Tony is in his 50s and recently did a rough calculation of how much of his life he has spent looking at pornography. “The result was horrifying,” he says. It was eight years. “I can barely think about it. The sense of failure is intense.”
Tony saw his first “hardcore” film on VHS in the 1980s when he was 12. In his 20s, he connected to the internet for the first time, which turned his habit into a “full-blown addiction”. Over the past 30 years, he has just about managed to maintain a double life: he works in a caring profession, is friends with men and women, has had relationships. But there is a part of him he keeps entirely hidden.
