Jerk From Home: Pandemic Has Fueled A Rise In UK Porn Addicts

As former CNN personality Jeffrey Toobin can tell you, working from home can pose its own unique set of ‘challenges’ – including turning casual porn watchers into total addicts who wank away the day.

In the United Kingdom, the number of Britons seeking medical help for the issue has almost doubled during the pandemic, when working from home became mainstream, according to the Daily Mail.

The Laurel Centre in London, the largest sex and porn addiction clinic in Britain, says it is now treating some remote workers who watch up to 14 hours of porn a day.

Dr Paula Hall, the centre’s clinical director, said WFH meant people are now spending more time than ever alone in front of their computers.

“It means you’ve got more opportunity, you don’t have to wait until you get home at night, you can be more impulsive during the day,” according to Hall, who noted that the London-based center saw around 750 porn addicts during the first six months of 2022 alone – vs. 950 for all of 2019.

Therapists working for the center also spend around 600 hours a month counseling people with porn addictions vs. just 360 hours per month in 2019, while Sex Addicts Anonymous UK told the Mail that lockdown and pandemic stress took a toll on mental health, driving people to porn websites.

“Porn addiction is a shame-based illness. We use compulsive sexual behaviour to escape from and block difficult feelings,” said one spokesman. “It’s easy to see why; sex is powerful and all consuming and unlike alcohol or narcotics, we don’t have to visit the office or see our dealer.”

“We face a public health crisis with toxic pornography available at no cost to anyone, which is especially worrying for our young people.“

According to Dr. Hall, working from home allows people to act on impulses without the fear of colleagues seeing them (for the most part).

There were an estimated 1.7 million people who said that they work mainly from home in 2019, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which this represents about 5 per cent of the total workforce.

This surged to almost half (46.6 per cent) in April 2020 during the first Covid lockdown, with about 13million mainly working from home.

While the share of people working predominantly from home has dropped since the peak of the pandemic, hybrid working has become a mainstay. 

The most recent ONS data suggests 9.9million people now mainly work from home. -Daily Mail

 “If you’re regularly viewing pornography for longer than two hours it’s probably not about sexual arousal. It’s probably about escape,” said Dr. Hall, adding “It’s a bit like making yourself breakfast and staring at it for two hours, if you’re hungry, you’re going to eat it, not going to stare at it.”

“Addiction is a sign of a life that is unhappy and not being well managed.”