Contemporary Authors

• Getting Off: One Woman's Journey through Sex and Porn Addiction Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2017

1. Getting off : one woman's journey through sex and porn addiction LCCN 2017013458 Type of material Book Personal name Garza, Erica, author. Main title Getting off : one woman's journey through sex and porn addiction / Erica Garza. Published/Produced New York : Simon & Schuster, [2017] Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9781501163371 (hardcover) 9781501163395 (trade paper) CALL NUMBER RC560.S43 G37 2017 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Erica Garza - http://www.ericagarza.com/about/

  Writer. Mother. Traveler.
  Erica Garza’s essays have appeared in Salon, Narratively, BUST, Good Housekeeping, and the Los Angeles Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. Getting Off, her memoir on sex addiction, is her first book. Born in Los Angeles to a Mexican father and a Mexican-American mother, she has spent the majority of her adult life traveling and living abroad. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jan/17/erica-garza-getting-off-book-sex-porn-addiction

  'Sex addiction can happen to anyone': author Erica Garza sheds light on a female taboo
  In her debut memoir, Getting Off, Erica Garza confronts her experience of overcoming sex and porn addiction, and the shame that still surrounds it

  Arwa Mahdawi
  Arwa Mahdawi

  Wed 17 Jan 2018 06.00 EST Last modified on Wed 24 Jan 2018 12.39 EST
  View more sharing options
  Shares
  418
  Comments
  403
  Erica Garza: ‘There’s a real danger with using sex addiction to justify bad behavior’.
  Erica Garza: ‘There’s a real danger with using sex addiction to justify bad behavior’. Photograph: Rachael Lee Stroud
  Erica Garza is telling me about the first time she masturbated and the people at the table next to us are doing a very subpar job of pretending not to eavesdrop.

  I’m sitting at a hotel bar in midtown Manhattan drinking coffee with the 35-year-old debut author, whose memoir, Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction, was published last Tuesday. This is Garza’s second interview of the day; earlier that morning she was on NBC talking to Megyn Kelly. She has had no trouble drumming up interest for her book and, if the intrigued glances from the women next to us are anything to go by, it seems likely to amass an immediate audience.

  It’s not surprising that there’s an appetite for Garza’s memoir. It may be 2018, but there remains a lot of secrecy and shame around female sexuality. While a good proportion of popular culture seems to center around men jerking off, female masturbation remains a relatively taboo subject. There are, Garza notes, “shows like Broad City and Insecure which depict women watching porn or masturbating, so things are changing for the better” but they are few and far between. Even the current #MeToo movement, which has ignited a debate about sexual mores, hasn’t really focused on women as sexual agents; rather hypersexuality has been equated with toxic masculinity.

  Meanwhile, women are watching more porn than ever: according to Pornhub’s 2017 Year in Review, “Porn for Women” was the top trending search of the year, increasing by over 1,400%.

  There certainly weren’t any frank discussions about such topics when Garza was growing up. Garza was born into a middle-class Mexican family and grew up in the well-to-do suburbs of LA. As a young girl at Catholic school, Garza says, it was made very clear to her “that sex was for procreation and anything outside of that was sinful or dirty or bad”. This made it difficult for her to separate shame from pleasure. “The first time I masturbated I felt immense pleasure and immense shame at the same time. So, I think I continued to seek out situations that would produce the same feelings in me because I didn’t know how to separate the two.”

  Advertisement

  As she grew older, her shame spiraled into what she describes as an all-consuming sex addiction. She’d spend whole days in bed masturbating to porn; have unprotected sex with a string of guys she’d just met; ruin promising relationships because she couldn’t stop herself having sex with other people. “In some moments, with some partners, ‘sexually liberated’ was exactly what I felt,” she writes in her book. “But those moments were rare.” Being sexually liberated is empowering; her sex addiction was just the opposite.

  But what exactly is a sex addiction? The term was popularized in the early 1980s but isn’t currently listed in the standard diagnostic manuals of mental disorders –and not everyone is sure it is an actual illness. So many disgraced male celebrities, the latest being Harvey Weinstein, have claimed to be sex addicts, potentially giving them a free pass for despicable acts.

  Garza acknowledges that’s “there’s a real danger with using sex addiction to justify bad behavior, especially right now with everything that’s happening in Hollywood.” However, she says, it’s “important to know that not all sex addicts are in positions of power and not all sex addicts want to take advantage of and hurt other people.”

  In some moments, ‘sexually liberated’ was exactly what I felt. But those moments were rare
  Further, says Garza, there is no easy definition of sex addiction. “I’m often asked how many hours of porn I watch and how many partners I’ve had. Understandably people want to measure an addiction because then it’s easier to cure. But sex addiction doesn’t work that way. I can’t just say ‘two hours of porn a day is OK but three is a problem’, because everyone expresses their sexuality in different ways.”

  When it comes to her own experience, Garza says, she knew she had a dysfunctional relationship with sex and porn “because it was getting in the way of my intimacy with other people; it was getting in the way of my productivity. I just felt bad about it all the time.” Garza says would cancel plans so she wouldn’t miss out on opportunities to have sex and sabotaged relationship after relationship because, she says, she “felt really unworthy of love”.

  Just as there is no straightforward diagnosis of sex addiction, says Garza, there’s no simple way of curing it. Garza herself tried various remedies, from going to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings (which, she says, were overwhelmingly male) to meditation to therapy.

  Erica Garza, who was raised Catholic, says: ‘The first time I masturbated I felt immense pleasure and immense shame at the same time.’
  Facebook Twitter Pinterest
  Erica Garza, who was raised Catholic, says: ‘The first time I masturbated I felt immense pleasure and immense shame at the same time.’ Photograph: Kzenon/Alamy
  Then, just as she was about to turn 30, she took a trip to Bali “partly inspired by Eat, Pray, Love”. There, she started doing a lot of yoga and taking care of herself. “When I was in that clear-headed space I met my husband – he was on his own journey recovering from drug addiction,” she says. It was the first time she was able to be in an honest, healthy relationship, and, from there, she started to develop a healthier relationship with sex.

  Garza hopes her memoir will educate people about the nature and prevalence of sex addiction. “I think the common narrative with sex addictions and most addictions is that it’s preceded by abuse and trauma and so I really wanted to open up that narrative and show that it could really happen to anyone, even if you had a safe, loving childhood as I had,” she explains.

  Her intention with the book, she stresses, isn’t to “promote censorship or demonize the porn industry. I think that people can use porn in a healthy way.” Rather she wants to help break down the shame that still shrouds female sexuality.

  Has #MeToo gone too far, or not far enough? The answer is both
  Laura Kipnis
  Read more
  But while Garza may intend for her memoir to promote a more complex view of female sexuality and desire, I wonder if might end up doing just the opposite.

  The tabloids have seized upon Garza’s memoir with obvious relish, and much of the coverage appears to have turned her story into a modern morality tale: a nice Catholic schoolgirl develops a shameful addiction to sex and internet porn. Just when she hits rock bottom, she meets her husband. The love of a good man saved her, turning her into a loving wife and mother.

  Garza always knew her story risked getting sensationalized and simplified. Still, she says, she has been disappointed by how reductive some of the coverage has been.

  Some outlets, she feels, have “minimized my story by saying that I was saved by a man, and that my husband was the main reason I changed. Yes, he played a very important role but that’s not the whole story.” In addition, says Garza, “a few articles really made a point of saying I was a mom – I think if I were a dad they wouldn’t have mentioned that. It felt like they were trying to shame me or make me into some kind of freak show.”

  But while she feels like some of the coverage has been trying to shame her, “I also feel like nobody is going to be able to shame me more than I’ve already shamed myself. They can certainly try. But that’s on them. I’m past that.”

  Getting Off, by Erica Garza, is out now

• The Cut - https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/sex-addiction-women-erica-garza-getting-off.html

  Addicted to Shame For years, sex and porn wreaked havoc on my life.
  By Erica Garza

  JANUARY 3, 2018
  10:05 AM
  SHARE
  TWEET
  PIN IT
  COMMENT
  This guy I kind of know named Clay, who has a neck tattoo and sells arty photographs to tourists, is on top of me and he’s not wearing a condom. I don’t care. I’m completely sober. He’s not. I’m not sure what time it is. It is so dark outside that I can barely see Clay’s tattoo or his mouth full of crooked teeth. I hear him grunting; I feel his body’s weight — his six-foot-eight frame on my five-foot-two — and I know he’s almost finished. I’m too tired to have an orgasm, so I wait for the inevitable end. He turns me over, which is his favorite way to come. My eyes, fully adjusted to the darkness now, focus on the dent forming between my headboard and the wall. It’s not that I don’t enjoy this; enjoy is not nearly big enough a word. I have come to crave these nights with Clay.

  Afterward, we lie there, our elbows touching. I am less sleepy than I was when I opened the door, so the awkwardness sets in fast. He asks how my day was, and then I wait in desperate anticipation for the “call you tomorrow” or “see you in a few days,” which may or may not be true. I don’t care. Finally he feeds me his lines and gets dressed and goes, and 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 slut I am to allow a guy like Clay to use me for sex.

  ADVERTISEMENT

  There’s nothing unique about this singular moment. I can reach into my arsenal of memories and easily pick out another story just like it, sometimes not even including a man. Because what I got from Clay was more than just his penis inside of me. What I got was an elaborate mix of shame and sexual excitement I had come to depend on since I was 12 years old. And my methods of getting this only became darker and more intense, wreaking havoc on all aspects of my life until I became a shell of a person, isolated, on a path to certain destruction.

  With Clay gone and my two orgasms over, I steep in the afterglow of having gotten what I needed. And, by now, I’m too exhausted to consider answering the overwhelming question echoing inside of me. Why am I doing this? What I block out of my mind, because it doesn’t fit the sad story I’m devising in my head, is that I’m using Clay too. He’s probably caught up in the same emptiness I am, desperately filling it with any warm body available. For what little conversation we have, Clay and I are actually quite similar, and we could probably have a genuine connection if we talked about these things. But we don’t talk about these things because — well, it isn’t sexy. I’d rather stick with the one thing that always manages to get me off — I’m bad, bad, bad.

  My favorite porn scene of all time involves 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.

  Revolting. I’ve been using this word and many adjectives like it to describe the things that have brought me to orgasm for more than two decades. I’m not just referring to porn scenes either. I’m also referring to those scenes from my own life, co-starring semi-conscious men in dark bedrooms and sex workers in cheaply rented rooms, where I prioritized the satisfaction of sexual release over everything else screaming inside of me, Please stop.

  Revolting: that summer after college when, after downing too many shots of tequila at a party, I stripped naked and took a bubble bath in front of a group of men.

  Disgusting: slipping a few $20 bills to a woman who called me “baby” on the other side of a semen-stained pane of glass at a Times Square peep show.

  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.

  I was 30 years old when I watched Steve McQueen’s provocative film Shame, which stars Michael Fassbender as Brandon, a New Yorker whose sex addiction leads him to reject intimacy and seek fulfillment through sex with prostitutes and extensive porn-watching.

  At 30 years old, at 24, even at 12, it was impossible for me to think about sexual pleasure without immediately feeling shame.
  In 2008, three years before Shame was released, I was living in New York City with a man a decade older than me. We were engaged. He was a recovering alcoholic and went to meetings daily, sometimes twice a day, and I began to suspect that the primary reason for this frequency was to get away from me. And why wouldn’t he want to get away? At that time in life I was racked with insecurity and relentlessly jealous. On top of that I was out of work and intimidated by his successful career as a filmmaker. He paid for everything, which seemed to make both of us increasingly uncomfortable over time. When I began to question his whereabouts and raid his journals for evidence of his presumed infidelity he began to resent me. Eventually we fell apart. But one of the things I remember most vividly about our breakdown was his accusation that I was a sex addict. “You’re just saying that because you don’t fuck me enough!” was all I could say, though I knew then, and I had known for a long time, that I did have a problem with sex.

  I just didn’t know what to do about it. He suggested I go to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) meetings, but I ended our relationship instead. It was easier. I wouldn’t go to SLAA for another five years, and when I did, I still wasn’t sure that I belonged there. When people talked about the emptiness that came when they watched porn and how isolated they felt, I shifted in my seat and held my breath, feeling that same sense of recognition I had watching Shame. Maybe these are my people, I thought. But when an attractive and uneasy woman admitted to picking up a “few new STDs” at her latest orgy, I thought, Well, I’m not that bad. And I judged her and judged them and went home and masturbated.

  At 30 years old, at 24, even at 12, it was impossible for me to think about sexual pleasure without immediately feeling shame. I felt bad about the type of porn I watched. I felt bad sleeping with people I didn’t like. I felt bad because of the thoughts I feasted on when I was having sex with people I genuinely loved.

  For as far back as I can remember this is just the way it was. 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. Even though I had a suspicion for a long time that this combination of pleasure and shame probably wasn’t good for me, the satisfaction I felt in acting out was worth it. That’s why I was willing to do things like stick it out for six months with an alcoholic bartender even when he’d repeatedly piss the bed and forget to hide other women’s clothes in his apartment. I didn’t want to lose the easy, consistent access to sex and affection that being in a relationship guaranteed.

  I would break plans with people who needed me — family members, friends — or not make plans at all, because I didn’t want to miss out on any potential opportunity to have sex. In Barcelona, suffering from what felt like the worst bout of strep throat I’ve ever had (which turned out to be mono), I chose to go home with the fifth guy in the space of a few weeks. It was the only thing I could do to stop thinking about the fact that I’d just lost a three-year relationship with a man I dated after the filmmaker — someone I truly loved and felt loved by — over a hand job I gave a Colombian man on vacation.

  Instead of attempting to repair the damage, I slept with a French waiter who fucked me so hard I bled on his bed as if I were a virgin. And then another French waiter, who took me to his friend’s house instead of his own because his wife was there. And then a Spanish guy, a German guy, and another Spanish guy. And I did it with the last one without a condom because who really cared at that point? Not him. Not me. I couldn’t even moan or speak to him my throat was so flared up.

  In those few weeks, it didn’t matter who approached me. All that mattered was that I was approached. I didn’t need an aphrodisiac-infused dinner, a long conversation spent bonding over our favorite writers of the 20th century, or a glimmer of a potential future. All I needed was an invitation.

  Don’t get me wrong: judging someone based on the number of people they’ve slept with is absurd, and I know there are plenty of healthy, intelligent, and honorable men and women with strong sexual appetites. In some moments, with some partners, “sexually liberated” was exactly what I felt. But those moments were rare. I’m much more familiar with the sad, anxious mess of a girl alone in her dark bedroom, hot laptop balanced on her chest, turning the volume down low, scrolling, scrolling, choosing, watching, escaping, coming. I’m far too familiar with the girl who can’t keep her hands from shaking or her throat from clenching, the girl who is just waiting for an invitation. Waiting for someone to show her some interest so she can put the loneliness away for a few hours and find some release.

  Sometimes I wonder, if there had been more research and more discussion about sexual addiction in women,In 2012, The Independent ran a story called “Sexual Addiction: The Truth About a Modern Phenomenon,” in which U.K. sexual psychotherapist Paula Hall noted an increase in clients seeking help for sex addiction. Hall found that out of 350 people who described themselves as addicted to sex, 25 percent were women, and 74 percent of those women said they were heavy porn users. would I have changed my behavior? Had there been more available examples of vulnerable, open, honest women sharing their journeys, would I have been more willing to embrace the possibility that I wasn’t alone and unfixable? It’s hard to know for sure. What I do know is that isolation is damaging. Silence is damaging. And when you are isolated and silenced, all sorts of ideas, however twisted they may seem, can begin to seem real because they aren’t ever dealt with properly.
  I’ll also admit that, while my misery was very real to me for a long time, I was willing to suffer the repercussions because the gratification of acting out was too good and I was hooked on a culture of chaos.

  My adolescent years were convoluted with ideas that chaos was good, that depression meant you were a creative person. My heroes were Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Nancy Spungen. Sylvia Plath. Little seemed cooler than Van Gogh cutting off his ear, than Virginia Woolf drowning herself. I romanticized brokenness as a means of resisting change, isolating myself, drinking too much, throwing tantrums, and playing Russian roulette with various dicks to make a point that I just didn’t care.

  I filled journals with my depressed thoughts about my behavior, my loneliness, the hole I felt growing bigger inside myself, but I made no efforts to stop. If anything, all the brooding I did only intensified my habits, entrenched them. I would do everything I could to tear a relationship apart if the flip side meant having to deal with any real problem.

  What began with harmless masturbation at 12 quickly became something more sinister. I wonder now if my parents suspected what I was up to all those hours behind closed doors with my computer. If they could tell by my exhaustion and dazed look that I had just binged for hours. But they never hinted at knowing. Do any parents confront their children about thisThe BBC reported in 2015 that of nearly 700 surveyed youngsters aged 12 to 13, one in five said they had seen pornographic images that had shocked or upset them. They also found that 12 percent of those surveyed said they had taken part in, or had made, a sexually explicit video. ? When I was living at home I’d take my laptop to my closet because I was afraid someone would bust through the lock on the door and catch me, or see me through the window that faced the street, even though I had blackout curtains and knew that was impossible.

  Porn made me paranoid, but it was free and accessible and always effective. From watching soft-core on cable TV at 12, to downloading photos at a snail’s pace on AOL at 14, to tuning in to streaming sites with broadband forever after, my habit became more immediate, more intense, and harder to escape.

  But what was I trying to escape? 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? This question led me, over the years, to a frantic investigation of my childhood journals, desperately trying to uncover some repressed sexual trauma that I could not find.In the article “Sex ‘Addiction’ Isn’t a Guy Thing” for The Atlantic, Tori Rodriguez points out that “exposure to pornography as a child was a stronger predictor of hypersexual behavior than sexual abuse as a child.” In a 2003 study that compared rates of sex addiction among men and women on a college campus, researchers found that almost twice as many women as men fell into the “at-risk” categories. I threw my money at hypnotherapy, past-life regression, and other alternative treatments to find the missing link, eyeing my brother, my cousins, my uncles, my father, thinking, Which one of you did it? Which one of you made me this way? But when no such traumatic event could be found, the only thing left was that same unanswered emptiness and the conviction that I was inherently bad.

  It wasn’t until my early 30s when I finally started to realize that this problem wasn’t just ruining my romantic relationships but all of my relationships — most notably, my relationship with myself. Because I had failed to examine all the reasons I had wanted to escape in the first place — the roots of my shame — I never developed the basic skill we all need to handle life’s twists and turns: how to cope.

  Whenever I finished having sex with Clay or men like him, I would often retreat to the bathroom for a few moments, allowing him the opportunity to make up an excuse for leaving. There was always a part of me that wanted him to stay, to make me feel desired, even loved. But the other part of me desperately wanted him to leave, not just so he wouldn’t find out that I was poor company, or because feeling unwanted was part of my sexual thrill, but because solitude can be a safety net when most of your choices make you feel so ashamed.

  Adapted from the book GETTING OFF: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction by Erica Garza. Copyright © 2018 by Erica Garza. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, NY. All rights reserved.

• NY Post - https://nypost.com/2018/01/06/my-decades-long-porn-addiction-nearly-destroyed-my-love-life/

  My decades-long porn addiction nearly destroyed my love life
  By Jane Ridley January 6, 2018 | 4:07pm
  Modal Trigger
  My decades-long porn addiction nearly destroyed my love life
  Erica Garza David Crosling
  A few minutes after her late-night booty call had left, Erica Garza turned on her laptop to watch a raunchy video.

  She finally brought herself to orgasm twice after being “too tired” to climax with her visitor.

  The particular scene featured a teenage cheerleader having sex with her stepfather while her mother showered upstairs. It was tame compared to Garza’s favorite film, which showed a gangbang at a factory in which two women were ritually humiliated.

  “That was my thing,” the 35-year-old writer told The Post of the peak of her porn obsession. “That’s how I got off.”

  Indeed, “Getting Off” is the title of Garza’s revealing new memoir, (Simon & Schuster, out Tuesday), which chronicles the two-decades-long addiction to sex and porn that began in her tweens.

  Modal Trigger

  In it, she describes how she went from a self-conscious Catholic schoolgirl to a promiscuous adult hooked on risky intercourse and cellphone smut — an addiction widely regarded as more of a man’s “problem” than a woman’s.

  “What I got was an elaborate mixture of shame and sexual excitement I had come to depend on since I was 12 years old,” Garza, now a monogamous and married mother of one, writes. “My methods of getting this only became darker and more intense, wreaking havoc on all aspects of my life.”

  Her porn habit started when she was struggling to fit in at middle school in the Los Angeles suburb of Montebello. Her main insecurity? Having to wear a back brace because she suffered from scoliosis. Bullied because of her appearance, she sought escape in watching soft-core porn on late-night cable TV.

  Over her teenage years, as technology advanced — and she was able to stream porn over the Internet — Garza secretly accessed the salacious material whenever she wanted. She vividly remembers the leaked Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape that came out in 1997, when Garza was 15.

  “I used to hide with my computer in the bedroom closet,” she said. “Part of the thrill was that I might get caught.”

  She wasn’t. And, after losing her virginity at 17, she almost got to the stage where she couldn’t imagine intercourse without her crutch.

  “If I felt uncomfortable with the person I was having sex with, I put on porn as a kind of distraction,” added Garza, who says her male lovers regarded her as a “cool girl” because of her interest. “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.”

  After college, she engaged in violent and risky sex while moving around to Hawaii, LA, London and New York. It frequently involved hooking up with strangers without using condoms. Her preference heightened to hard-core porn, such as the scene in the factory featuring “two sweaty women and 50 horny men.”

  “I think it was the element of shock,” she said.

  Often, Garza’s real-life sex life mimicked porn scenes in which women were demeaned.

  “Afterwards, I would feel broken, unlovable, worthless and used,” she said. “But I was using men for my own needs, too.”

  She was also influenced by the smoothly shaven look of the actresses — paying $50 every three weeks for a Brazilian wax so her private parts remained hair-free.

  Modal Trigger
  Erica Garza at 25 during her time living in Hawaii.Erica Garza
  It wasn’t until her early 30s that Garza realized her infatuation was preventing her from bonding with men. That all changed when she met her now-husband, a 39-year-old app designer, on a trip to Bali.

  “We watched porn at the beginning [of the relationship] because that was my habit,” said Garza, “but he wanted me to talk about why I used porn, and nobody had ever done that before.

  “For the first time, I really felt that I could be safe, supported and reveal who I was.”

  Back in LA, Garza tried the 12-step method to wean herself off her addiction. It worked to a limited extent: “However, I didn’t agree with the philosophy that you are powerless against this disease.”

  So, with help from her husband, as well as yoga and therapy, Garza didn’t watch porn for six months. She now uses it occasionally and “healthily.”

  “I realized that I’m not alone, that it’s OK,” she said. “I just wanted to stop feeling the shame aspect of it, and I succeeded.”

• Daily Mail - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5243087/Author-details-struggle-pornography-addiction.html

  'I was sick and shameful': Author, 35, details her decades-long struggle with pornography addiction and how she managed to break it with the help of her husband's love, therapy and yoga
  Erica Garza, 35, has written Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction
  The book details how from age 12 until early 30s she was addicted to porn
  It also tells how she became addicted to sex after losing her virginity at age 17
  'What I got was an elaborate mixture of shame and sexual excitement,' she writes of her interest in porn
  She met her husband on a trip to Bali and was able to move on from it
  By Forrest Hanson For Dailymail.com

  PUBLISHED: 00:15 EDT, 7 January 2018 | UPDATED: 06:02 EDT, 9 January 2018

  e-mail
  1k
  shares
  378

  View comments
  Erica Garza, 35, has written a memoir called Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction. It will be released on Tuesday, January 9 +9
  Erica Garza, 35, has written a memoir called Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction. It will be released on Tuesday, January 9

  An author has written in great detail and with brutal honesty about her struggle with pornography addiction in a provocative memoir.

  Erica Garza, 35, charts in her book, titled 'Getting Off,' her relationship with pornography that began at the age of 12 and lasted into her early 30s.

  The addiction was broken in part due to the love of her now-husband, Willow Neilson, with whom Garza has a child.

  Garza's porn addiction 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, the New York Post, which has obtained a copy of her memoir, reports.

  'What I got was an elaborate mixture of shame and sexual excitement,' she writes of her interest in porn.

  She describes 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 hardcore material on her computer.

  Garza, pictured with her husband Willow Neilson, describes her decades-long struggle with her pornography addiction that began when she was 12 years old and living in the LA area +9
  Garza, pictured with her husband Willow Neilson, describes her decades-long struggle with her pornography addiction that began when she was 12 years old and living in the LA area

  Garza managed to overcome her addiction, she writes, through the love of her husband, therapy and yoga +9
  Garza managed to overcome her addiction, she writes, through the love of her husband, therapy and yoga

  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 writes.

  '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 writes.

  RELATED ARTICLES
  Previous
  1
  Next

  'Never say never': Ridley Scott has NOT ruled out the return...

  New anguish for Olympic diver Tom Daley as naked selfies of...
  SHARE THIS ARTICLE
  Share
  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 one instance Garza writes: 'My favorite porn scene of all time involves two sweaty women, 50 horny men, a warehouse, a harness, a hair dryer, and a taxicab' +9
  In one instance Garza writes: 'My favorite porn scene of all time involves two sweaty women, 50 horny men, a warehouse, a harness, a hair dryer, and a taxicab'

  Garza traveled to Bali, Indonesia in an effort to curb her porn and sex addiction. There, she met her husband +9
  Garza traveled to Bali, Indonesia in an effort to curb her porn and sex addiction. There, she met her husband

  In the same segment, she describes her favorite scene: 'My favorite porn scene of all time involves two sweaty women, 50 horny men, a warehouse, a harness, a hair dryer, and a taxicab.

  At one point in her book, she describes the sex tape between Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee leaked in 1997 (they are pictured together in 2015) +9
  At one point in her book, she describes the sex tape between Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee leaked in 1997 (they are pictured together in 2015)

  '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.'

  In a different essay written for Salon, she describes how she went down a rabbit hole of watching videos of 'gang bangs,' or 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 describes 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 writes 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.

  '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 writes +9
  '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 writes

  She writes: '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?' +9
  She writes: '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?'

  '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 writes.

  Eventually, Garza decided to go to Bali, Indonesia in an effort to kick her porn habit.

  The book goes on sale on Tuesday, January 9 +9
  The book goes on sale on Tuesday, January 9

  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 analyze the root causes of her addiction.

  She also went to therapy and practiced yoga in an effort to help curb her addiction, she writes.

  Now, she says she uses porn only 'healthily'.

  She writes 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 will be released on January 9.

  Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5243087/Author-details-struggle-pornography-addiction.html#ixzz5ADWdiFjh
  Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

• Elle - https://www.elle.com/culture/books/a13761369/she-liked-to-watch-january-2018/

  Erica Garza's New Memoir Explores Sex, Porn Addiction and Online Hookups
  BY LISA SHEA
  JAN 9, 2018
  In an era when predatory male sexual behavior has finally become a topic of urgent national discourse—I personally consider it a public-health issue!—Erica Garza’s Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction (Simon & Schuster) makes for a wild, timely read. In the prelude to her raw, sometimes almost pornographic memoir, Garza, who’s in her midthirties, writes that her dual addictions fed “an elaborate mix of shame and sexual excitement I had come to depend on since I was twelve years old. And my methods of getting this only became darker and more intense so that it wreaked havoc on all aspects of my life until I became a shell of a person, isolated, on a path to certain destruction.”

  Garza grew up in a middle-class household in a Los Angeles neighborhood dubbed “the Mexican Beverly Hills.” She was a top student at a private high school, read Sylvia Plath and T. S. Eliot, and went to Hawaii on family vacations. But Garza’s neediness and feelings of emptiness had already emerged by middle school, when her best friend turned on her and she was diagnosed with scoliosis. For two years, Garza wore a painful corrective brace, followed by surgery. She withdrew socially and got hooked on TV—“the beginning of my intense bond with screens”—which led to an obsession with pleasuring herself while watching porn, discovering virtual online sex and game-based chat rooms, and exploring her bisexuality. “The type of porn I watched varied from day to day. My young lust gravitated to categories like cheerleaders, schoolgirls, and teens, probably because I related to the youthful theme,” she writes. “I was also drawn to lesbian scenes, which were equally exciting regardless of the age of the actresses.”

  Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction will be available Jan. 9. SHOP
  SIMON & SCHUSTER
  Garza says she would “carry the scenes around with me all day, fantasizing about the people around me and imagining what we’d do if given a dark room and opportunity. And as exciting as it was to feel a man’s eyes on me, when it didn’t happen, I felt empty and pathetic.”

  Online hookups progressed to many a messy offline “violent romance,” and to blacking out on drink and drugs. The common thread was Garza’s compulsive need to feel sexual humiliation and shame, and her destructive quest took her from California to Italy and New York City, to London and Hawaii, Thailand and Bali. Consider a Hawaiian encounter, set up by her landlady, who is also a madam: “Just as I was starting to feel disgusted with him and with myself, something strange happened. There was a shift. An opening. Suddenly, I felt turned on. I opened my eyes and saw him on top of me, this old man I didn’t know or like, and then I looked over at the photo of him on the wall with his kids, and I, too, felt like a kid. Like a little girl who was unsure of herself and didn’t know what else to do but hand herself over to a man, any man.…”

  Garza eventually got the real help she needed, immersing herself in a mix of Eastern and Western religious and therapeutic practices and meeting a man she was ready to honestly share herself with. Her sexual appetite now? As Garza, who’s married and has a daughter, tells it: healthy, open, and no longer ruining her life.

  This article originally appears in the January 2018 issue of ELLE.

• The Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2018/02/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-123-erica-garza/

  Next post like this »
  « Previous post like this

  THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #123: ERICA GARZA
  BY JAIME HERNDON

  February 15th, 2018

  Erica Garza and I first met online in a group for new moms. It was only later that we discovered we had gone to the same MFA program, albeit several years apart. We talked about what we were working on—typical stuff of MFAers—and she told me about her memoir. I was instantly intrigued.

  A few months later, I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction, which chronicles much of Garza’s life—from childhood through her early thirties, with a focus on her relationships to masturbation, porn, and sex.

  What the memoir is not is titillating or full of shock value. In this day and age, that might be surprising, given the content. What it is, in the end, is a story about connection: to oneself, and to others.

  Recently, Garza graciously found the time to speak with me over email about her work.

  ***

  The Rumpus: Tell me about what led you to write about this aspect of your life?

  Erica Garza: I had never written about sex addiction before my essay “Tales of a Female Sex Addict,” which I published at Salon.com in 2014. I was a newlywed and had recently completed this intense seven-day retreat called The Hoffman Process, which is all about taking a hard look at our negative patterns and learning how to dismantle them. It was becoming unavoidably clear to me that my sexual behavior had been causing me great unhappiness for a long time and I desperately wanted to change. I usually use writing to figure things out, and I really wanted to figure out why I had this relationship to sex, how it all started, how it got worse, and how I might find a way out so that I would no longer stay stuck in unhappiness or destroy yet another relationship. After I published that essay, I felt like a weight had been lifted from me. So much of my sexual history made me feel ashamed and I lived a very lonely, secretive life for a long time in fear of called a pervert, a loser, or a slut. But there was something really empowering about being honest and open about this part of myself. Somehow, writing helped lessen the shame. Also, the response I received from readers who had similarly battled with sex and porn addiction made me feel less alone.

  Rumpus: Though the subject has to do with sex, I felt like relationships—friendship, romantic, platonic—were woven through the narrative of your book, building a sort of scaffolding that the story rested on. The relationships you had with Leslie and Anna were so fascinating to me. Leslie, because it’s that childhood infatuation kind of relationship, and Anna, because she was so different. They seemed to play a significant role for you, too.

  Garza: It was important to me to include my challenges with other types of relationships besides romantic. The subject has to do with sex, but it mainly has to do with intimacy. I didn’t know how to nurture relationships with people if I wasn’t having sex with them—what else did I have to offer? I thought so little of myself and thought people only wanted to hang out with me because they pitied me and it was so uncomfortable feeling like an object of pity. It was easier to stay cut off from other people, but it was also incredibly lonely and unfulfilling. It became clear to me that if I started to think more highly of myself and embrace my own worth as a friend, a sister, a daughter, a person, then I would feel more worthy of intimacy beyond the sexual kind—something I desperately wanted.

  Rumpus: The subject of the book—sex and porn addiction—is one that has often been more of a “man’s” topic than women’s.

  Garza: I think our culture is finally starting to warm up to the idea that women can like sex and porn as much as men do, and that we can even develop compulsive sexual behaviors. It’s an old and outdated idea that men are the only sex addicts, but sadly most of the data that exists on sexual addiction says the same thing. I think what’s more true is that women might still feel too ashamed to come forward about sex addiction out of fear of being slut-shamed or seen as weird or different. I hope that my small contribution in sharing my story might help other female addicts come forward about their own struggles so we might change the conversation to be more inclusive of women.

  Rumpus: Piggybacking off of that, early on in the book, you draw the correlation between sexual pleasure and shame. How has that played into the writing of this, and the “outing,” so to speak, of your experiences?

  Garza: Shame is a knee-jerk reaction for me. I have such a thick history of feeling ashamed that sometimes it’s the first thing I feel when I think about other people reading this deeply personal account. However, the shame never lasts long. I have put a tremendous amount of work into allowing myself to accept the shame or humiliation or guilt I feel at times and move forward to healthy acceptance instead. Simply writing and talking about shame has really helped reduce its power over me.

  Rumpus: I found it fascinating when you talked about Tim Fountain and how he viewed his relationship to sex. Do you think there are marked gender differences in how addiction and recovery are framed and how they play out, especially with sex and porn?

  Garza: In the letters I receive from sex and porn addicts, I don’t see much difference between men and women. Whether they’re married or single, old or young, male or female, sex and porn addicts typically feel ashamed, isolated and out of control. However, when I went to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings, I did notice a difference between the men and women. First, there were more men than women at most of the meetings. Second, many of the women talked about being sexually anorexic, which means they compulsively avoid sex, while men talked about frequent casual sex encounters. What was interesting, though, was that in both scenarios, men and women felt like they were lacking true intimacy with another person. Even though that was my experience in the meetings, I still don’t think it’s an accurate representation of women and compulsive sexual behavior. Like the data (or lack of data) that exists, I just think women feel uncomfortable sharing those aspects, even in a relatively safe place like a twelve-step meeting.

  Rumpus: Would you say that you’re “recovered,” to use addiction parlance?

  Garza: I think one of the reasons the concept of sex addiction is a controversial one for doctors and scientists is because “recovery” and “treatment” are difficult to define. In most addictive behaviors (like drugs and alcohol), recovery has to do with abstinence, but recovery in sex addiction is more about balance and eliminating harmful behaviors, which are manifested differently in every addict. My harmful behaviors were mainly porn bingeing, compulsive masturbation, secrecy, and needing to feel an element of shame in my sexual experiences. When I first started to face my addiction and desire change, I stopped watching porn altogether and committed myself to an intimate, monogamous relationship. A few years on, I now watch porn occasionally and my husband and I are open to sexual experimentation. I feel more connected, more present, and more at peace with my past, but I’m not sure I would’ve gotten here if I hadn’t taken a break from porn, stopped sabotaging relationships and chosen honesty and vulnerability over secrecy. These choices were imperative to interrupting my patterns and starting to do things differently. I do not consider myself a sex addict anymore, but I do know that falling back into harmful behaviors is a possibility that comes with being a sexually open person with a history of addiction. The best I can do is to remain honest, respectful of myself and the people around me, and resistant to the urge to shut down and escape when stressors and triggers come up.

  Rumpus: What are your top five books? What are you reading now?

  Garza: Hard question! Top five books are: This is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz, The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis, Wild by Cheryl Strayed and A Moveable Feast by Hemingway.

  Right now, I’m reading The Art of Misdiagnosis by Gayle Brandeis, Mean by Myriam Gurba, and Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter.

  Rumpus: What are you working on next?

  Garza: Sleep! Just kidding. I have an eighteen-month-old and I can’t help but want to write something about motherhood. I don’t want to give specifics because I’m still working it out, but it seems to be a logical next step.

  ***

  Author photograph © Rachael Lee Stroud.

  Jaime Herndon is a writer and editor living in New York. She graduated with her MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University in 2014, and her book Taking Back Birth is forthcoming in 2016 from Microcosm Publishing. More from this author →

• Poets and Writers - https://www.pw.org/content/erica_garza

  Erica Garza
  Printable Version

  Log in to Send

  Log in to Save

  Twitter logo

  Facebook logo

  Tumblr logo

  Los Angeles, CA 90032
  E-mail:
  ericadgarza@gmail.com
  Website:
  www.ericagarza.com
  AUTHOR'S BIO
  Erica Garza is the author of the memoir GETTING OFF (Simon & Schuster). Her essays have appeared in Salon, Narratively, Good Housekeeping, BUST, Alternet, Refinery29, Bustle, and The Los Angeles Review. In 2010, she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia University. Born in Los Angeles to Mexican parents, Erica has spent most of her adult life traveling and living abroad in such places as Florence, London, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Bogota, Bali, Bangkok, Koh Samui, Chennai, Melbourne and the island of Maui. She now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.
  PUBLICATIONS AND PRIZES
  Books:
  Getting Off (Simon & Schuster, 2018)
  Journals:
  Cactus Heart, Gravel Literary Journal, Hobart, Hot Metal Bridge, Label Me Latina/o, Pure Slush, The Los Angeles Review
  REVIEWS, RECORDINGS, AND INTERVIEWS
  Tales of a Female Sex Addict (Salon)
  My Feminist Dilemma at the Peep Show (Salon)
  I'm Married. I'm A Woman. I'm Addicted To Porn. (Narratively)
  How I Learned to Deal With My Jealous Rage (Refinery29)
  I Paid Off My $52,000 Student Loan In Under A Year By Moving To Bali (Bustle)
  MORE INFORMATION
  Listed as:
  Creative Nonfiction Writer
  Gives readings:
  Yes
  Travels for readings:
  Yes
  Identifies as:
  Latino/Latina
  Prefers to work with:
  Any
  Fluent in:
  English
  Born in:
  Los Angeles
  Raised in:
  Los Angeles, CA
  Please note: All information in the Directory is provided by the listed writers or their representatives.
  Last updated: Oct 25, 2017

• Mental Pod - http://mentalpod.com/archives/4730

  The Salon contributor and author of Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction shares about her sex addiction, which began at age 12 after discovering masturbation as a way of soothing her anxiety and not having to deal with her feelings but over time escalated into riskier and more addictive behavior which she eventually sought help for. She shares about the odd relationship shame and pleasure have for her when acting out and how today she can have sexual experiences that are actually intimate and freeing.

• The Fix - https://www.thefix.com/getting-off-erica-garza-discusses-recovery-sex-and-porn-addiction

  "Getting Off": Erica Garza Discusses Recovery from Sex and Porn Addiction
  By Helaina Hovitz 01/29/18
  The common narrative about women who are sex or porn addicts is that they must have been sexually abused. But sex addiction can happen to anybody, it doesn't have to start with abuse or a big trauma.

  Erica Garza, Author
  Erica Garza and I have a lot in common. We both needed to heal the 12-year old-girl inside of ourselves in order to recover from our respective addictions; hers wanted to be loved, and mine wanted to feel safe. We both drank in order to allow ourselves to make decisions about sex that we likely wouldn’t have made sober. And we were both initially misdiagnosed and incorrectly medicated when we sought out specialists to “fix us.” My ultimate diagnosis was PTSD and alcoholism; Erica Garza’s was sex and porn addiction.

  Addiction takes many forms, both in its active state and in the way we heal it, but at its core it’s the act of using something to distract ourselves from real or perceived negative feelings, memories, thoughts, and beliefs. Erica’s addiction, sex, is something she has to figure out how to make friends with and engage with in a healthy way, while my big task is abstaining from alcohol and drugs altogether.

  So what does sex and porn addiction look like, where and how does it begin, and what does recovery look like? Following the release of her memoir, Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex And Porn Addiction, we spoke with Garza about her journey, from first touch to major awakening.

  The Fix: Looking back, which parts of your journey were part of a natural and healthy exploration of masturbation, and when did it start to cross over into unhealthy?

  Erica Garza: Everything started off normally when it came to exploring my sexuality. I started masturbating and watching soft-core porn on Cinemax when I was 12. I think most 12-year-old girls and boys, they're curious when they come across images like that. I did it a lot, almost every day, normal stuff. Around the same time I was diagnosed with scoliosis, and that's when I started to feel insecure about my body—ugly, different from everyone, so I started closing myself off and keeping away from people. My mind was always racing with worry, and I found if I watched more porn and masturbated, I could take a break and not worry about what people thought of me. It was a release and an outlet for frustration and I never stopped using it that way. As time went on and new stresses came up, technology became more sophisticated, and every time I may have ‘gotten over’ looking at porn, my needs were met with more enticing images to keep me hooked.

  As one of your footnotes, you cite a finding from an article in The Atlantic that said exposure to porn was a strong predictor of hypersexual behavior, more so than sexual abuse of a child. Why did you feel it was important to include that statistic?

  The common narrative about women who are sex or porn addicts—and men, sometimes, but more so women—is that they must have been sexually abused. “What happened to you” is one of the first things people ask; even in therapy, it’s one of the first questions. “Do you think anyone abused you?” I wanted to expand that narrative to show sex addiction can happen to anybody, and it doesn't mean you were abused. We need to open up this conversation. Sex and porn addiction doesn't have to start with abuse or a big trauma. Yes, some traumatic things happened to me with the back brace, and that trauma doesn't compare to something like sexual abuse. But if people did not experience abuse, they may not feel like they can share their pain because [they think] it isn't justified and I wanted to provide space for them to see that their experience is valid.

  In its most basic form, what does and does not constitute sex addiction?

  It's tricky to answer because every addict will act out in a different way. Someone may act out by cheating on their spouse, watching a lot of porn, hooking up with prostitutes, there are different ways you might use sex negatively, but sex workers and pornography aren’t inherently bad. People can do these things in a healthy way. I used sex and porn to deal with my problems or escape my problems, to numb myself. I sabotaged a lot of relationships. I didn’t know how to have loving sex, or be in a healthy relationship. I needed to have shame and I needed to feel bad. That's the only way I knew how to have pleasure. I was hooked on that combination. I can't say, “If you watch porn two hours a day, you have a problem.” You can't measure sex addiction that way. It’s for everyone to take a hard look at their actions and decide for themselves if they're using it in an unhealthy way.

  You find yourself engaging in relationships with at least three men in AA at different times in your life. One is actively still drinking, the others are actively sober. What do you think it was that drew you to them? Was it coincidence?

  Hmm…Like attracts like? People who were addicted and acting out; it felt like we were both in the same space. They were emotionally unavailable, so was I. When I started to be with recovering addicts, I think I was getting closer to trying to face my problems. Inching toward it. It didn't happen overnight, it was a series of gradual progressions and realizations about myself. I was heading towards healthier relationships and they were able to help point out things about myself that were true and hard to look at.

  Despite trying Al Anon, CODA, and being around folks in AA, you weren't willing to consider SLAA for a while, because it would mean abstinence—even though, at the time, it seemed that you weren’t having much active sex. What was it that kept you away?

  Part of it was that I thought I was going to be the only woman at the meetings, even though another woman told me about it initially. I thought maybe it’d be me and one other woman. I felt there would be an overwhelming number of men and it’d not only be uncomfortable for me, but it could trigger a lot of my fear to be there. I wasn't having a lot of sex but I was still looking at a lot of sex and a lot of porn. I wasn't ready.

  It seems like as women, we feel we need social lubricant, no pun intended, before we hook up. You mention getting drunk several times in the book, do you think you drank so that you could put yourself in situations you might normally not have?

  Some women may use drinking to do things they wouldn't do sober. I would sleep with men that I knew were not good for me whether I was sober or drunk. I made those choices either way. The drinking I often did just because I had a lot of social anxiety. I felt uncomfortable having conversations with people without the constant chatter in my head. I drank to feel comfortable in my body or talk, to feel looser socially. With sex, I didn't really use the drink to convince me to do something.

  You also include a study about how drugs aren’t really an effective way to manage compulsive—or addictive—behaviors. Why did you feel this was important to include?

  There are no approved drugs to treat sex addiction, and I think that’s a reason it’s not seen as a “real” disease. The pharmaceutical companies can’t prescribe the medication and can't make money off of it. No other therapist [outside of the one I mention in the book] ever told me I had OCD again. I hadn't spent that much time with that doctor before she made the diagnosis, so I think that was clumsy of her. She wasn't being careful there. It was too fast a diagnosis. She gave me Zoloft and Xanax and turned me into a zombie. I wasn't dealing with my problems in a healthy way after that, I was numbing myself more. You have to deal with things, talking through it is harder and longer to do, and a process. It’s about more than just taking a drug.

  What are some of the paths to recovery from sex addiction that you took, and that other people might take, before and after they arrive at SLAA or check into a rehab?

  It's important to try a lot of things. There isn't one way to become a sex addict, and there isn't one way to deal with it when you find yourself grappling with that struggle. I’d love to know what Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey do when they check into these places, but for me the first big step was when I started doing yoga and meditation in Bali. My 30th birthday had happened, and I was trying to make the decade better than the last. I was unhappy and stuck and realized, I have an issue with sex, what do I do about it. I really paid attention to my thoughts and put myself first. I saw what was going on my head, so much negativity, and in that space was able to meet my husband. That was the first time I felt like I could reveal things about my past. He didn't run away. I saw I could be supported and listened to and encouraged to say more. Meditation and yoga gives you a nice supported space to look inside and get in touch with yourself. I was constantly looking outside.

  You did finally make it to SLAA. What was that like?

  The 12-step meetings were another space that I could reveal things to people and feel supported by people who went through other struggles. Having the connection was helpful. Being able to talk to other people with things that I kept secret for long…that had been a huge wall. I thought, if people find out things about me they'll run away, nobody wants to deal with someone as disgusting as me who does all these bad things, but in those rooms there are people going through similar struggles. We can have a connection instead of this wall.

  So now you’re married—what does a healthy sex life and self-love life look like, in your opinion?

  It’s important for us as women not to be afraid of our desires, and to admit what turns us on. We should feel worthy of pleasure. I don't have to be ashamed by liking what I like or when I look back over my path. I’ve made messy choices and mistakes, but I think the most harmful part of it was feeling bad about my choices instead of empowered by them. I could have prevented a lot of hardship myself if I just felt worthy. In the early stages of my recovery, I thought had to stop watching porn and become someone else and never experiment outside of my marriage sexually. I set strict guidelines for myself because I thought that's what a person in recovery does, and I realized I was cutting off a big part of my sexuality, and that didn’t feel authentic to me. I didn't want to totally kick porn or stop exploring with other people. My husband and I aren’t in an open marriage but we’re open-minded in our marriage. It’s just about being honest with each other and what we want and like and having a good honest open discussion about it.

Print Marked Items
Getting Off: One Woman's Journey
through Sex and Porn Addiction
Eugenia Williamson
Booklist.
114.8 (Dec. 15, 2017): p83+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
Getting Off: One Woman's Journey through Sex and Porn Addiction.
By Erica Garza.
Jan. 2018. 224p. Simon & Schuster, $26 (978150116337111.616.85.
For those of us whose understanding of sex addiction is relegated to a vague malady celebrities blame when
they're caught with the nanny, Garza offers a sobering antidote. Growing up in a Mexican American suburb
of Los Angeles, Garza developed troubling thoughts and behaviors, including a compulsive desire to
masturbate, starting around age 10; these problems worsened after an alienating diagnosis of and treatment
for severe curvature of the spine. Freed from her back brace by the time she entered high school, she
developed an unhealthy fixation on her appearance, leading to a beauty-pageant win and the start of her
sexual assignations. Beginning in college, Garza believed that travel might free her from a miasmatic funk
of sex and shame, but instead, she was thrust into a twilight decade of self-loathing and strange, frequently
unappealing men, until the fog is lifted, Eat Pray Love-style, at a Balinese yoga retreat. This confessional
memoir is peppered with statistics about porn use and sex addiction, and Garzas pull-no-punches style will
twinge the sympathies of even the most prudish.--Eugenia Williamson
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Williamson, Eugenia. "Getting Off: One Woman's Journey through Sex and Porn Addiction." Booklist, 15
Dec. 2017, p. 83+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521459552/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=354f2d78. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A521459552
Garza, Erica: GETTING OFF
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Garza, Erica GETTING OFF Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 1, 9 ISBN: 978-1-5011-6337-1
A sex addict's bracing chronicle of erotic dependency.
Essayist Garza's memoir begins in bed, where she is having sex with a man she neither knows well nor
particularly cares for. This scene sets the tone for a narrative that never deviates from its intent to educate
and engross readers with the random sexual escapades and private pains of a woman at the mercy of her
addiction. What the author thrived upon was "an elaborate mix of shame and sexual excitement I had come
to depend on since I was twelve." She shares that her first source of shame manifested in her mediocre
family life in Los Angeles, where she was raised Catholic with a mortgage broker father and a moody
mother. Garza retreated into TV and video games and didn't begin sexually fantasizing until she was barely
a teenager, when her parents announced they were expecting another child. The author's raging hormones
feasted on Cinemax soft-core porn, then dial-up cybersex, and, later, high-speed internet porn, which
became an obsession and a balm for her burgeoning social anxiety. She describes her high school years and
her 20s through the many men with whom she had sex. Moving to Hawaii, she was ever eager to promote
herself as an "adventurous, insatiable vixen always down to fuck," with shame being the common
aftereffect. At 30, Garza's pursuit of sexual gratification became "darker and more intense" until she finally
realized how much her robust and seemingly robotic sex life was damaging not only interpersonal
relationships, but also the relationship she enjoyed with herself: "I prioritized the satisfaction of sexual
release over everything else screaming inside of me Please stop." A combination of therapy and prescription
drugs proved only a short-term remedy; life forced Garza to cope once she found herself in love and on the
threshold of marriage. Though exquisitely visceral and written with genuine emotion, the author's
fascinating odyssey ends too abruptly, lacking some of the curative details readers will be expecting.
A provocative sojourn through the wilderness of sexual addiction.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Garza, Erica: GETTING OFF." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514267695/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=062302ca.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A514267695
Getting Off: One Woman's Journey
Through Sex and Porn Addiction
Publishers Weekly.
264.46 (Nov. 13, 2017): p53+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction
Erica Garza. Simon & Schuster, $26 (224p) ISBN 978-1-5011-6337-1
Garza explores her history of sex addiction, its causes, and her attempts to overcome it in her unflinching
debut. Readers follow her through her early childhood; her lonely, insecure teenage years; and into
adulthood as she moves across the country and around the world, led by one terrible relationship after
another. Garza recounts her sexual experiences in evocative detail: she describes her first time masturbating
at age 12, recalling "the dried spots of mildew in the corners of the tub and how my own reflection bounced
back at me from the metal faucet." She progresses from there to a series of bad relationships and one-night
stands. While living in Hawaii after college, she is convinced by her landlady to sleep with a man older than
her father. While Garza provides an honest voice to sufferers of sex addiction, the book often veers into
diarylike territory, feeling less like an empowering missive than a public confession of sexual
misadventures. Still, Garza's blunt descriptions of addiction and addictive behavior will interest anyone who
has suffered from similar afflictions. (Jan.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction." Publishers Weekly, 13 Nov. 2017, p.
53+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515326035/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6e4225c0. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515326035

Williamson, Eugenia. "Getting Off: One Woman's Journey through Sex and Porn Addiction." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2017, p. 83+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521459552/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018. "Garza, Erica: GETTING OFF." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514267695/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018. "Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction." Publishers Weekly, 13 Nov. 2017, p. 53+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515326035/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.

• The New York Times
  BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION A Recovering Sex and Porn Addict Tells All By CAT MARNELLFEB. 7, 2018 Continue reading the main storyShare This Page Share Tweet Pin Email More Save Photo Erica Garza Credit Rachael Lee Stroud GETTING OFF One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction By Erica Garza 210 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26. Is sex addiction real? I was never particularly convinced, until one afternoon spent in a dark theater in Si Racha, Thailand, changed my mind. It was the spring of 2014, and the movie onscreen was called “Thanks for Sharing.” It starred Mark Ruffalo, Pink and others as addicts fighting to maintain sobriety — from pornography, from masturbation, from intercourse before commitment. They attend 12-step groups; they have televisions removed from business trip hotel rooms so pay-per-view won’t tempt them; they struggle for intimacy. They relapse (they hole up and order hookers); then they find strength anew and start counting days again. I was overseas at a place called Hope Rehab, receiving my own treatment for what was, in my mind back then anyway, a much more “normal” addiction to prescription drugs; the excursion to the cinema was a field trip. My dates for the flick were other clients: a whole row of junkies, alcoholics and even one video game addict from Australia. In the car ride back to campus, we all agreed: It was an interesting movie — an educational movie — and we were glad to have seen it. “Getting Off,” the debut book by the 35-year-old Mexican-American essayist Erica Garza, is comparably affecting. The memoir shines light on the lonely (albeit impressively multi-orgasmic) world of a woman who binges not on food or pills, but on hookups and “getting off.” Oh, and porn. Lots of porn. Teenage-cheerleader-and-her-stepdad-on-the-kitchen-counter porn. Wasted-girls-getting-walked-around-on-leashes-at-parties porn. “Bukkake” porn. You get the idea. Garza, a native of Montebello, Calif. (“the Mexican Beverly Hills”), holds a swaggy M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Columbia, but her prose is appealingly no-frills and accessible. She writes in the style of one who knows better than to linger too long on the eroticism of her memories — one who has learned the hard way how crucial it is to keep dangerous rushes of euphoric recall in check. She recalls, flatly but in explicit detail, a tequila-ridden sexual episode with a Colombian waiter named Andres while on a trip to Hawaii — despite being in a committed relationship with another man back home in New York. Such boudoir scenes abound in this book, and they are both good and mercifully brief. She beds dudes all over the world (naturally, the S.T.D. that pops up on Page 123 is only her first): Los Angeles, London, Paris, Bali and Shanghai. But these encounters are not without their consequences for her, emotionally. “The adrenaline racing through my body made me feel invincible at the time,” she writes. “And the shame I felt afterward was even better.” Photo As a narrator, Garza is a master of identifying such dark, postcoital feelings as these. She wallows in the aftermath of sex with a gnarly older man (also in Hawaii), an act she has engaged in not because she wanted to, really, but because he has given her free dinners at his restaurant. “Keeping my eyes on the red taillights of some distant car ahead, I felt the erotic thrill of that moment with Luc slowly drain from my system, leaving behind a big black hole.” We’ve all been there, and in reading Garza’s insight into her own experiences, we better understand ourselves. “This disease is a … bitch,” Tim Robbins’s character tells Ruffalo’s in “Thanks for Sharing.” He gestures at his crotch. “It’s like trying to quit crack while the pipe is attached to your body.” When Garza — at last humbled, exhausted by years of compulsion and spiritual disease — finally makes moves to get it together, the road isn’t easy. For the person in recovery, triggers are everywhere, even Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous sessions. (“I came so hard I thought my heart would explode,” she writes of one post-meeting masturbation session. “Afterward, I crawled under the covers and cried.”) But the strong final chapters, sublimely set in Southeast Asia, are both inspirational and, dare I say it, still pretty kinky. God bless a lost person who has found her way. Thanks for sharing, Erica.
  Word count: 756

  BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION
  A Recovering Sex and Porn Addict Tells All
  By CAT MARNELLFEB. 7, 2018

  Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
  Share
  Tweet
  Pin
  Email
  More
  Save
  Photo

  Erica Garza Credit Rachael Lee Stroud
  GETTING OFF
  One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction
  By Erica Garza
  210 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.

  Is sex addiction real? I was never particularly convinced, until one afternoon spent in a dark theater in Si Racha, Thailand, changed my mind. It was the spring of 2014, and the movie onscreen was called “Thanks for Sharing.” It starred Mark Ruffalo, Pink and others as addicts fighting to maintain sobriety — from pornography, from masturbation, from intercourse before commitment. They attend 12-step groups; they have televisions removed from business trip hotel rooms so pay-per-view won’t tempt them; they struggle for intimacy. They relapse (they hole up and order hookers); then they find strength anew and start counting days again.

  I was overseas at a place called Hope Rehab, receiving my own treatment for what was, in my mind back then anyway, a much more “normal” addiction to prescription drugs; the excursion to the cinema was a field trip. My dates for the flick were other clients: a whole row of junkies, alcoholics and even one video game addict from Australia. In the car ride back to campus, we all agreed: It was an interesting movie — an educational movie — and we were glad to have seen it.

  “Getting Off,” the debut book by the 35-year-old Mexican-American essayist Erica Garza, is comparably affecting. The memoir shines light on the lonely (albeit impressively multi-orgasmic) world of a woman who binges not on food or pills, but on hookups and “getting off.” Oh, and porn. Lots of porn. Teenage-cheerleader-and-her-stepdad-on-the-kitchen-counter porn. Wasted-girls-getting-walked-around-on-leashes-at-parties porn. “Bukkake” porn. You get the idea.

  Garza, a native of Montebello, Calif. (“the Mexican Beverly Hills”), holds a swaggy M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Columbia, but her prose is appealingly no-frills and accessible. She writes in the style of one who knows better than to linger too long on the eroticism of her memories — one who has learned the hard way how crucial it is to keep dangerous rushes of euphoric recall in check. She recalls, flatly but in explicit detail, a tequila-ridden sexual episode with a Colombian waiter named Andres while on a trip to Hawaii — despite being in a committed relationship with another man back home in New York. Such boudoir scenes abound in this book, and they are both good and mercifully brief. She beds dudes all over the world (naturally, the S.T.D. that pops up on Page 123 is only her first): Los Angeles, London, Paris, Bali and Shanghai. But these encounters are not without their consequences for her, emotionally. “The adrenaline racing through my body made me feel invincible at the time,” she writes. “And the shame I felt afterward was even better.”

  Photo

  As a narrator, Garza is a master of identifying such dark, postcoital feelings as these. She wallows in the aftermath of sex with a gnarly older man (also in Hawaii), an act she has engaged in not because she wanted to, really, but because he has given her free dinners at his restaurant. “Keeping my eyes on the red taillights of some distant car ahead, I felt the erotic thrill of that moment with Luc slowly drain from my system, leaving behind a big black hole.” We’ve all been there, and in reading Garza’s insight into her own experiences, we better understand ourselves.

  “This disease is a … bitch,” Tim Robbins’s character tells Ruffalo’s in “Thanks for Sharing.” He gestures at his crotch. “It’s like trying to quit crack while the pipe is attached to your body.” When Garza — at last humbled, exhausted by years of compulsion and spiritual disease — finally makes moves to get it together, the road isn’t easy. For the person in recovery, triggers are everywhere, even Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous sessions. (“I came so hard I thought my heart would explode,” she writes of one post-meeting masturbation session. “Afterward, I crawled under the covers and cried.”) But the strong final chapters, sublimely set in Southeast Asia, are both inspirational and, dare I say it, still pretty kinky. God bless a lost person who has found her way. Thanks for sharing, Erica.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/shame-porn-and-perversion-on-erica-garzas-getting-off/#!
  Word count: 2530

  Shame, Porn, and Perversion: On Erica Garza’s “Getting Off”
  By Kristin Sanders

  32 0 0

  FEBRUARY 5, 2018

  WE’VE COME A LONG WAY from Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, with its prim meows and horse carriage bells symbolizing female sexuality alongside risqué (for 1967) scenes of sadomasochism and sex work. We’ve come a long way from men explaining women’s sexuality through their art. Now, we do it ourselves.

  Erica Garza’s Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction is like Belle de Jour if Séverine was a real woman writing in the 21st century and exploring her desires before she even had the chance to become a bored housewife. In fact, Garza’s book ends with a sex scene — as a new wife, post-recovery from said sex and porn addiction — which is anything but bored housewife: the apex of her recovery involves a Thai woman (who may or may not be a sex worker), her husband, and pleasure. That Garza’s memoir ends with satisfying sex, sensuality, and self-acceptance is triumphant, but not because her prior sex life seems so licentious; there’s plenty she doesn’t do. Rather, the compelling part of Garza’s story is that recovery entails the acceptance of her libido and refusal of shame. In a world that still fears female sexuality and buys into the dichotomy of the Madonna-whore complex, Getting Off is doing crucial work.

  Garza is a Los Angeles native, raised Catholic by her Mexican father and Mexican-American mother in Montebello. Getting Off is her debut book, though she has published numerous essays about her porn and sex addiction, most notably the 2014 essay “Tales of a female sex addict” in Salon. Garza’s early porn viewing begins with a VHS tape found in her older brother’s room, and her first shared viewing experience is with her brother’s then-girlfriend. Garza and her brother’s girlfriend share a bed that night, and also a kiss. It’s Garza’s first foray into sexual experiences with girls. Interestingly, Garza never identifies herself as queer in her writing, but not for lack of queer experiences. Garza seems uninterested in labeling her sexuality, only hesitatingly adopting the label of addict. Her sexual interest in women is more of a proclivity than a preference, and a sort of “chicken or egg” question: is her sexual interest entirely a product of porn, or did porn help draw out her queer sexuality?

  Other thematic threads woven through Getting Off’s narrative are the fear of exposure (which she overcomes via her nonfiction writing) and the intersection of technology and intimacy. In a poignant moment in her late 20s, Garza realizes she works online (writing copy remotely for an agency in New York City), communicates with her long-distance boyfriend online, and gets off online via streaming porn videos: “I went to the screen, not just for brief interactions with River, but for everything. […] Like my use of porn, I felt attached to the screen, but also safely distant. I could shut the laptop and walk away when I wanted. It was easier this way, but also not entirely fulfilling. This was not real intimacy, and I knew that.” We know so little about how desire, especially fantasy, works in the first place. We have even less of an understanding of how technology and sexuality interact, or damage our capacity for intimacy, though Garza’s book makes a few important contributions in this vein.

  Garza’s addiction to sex and porn leads her to periods of promiscuity, obsessive thoughts, codependent relationships, and hours lost masturbating to screens; but overall her sex life seems — well, masculine. She has sex and orgasms all over the world. In some ways, she’s a female Lothario, though she makes clear the negativity of her experiences lies in her feelings of insecurity, shame, and worthlessness: “I wish I could say this was the last time I saw men like him, men dug up from a painful corner of my past and messily transposed onto a promising present to confirm the story I was intent on telling myself: this is all I deserve.” She repeats a few times the idea that her body or sex were “the most promising thing I had to offer a man.”

  As a sex and porn addict, Garza doesn’t end up making porn, doing sex work, or experiencing sexual trauma such as rape. Her closest experience to non-consensual sex is one of the more gripping scenes: in Maui at 24, Garza’s landlady Helen — who turns out to be the island’s aging madam — sets Garza up with a wealthy, older businessman. As this man throws himself on the beautiful, young Garza, she narrates her discomfort, and it starts to feel like we’re headed toward “Cat Person” territory. But then, unexpectedly, she veers. Garza finds herself turned on by this older man, by the grossness of the situation, and feels like “those young girls in all those ‘old and young’ category videos that had filled so many hours of [her] young life.” Garza writes: “I got off on the idea that I was a whore being used, a dirty slut, something to be ashamed of.” Of course she would feel aroused; after watching video after video of porn scenes featuring similar visual and narrative territory, how could she not feel excited when a real-life encounter echoes that very same degradation, violence, and lack of agency?

  Garza and I are both in our mid-30s. We are both in the generation who grew up with the internet; we began with a free trial of AOL on our home desktops, then encountered sex chat and internet porn. We are also of the generation who is now writing about how this early porn viewing shaped our sex lives, especially the fantasies we play in our heads; Marie Calloway’s What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life and Melissa Broder’s So Sad Today are two books exploring similar territory. I’ve wrangled with the difficulty of writing about porn in my own work, and can attest that it is no easy feat, as our society still tends to punish women who refuse silence and repression, who insist on being public. It’s worth noting, for example, that Marie Calloway is a pseudonym and Broder’s book was published on the heels of her anonymous Twitter account, @SoSadToday. Garza is admirably bold, laying everything bare via her chosen genre. The best parts of her book are when she writes explicitly about the porn she watches and the fantasies she masturbates to. The two are interwoven: the porn feeds the fantasies, and vice versa.

  Through her journey to recovery, which involves Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings in Los Angeles, yoga in Bali, months in Thailand with her boyfriend, and a week-long retreat called “the Hoffman Process” in Northern California, Garza discovers her addictions are tied to a lack of self-worth stemming from childhood traumas. She also discovers that “[t]rauma can be ordinary”: her traumas include the arrival of a baby sister at age 10, a back brace in seventh and eighth grade, her older brother ignoring her in their teen years, and early sexual experiences, in particular one with an aggressive, insensitive teenage boy named Alex. In an emotional scene where Garza describes her favorite porn scene to her boyfriend (“[a] scene so troubling and stomach-turning that the idea of telling him seemed like the most dangerous thing I could do”), opening herself up to vulnerability and his potential judgment, she writes:

  And so I told him. How long I’d been watching porn like this. How I couldn’t get turned on unless I was turned off. How I needed the women to be mistreated and misused — guzzling gallons of cum, slapped, thrown around, laughed at, walked around on leashes, ridiculed, dragged by their hair and tossed into the Dumpster. Anything that announced to the world that they were worthless and deserved to be humiliated. Because I felt worthless. I deserved to be humiliated. Porn was a mirror for how I felt about myself.

  The crux of Garza’s recovery is embodied in working through this realization: the women in porn scenes ought to be mistreated and she herself ought to be mistreated. Garza ultimately comes to believe she deserves to be treated well, and finds a partner who does so. Notably, Garza does not see a gap between erotic fantasy or play and wanting to be treated poorly in a non-sexual sense (a gap which plenty of people in BDSM communities acknowledge). Rather, she determines that her string of poor relationships and her addictions stem from feelings of worthlessness.

  Garza peppers her narrative with references to research in the field of sexuality studies to add gravitas to her self-reflection. She touches briefly on Gary Wilson’s TEDxGlasgow talk, “The Great Porn Experiment,” about how porn viewing in adolescence trains the brain to rely on novelty for arousal or, as she calls it in another reference, “arousal addiction.” Other studies refer to this phenomenon as “ramping up,” or the need for increasingly extreme scenes in order to reach orgasm. But if you get off to violent, degrading images, are you inherently lacking in self-worth? Or is your brain being groomed by the images? Though Garza writes through the lens of addiction and recovery, the conclusions she draws feel a bit too simple at times. What about women who look at hardcore porn and have strong feelings of self-worth? Garza doesn’t explore this question and it isn’t part of her journey, but nonetheless, it feels like a pertinent question that perhaps future books in this field might address.

  Garza ends Getting Off by taking ownership over her sexuality. She describes this acceptance through the metaphor of “return[ing] to the little girl” she was in childhood, a period when she learned to masturbate beneath the bath faucet and engage in online sex chat, pretending to be 18. The period where a girl’s sexuality exists only for herself is all too fleeting, and Garza points to this truth: as a teenager, she realizes the erotic power she possesses in telling boys she views internet porn. “After I’d had enough tequila and was feeling ballsy, I’d rave about the kind of porn I liked, but I’d refrain from mentioning clips I thought they’d consider too gross,” Garza writes. The thrill of revealing your secret, subversive porn viewing to potential male lovers, as a way to signal “I’m sexy, I’m adventurous, I’m dirty, you desire me,” makes the porn less about a girl’s own desire and always, sadly, about a girl’s perceived desirability to men. Naomi Wolf, in The Beauty Myth, discusses the cultural training and sexual socialization through which “little girls” learn “the desire to be desired” rather than how to desire their love objects or their own pleasure. “Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys,” Wolf explains, “[and] that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it.” Wolf calls this an “outside-in perspective” women have on their own sexuality, in which questions about desiring a partner are inverted into questions about being desirable to a partner. Porn, in Garza’s memoir, provides the framework for her sexual desires, while also teaching her this “outside-in perspective,” in which she believes her sexuality and objectified body is her main currency in the world (fighting — and often losing — the battle with writing as a more positive currency).

  Garza certainly is not anti-porn. Rather, Garza suggests that the world needs to have this conversation in a much louder way and in schools, at a younger age than adults think is appropriate. Garza tells us in a footnote: “The BBC reported in 2015 that of nearly seven hundred surveyed youngsters, ages twelve to thirteen, one in five said they had seen pornographic images that had shocked or upset them.” Peggy Orenstein’s Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape confirms this statistic through a series of case studies that demonstrate teens are looking at porn and teenage girls are internalizing porn’s messages. Orenstein found girls in high school and college are taking Women’s and Gender Studies classes, identifying as feminist, dressing sexy to assert feelings of agency over their sexuality — then routinely not having orgasms with male partners, and not seeing the oral sex they perform on male partners reciprocated. In other words: Girls aren’t getting off, but they are getting boys off.

  If we care about the sexual health of our young people, we might encourage them to read Getting Off. Teenagers could benefit from reading books like Garza’s, Amy Rose Spiegel’s Action: A Book About Sex, Orenstein’s Girls & Sex, or even Oriana Small’s Girlvert: A Porno Memoir, books that offer an unflinching look at the pros and cons of porn — Small’s from within the industry itself. At the end of her memoir, Garza reflects on a photo of herself as a 12-year-old:

  Each year would bring with it a whole new set of reasons why I didn’t deserve pleasure, why I should hate myself, why I should hide and pretend and escape. But in that photo, locked in time, as real and true as any other moment in my life, I knew what I wanted and I couldn’t wait to say it. Look at me, BOYS. I’m a girl and I am sexual. I’m a girl and I have desires.

  That it seems revolutionary for a girl to have desires — in all of their complexities, kinks, fetishes, and fantasies — and yearn for those desires to be not only acknowledged, but met, points to how far our society still has to go in affirming every individual’s capacity to feel pleasure, sensuality, respect, and agency.

  This is the real question of sex addiction, porn addiction, or simply porn viewing: How can we — and I mean men, to some degree, but more so women — have healthy sex lives when watching mainstream porn feeds our brains with abusive, violent images? What if Buñuel’s Séverine had access to the degrading porn only a click away today? Her eroticization of debasement was already present in her own mind; would porn have provided her an imaginative outlet, instead of her foray into working in a Parisian brothel? Does porn make our sex lives better or worse? These are questions Garza considers in Getting Off, questions for which she offers no easy answers. In our porn-saturated society, we’ve only just begun to have this conversation out loud. What we need are more books like Garza’s, in which women are willing to discuss their sexuality in all of its complexity.

• Roar
  https://roarfeminist.org/2018/01/09/unexpected-innocence-a-review-of-getting-off-by-erica-garza/
  Word count: 1133

  ROAR
  LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION BY FEMINIST PEOPLE
  Primary MenuSkip to content
  My Abortion
  Politics, Culture & Activism
  Fight this Hate
  Letters
  Must Reads
  ROAR Meter
  Talkin’ About a Revolution
  Criticism
  Books
  Film
  Music
  Comics
  Fiction
  Poetry
  Arts & Media
  Videos
  The Dollhouse
  Polarized: Images
  Interviews
  Columns
  Girlchik Interrupted
  In The Struggle
  In Transit
  Mestiza Musings
  Native American Letters
  Queer is Boring
  Race Baiting…
  There was an Old Woman
  TW*G
  Womxnish
  Editor
  Archive
  Dear Salty
  The Old Salt
  Unexpected Innocence: A Review of Getting Off by Erica Garza
  Category: Books
  AuthorErynn Porter |Posted onJanuary 9, 2018 | 1 Comment
  Sex and porn addiction are not often discussed, never mind a woman having this addiction. This alone makes Getting Off by Erica Garza stand out. Garza takes the reader through a very intimate journey of self-discovery and acceptance. There is an incredible innocence to her writing that is wonderfully unexpected. Shame plays such a huge role is this memoir. Its influence spreading from being a woman, to her Mexican heritage, where she grew up, and her sexuality. There is very little time in this memoir that Garza doesn’t feel shame and how she connects this to her addiction is fascinating.

  Garza holds nothing back; she traces her addiction back to her prepubescence. Being twelve is already hard enough, but when Garza ends up with a younger sister everything gets harder. For a long time, she was the youngest of her family, getting all the love and affection she needed. Now, her parents are occupied and her brother wants nothing to do with her. Not only feeling unloved, she has insecurities with her looks when she has to wear glasses and is forced into a back brace.

  She had her first orgasm at this age, even before getting her first period. Young Garza was completely ignorant when it comes to sex. She never had “the talk,” sex was shameful. Garza thinks something was deeply wrong with her. She searches for a reason for why she is like this; she’s has a pretty normal life, loving family, no sexual trauma. She looks around at her family trying to figure out if anyone abused her sexually, that’s how desperate she is to find a reason. You can feel the anxiety in Garza’s words as her younger self tries to stop the shame.

  What starts out innocently enough with making a list of boys she wants to kiss, soon increases to every student in her class, girls and boys, and even teachers. Garza is desperate to find affection that she feels she isn’t getting from her family. This need for love takes her to cybersex through online chatrooms, creating different aliases to flirt with men. This is how young Garza thinks she will find love, the naïveté of this idea is almost as shocking as what she thinks cybersex will prepare her for:

  “The more versed I become in cybersex, the more I learned about how the act worked, but it would still be years before I would experience anything remotely close to it in real life. I figured that when the time came, I’d sufficiently prepared.” (37)

  The idea that cybersex can prepare you for the real thing is something a child would think. It’s this innocence amidst this display that cause the reader to pause and almost pity young Garza because she has no idea what she’s in for. That lost child searching for someone to fill the hole in her heart endears her to the reader.

  That attention she’s so desperate to have is a great tool to ground the reader as Garza grows up before our eyes. The reader sees her giving into the pressure of sex, playing hard to get, pretending not value the relationship as much as she does for the sake of keeping men. Sex has become a norm for to get people to like her, it’s the only way she knows how. The only way she trusts. She knows it’s not right, that it’s not healthy, but she doesn’t know what to do otherwise. She tries Sex Addiction Anonymous meetings, quitting orgasming cold turkey, going on finding yourself trips like Eat, Pray, Love. But the problem is that the root cause never goes away. She always returns to her habits. It finally takes her controlling her shame in all its forms for her to feel whole.

  “When shame creeps into her (Garza’s) house like an alley cat, she pours some warm milk into a saucer so the poor thing can have a drink and then she makes herself a cup of tea so she can have a drink too.” (198)

  Watching Garza go down into the depths of desperation is painful to watch, she articulates everything she’s feeling with accuracy of it happening right before our eyes. By not holding anything back, she makes the experience feel live and in person instead reading words on paper. The innocence she conveys gives a tender feeling throughout the memoir. While it feels like the end happened abruptly, leaving the story feel unfinished, maybe we can take this as just first part of the journey. If we are lucky enough, Garza will let us follow her on the rest.

  Erynn Porter has a BFA in Creative Writing from the New Hampshire Institute of Art; she is currently Assistant Editor for Quail Bell Magazine, along with being a book critic for ROAR Feminist Lit Magazine. She has been published or is forthcoming in Bust, ROAR, Entropy, Brooklyn Mag, and more. She often jumps between her interests of writing about her chronic illnesses, fiction, and to anything else that grabs her attention. You can often find her eating candy while editing her own work; she claims that candy is the perfect editing food. When Erynn isn’t editing, she’s reading with a cat curled up beside her. You can see more of her work at erynnporter.com

  Erica Garza’s essays have appeared in Salon, Narratively, BUST, Good Housekeeping, and the Los Angeles Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. Getting Off, her memoir on sex addiction, is her first book. Born in Los Angeles to a Mexican father and a Mexican-American mother, she has spent the majority of her adult life traveling and living abroad. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

Word Count