tequila and was feeling ballsy, I'd rave about porn. Sometimes I took out my laptop and played some of the "nicer" clips as if I were simply turning on the radio," the Sunday Times magazine reports.
"And every time I did these things, or confessed to hating condoms, or to having an unusually high sex drive, I hoped the guys liked me even more than they seemed to.
"I was one of them, I thought, and not like other girls. When my confessions would elicit laughs or high-fives or nods of recognition, I'd feel a rush of what I thought was intimacy."
Garza did have serious relationship but her engagement to one man broke down because she became obsessed with the idea he was having an affair.
Another three-year relationship with a man she loved broke down because she cheated on him with a Colombian man she met on holiday and then, instead of trying to repair the damage, she slept with a French waiter instead.
She described her shame over her addiction as: "Sickening: Letting daylight dissipate and with it all my plans and obligations for the day because I'd rather stay in bed with high-definition clips of naughty secretaries, busty nurses, incestuous cheerleaders, drunk frat party girls and sad Thai hookers."
Garza's porn addiction was broken in part due to the love of her now-husband, Willow Neilson, with whom she has a child, therapy and spending time at a yoga retreat.
It 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.
She described 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 hard-core 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 explained.
"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 wrote.
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."
In the same segment, she described her favorite scene involving "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," she said.
In a different essay written for Salon, she described how she went down a rabbit hole of watching videos of "gang bangs" - 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 described 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 wrote 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 asked.
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 analyse 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 wrote 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.
"Afterward, in a tight embrace, our vomit-stained clothes in a heap beside the bed, I sometimes feel guilty."
She continues: "But then we'll have one of those miraculous days, where the baby's well rested and so are we.
"There's no need to rush or think about what we're doing wrong — and I can see a glimmer of the bright future that lies ahead."
• Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction is published by Simon & Schuster