Comedian and actor Marcus Brigstocke has opened up about his struggles with porn addiction, which he says left him in a “terrible place”.
Brigstocke, who is best known for his stand-up comedy and radio work, revealed to The I that he’s been in recovery for over seven years.
“It changed my sexual self completely,” he admitted. “The things I was into sexually were altered by what I was seeing. I won’t go into specifics but it taught me there is so much elasticity in our sexuality.
He added that porn addicts have “really f**king awful sex if they’re having sex at all”, describing his experience as “awful, shameful, lonely”.
“It’s unhappy,” he said. “Unhappy making. Afterwards, porn addicts will lie there thinking: ‘Well that seems to have made us really quite miserable’.”
Brigstocke added that it “one hundred per cent” changed the way he interacted with women, leaving him in a cycle of shame and isolation and creating a “hole” that left him feeling unlovable.
The comedian split from his first wife Sophie Prideaux in 2013, following an affair with his 2010 Spamalot co-star Hayley Tammadon.
Since April 2018, he has been in a relationship with fellow comedian Rachel Parris. They married on 14 September 2019.
Speaking about that infidelity, Brigstocke said: “It’s a terrible place to find yourself in, because even if somebody looks you directly in the eyes and says ‘I love you’, you’re thinking, ‘That’s because you don’t know what I did. You wouldn’t love me if you knew’.”
Having gone through a difficult detox, the 51-year-old said that these days he is overly cautious and mindful of what he is consuming on social media.
“You can start to be in the world and enjoy the simple things again,” he said. “I’ve quit it in all its forms. Even a scantily clothed person on Facebook, I scroll past and do not pause for a split second. Now I have rediscovered the joy of simple things, of living in the moment again.”
Describing the effect on children, he explained that he’d had a frank discussion with his son about porn and its dangers.
“I had a conversation with my oldest son about it when he was in his early teens,” he explained. “I said: ‘You’re going to see things that don’t look like love, don’t look like sex, don’t look like how people in the real world should treat each other’.”
Brigstocke said he feels he’s lucky to be part of a generation who didn’t encounter the “bottomless pit” of internet porn until they were in early adulthood.
Research indicates the average age at which young people first see explicit material online in the UK is 13 – with many being exposed to it much earlier.
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