By Edward Marriott

Porn is more accessible and more fashionable than ever. But its prevalence masks an inherent emptiness, say experts and users. Many believe the men who rely on it are living a dangerous lie.

There's an episode of Friends - "The One With The Free Porn" - in which Chandler and Joey discover they have tuned into a porn channel. And it's free. They leave the TV on, afraid switching off will mean no more pornography. By the end of the episode, Chandler is seeing the world through porn-tinted spectacles. "I was just at the bank," he complains, "and the teller didn't ask me to go do it with her in the vault." Joey, bewildered, reports a similar reaction from the pizza delivery girl. "You know what," decides Chandler, "we have to turn off the porn."

As a society, however, we are further than ever from turning off the porn. Pornography is everywhere - it masquerades as "gentlemen's entertainment", it infiltrates advertising and, in Britain, it will soon be available in back pockets, thanks to a deal by an adult entertainment giant to beam porn to mobile phones.

In the US, people spend more on porn every year than they do on movie tickets and all the performing arts combined. Each year, in Los Angeles alone, more than 10,000 hard-core pornographic films are made, against an annual Hollywood average of just 400 movies.

Pornography is not only bigger business than ever, it is also more acceptable, more fashionable, more of a statement of cool. From pieces "in praise of porn" in the normally sober Prospect magazine, to Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton's book - Once More, with Feeling, published last year - about making a porn film, to the news that Val Kilmer is to play the part of pornography actor John Holmes in a new mainstream movie, there is a widespread sense that anyone who suggests pornography might have any kind of adverse effect is laughably out of touch.

Coren and Skelton, former Erotic Review film critics, focus on their flip comic narrative, scarcely troubling themselves with any deeper issues. "In all our years of watching porn," they write, in a rare moment of analysis that doesn't get developed any further, "we have never properly resolved what we think about how, why and whether it is degrading to women. We suspect that it might be. We suspect that pornography might be degrading to everybody."

But what about the millions who consume pornography; the men - for they are, despite pornographers' claims about growing numbers of female fans, mostly men - who habitually use it? How are they affected? Is pornography, as most claim, a harmless masturbatory diversion? That episode of Friends suggested, albeit with tongue in cheek, that a diet of porn might encourage men to inappropriately expect sex. Is that true? And what about more profound effects? How does it affect relationships? Is it addictive? Does it encourage rape, pedophilia, sexual murder? Tough questions need to be asked.

The received wisdom, pushed hard by such mass-market magazines as Loaded and FHM, is that men derive a pretty uncomplicated enjoyment from pornography. That, certainly, is the argument put forward by such proponents as A.A. Gill, who has directed his own pornographic film, and the musician Moby, who once said in an interview: "I like pornography - who doesn't? I don't really trust men who claim to not be interested in porn. We're biologically programmed to respond to the sight of people having sex." Danny Plunkett, then features editor of Loaded, takes an equally relaxed view: "We know that a lot of people enjoy it and take it with a pinch of salt. We certainly don't view it as dangerous."

But is it as simple as this? One of my best friends is a man for whom pornography has apparently never held even the slimmest interest. Moby may choose to distrust him, but his sex life has always seemed to me to be perfectly robust. He is, however, so much in the minority as to seem almost an oddity.

For most men, pornography has, at some point in their lives, held a strong appeal and, before any examination of its effects, this fact has to be addressed. Like many men, I first saw pornography during puberty. At boarding school, dog-eared copies of Mayfair and Knave magazines were stowed behind toilet cisterns. This borrow-and-return system was considered absolutely normal, seldom commented on and either never discovered by the masters or tacitly permitted. Long before my first sexual relationship, porn was my sex education.

No doubt (though we'd never have admitted it then), my friends and I were driven to use porn through loneliness. Being away from home, we longed for love, closeness, unquestioning acceptance. The women over whom we masturbated - the surrogate mothers, if you like - seemed to be offering this but, of course, they were never going to provide it. The untruths it taught me on top of this disappointment - that women are always available, that sex is about what a man can do to a woman - I am only now, more than two decades on, finally succeeding in unlearning.

From men everywhere come similar stories. Nick Samuels, 46, an electrical contractor from Essex - now, with a wife and four children, the very image of respectable fatherhood - says he discovered the power of pornographic images at the age of 16, when he found a copy of Mayfair in his father's garage.

"I can even remember the picture. There was a woman walking topless past a building site and the builders were ogling her from the scaffolding. It was pretty soft stuff, but it heightened my senses and kicked off my interest in pornography. Before long, I was reading Whitehouse and then, through a friend at my squash club, I was introduced to hard-core videos."

Si Jones, a 39-year-old north London vicar who regularly counsels men trying to "come off" pornography, admits that it was also his introduction to sex. "As a teenager, I watched porn films with my friends at the weekend. It was just what you did. It was cool, naughty and everyone was doing it."

Set against today's habit of solitary internet masturbation, Jones's collegiate introduction to porn seems peculiarly sociable. Today, boys no longer clandestinely circulate magazines after school, nor do they need to rummage through their fathers' cupboards in search of titillating material. Access to internet pornography has never been easier and its users never younger.

At its most basic level, pornography answers natural human curiosity. Adolescent boys want to know what sex is about, and porn certainly demonstrates the mechanics. David Morgan, a consultant clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Portman Clinic in London, which specialises in problems relating to sexuality and violence, describes this phase as "transitional, like a rehearsal for the real thing. The problem with pornography begins when, instead of being a temporary stop on the way to full sexual relations, it becomes a full-time place of residence."

Morgan's experience of counselling men addicted to porn has convinced him that "the more time you spend in this fantasy world, the more difficult it becomes to make the transition to reality. Just like drugs, pornography provides a quick fix, a masturbatory universe people can get stuck in. This can result in their not being able to involve anyone else."

Yet men, as much as women, hunger for intimacy. For many men, locked into a life in which self-esteem has grown intrinsically entwined with performance, sex assumes an almost unsustainable freight of demands and needs. Not only does the act itself become almost the only means through which many men can feel intimate and close, but it is also the way in which they find validation. And sex itself, of course, cannot possibly satisfy such demands.

It is into this troubled scenario that porn finds such easy access. For in pornography, unlike in real life, there is no criticism, real or imagined, of a man's performance. Women are always, in the words of the average internet site, "hot and ready", eager to please. In real life, by contrast, men find women are anything but: they have higher job status, they demand to be sexually satisfied, and they are increasingly opting to combine career and motherhood.

Men, say psychologists, also feel threatened by the "emotional power" they feel women hold over them. Unable to feel alive except when in relationships with women, they are, at the same time, painfully aware that their only salvation from isolation comes in being sexually acceptable to women. This sense of neediness can provoke intense anger that, all too often, finds expression in porn. Unlike real life, the pornographic world is a place in which men find their authority unchallenged and in which women are their willing, even grateful, servants.

"The illusion is created," as one man who writes on pornography puts it, "that women are really in their rightful place and that there is, after all, no real and serious challenge to male authority." Seen in this light, the patently ridiculous pornography scenario of the pretty flat hunter (or hitchhiker, driver with broken-down car, or any number of similar such vulnerable roles) who is happy to let herself be gang-banged by a group of overweight, hairy-shouldered couch potatoes makes perfect psychological sense.

Pornography, in other words, is a lie. It peddles falsehoods about men, women and human relationships. In the name of titillation, it seduces vulnerable, lonely men - and a small number of women - with the promise of intimacy, and delivers only a transitory masturbatory fix. Increasingly, though, men are starting to be open about the effect pornography has had on them.

David McLeod, a marketing executive, explains the cycle: "I'm drawn to porn when I'm lonely, particularly when I'm single and sexually frustrated. But I can easily get disgusted with myself. After watching a video two or three times, I'll throw it away and vow never to watch another again. But my resolve never lasts very long." He has, he says, "seen pretty much everything. I've even seen pictures of men being buggered by a pig. But once you start going down that slope, you get very quickly jaded."

Like many men, McLeod is torn. Quick to claim that porn has "no harmful effects", he is also happy to acknowledge the contradictory fact that it is "deadening". Andy Philips, a Leeds art dealer and, at 38, a father for the first time, says he has been "a very heavy user" at times. His initial reaction, like that of many men, is studiedly jokey: "I love porn." Yet, as he grows more contemplative, he admits: "I've always used it secretly, never as part of a relationship. It's always been like the other woman on the side. It's something to do with being naughty, I guess."

Again and again, despite being married now, he is drawn back. "You can easily get too much of it. It's deadening, nullifying, gratuitous, unsatisfying. At one point, I was single for three years and I used a lot of porn then. After a while, it made me feel worse. I'd feel disgusted with myself and have a huge purge."

Extended exposure to pornography can have a raft of effects. By the time Nick Samuels had reached his mid-20s, it was altering his view of what he wanted from a sexual relationship. "I used to watch porn with one of my girlfriends, and I started to want to try things I'd seen in the films: anal sex, or threesomes." Sometimes, he says, this was OK - "she was an easygoing person". At other times, "it shocked her". Married for 15 years, he admits he has carried the same sexual expectations into the marital bedroom. "There's been real friction over this: my wife simply isn't that kind of person. And it's only now, after all these years, that I'm beginning to move on from it. Porn is like alcoholism: it clings to you like a leech."

Psychoanalyst Estela Welldon, author of the classic text Mother, Madonna, Whore, has treated couples for whom such scenarios spiralled out of control. "A lot of men involve their partners in the use of porn. Typically, they will say: 'Don't you want a better sex life?' I have seen cases in which first the woman has been subjected to porn, and then they have used their own children for pornographic purposes."

When couples use porn together - a growing trend, anecdotal evidence suggests - there is, says Welldon, "an illusory sense that they are getting closer together. Then they film themselves having sex and feel outside themselves. This dehumanising aspect is an important part of pornography. It dehumanises the other person, the relationship, and any intimacy."

In its most severe form, this can lead to sexual crime, though the links between the two remain controversial and much argued-over. Ray Wyre, a specialist in sexual crime, says: "It is impossible not to believe pornography plays a part in sexual violence. As we constantly confront sex offenders about their behaviour, they display a wide range of distorted views that they then use to excuse their behaviour, justify their actions, blame the victim and minimise the effect of their offending. They seek to make their own behaviour seem normal, and interpret the behaviour of the victim as consent, rather than a survival strategy. Pornography legitimises these views."

One of the most extreme examples of this is Ted Bundy, the US serial sexual murderer executed for his crimes in January 1989. The night before his death, he explained his addiction to pornography in a radio interview: "It happened in stages, gradually ... My experience with ... pornography that deals on a violent level with sexuality is that once you become addicted to it, and I look at this as a kind of addiction like other kinds of addiction, I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder, harder, something which gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far ... It reaches that jumping-off point where you begin to wonder if, maybe, actually doing it will give you that which is beyond just reading about it or looking at it."

Bundy, as damaged as he was, stopped short of blaming pornography for his actions, though it was, he believed, an intrinsic part of the picture. "I tell you that I am not blaming pornography ... I take full responsibility for whatever I've done and all the things I've done ... I don't want to infer that I was some helpless kind of victim. And yet we're talking about an influence that is the influence of violent types of media and violent pornography, which was an indispensable link in the chain ... of events that led to behaviours, to the assaults, to the murders." In the understated words of Wyre: "The very least pornography does is make sexism sexy."

The average man, of course, whatever his consumption of pornography, is no Bundy. Yet for those who have become addicted, the road to a pornography-free life can be long and arduous.

Si Jones advises accountability: "Make your computer accountable, let other people check what you've been looking at."

And the alternative to pornography, says Morgan, is not always easy. "Relationships are difficult. Intimacy, having a good relationship, loving your children, involves work. Pornography is fantasy in the place of reality. But it is just that: fantasy. Pornography is not real, and the only thing human beings get nourishment from is reality: real relationships. And, anyway, what do you want to say when you get to the end of your life? That you wish you'd spent more time [masturbating] on the internet? I hardly think so."

Copyright © 2003 The Guardian