“I had to put up a barrier between me and other people.” “I felt very lonely in relationships for a long time,” she says. In another, she recounts how she went home with a French waiter who “f-cked so hard bled on his bed as if were a virgin,” and the time she blacked out and stripped naked in a bathtub in front of a group of men. In one chapter, she reveals how she made her boyfriend hire her a 19-year-old sex worker while they were together in Thailand after they had yet another drunken fight. In Getting Off, Garza details many of the destructive ways she used sex. “It comes down to using sexual pleasure-however you derive that pleasure-as an escape or in an unhealthy and destructive way.” “It’s going to be different for every person, and I think it’s up to each person to look at their decisions and ask, ‘Am I using sex in a healthy way? Do I feel empty after I have sex or do I feel out of control?’” (Courtesy of Simon & Schuster) They went through the 12 steps and 12 traditions I would come to know so well… I listened and nodded, thinking, Yes, that sounds like me.”įrom time spent at SLAA meetings and researching her addiction, Garza says she’s learned how sex addiction takes different forms. “One person may binge on porn, the other person might like having sex with lots of prostitutes,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to admit I was a sex addict to a group of strangers,” Garza writes of attending her first SLAA meeting. Garza, who writes about her journey through sex and porn addiction in her new memoir Getting Off (Simon & Schuster, $32), says it took time before she called herself an addict-even after an ex-boyfriend called her one. Then, at age 30, Garza attended her first Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting.
“Instead of talking about things, I would often shut down and turn to sex or turn on the porn,” she says. Although she felt shame around her behaviour, Garza says she couldn’t stop.
By the time she was in her late twenties, she had a hard time remaining faithful to partners, and her obsession with sex found her in dangerous situations, both at home and when travelling abroad. She was drinking and smoking pot to escape, bingeing on porn and masturbating until she was sore. Then, at 23, Garza moved to Maui to work as a waitress and was sleeping with different people more frequently than she had before. She lost her virginity when she was in high school to a man a decade older. Soon, things got out of control. As a teen, Garza’s interest in porn and masturbation grew, and she started having cyber sex with strangers. I started to use sex as an escape route.” “I found that if I watched more porn and if I masturbated more, I could get away from those feelings. “That’s when I really started to feel insecure and self-conscious,” she says.
The Los Angeles-native says her sexual habits were healthy until she was diagnosed with scoliosis in grade seven. Shortly after she discovered the pleasures of water pressure, Garza was regularly watching softcore porn on TV. “But it sounded easy enough, so I tried it. “I had never heard of an orgasm and I didn’t know what masturbation was,” Garza, now 35, says. The preteen listened as a female caller talked about the mind-blowing orgasms she was having in her bathtub by turning on the faucet and opening her legs. Erica Garza first masturbated when she was 12 after tuning into an episode of late-night sex and relationship talk show, Loveline.