Getting Off

One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction

By: Erica Garza

Narrated by: Joy Osmanski

“Erica Garza has written a riveting, can’t-look-away memoir of a life lived hardcore…In an era when predatory male sexual behavior has finally become a topic of urgent national discourse…Getting Off makes for a wild, timely read” (Elle).

A fixation on porn and orgasm, strings of failed relationships and serial hook-ups with strangers, inevitable blackouts to blunt the shame—these are not things we often hear women share publicly, and not with the candor, eloquence, and introspection Erica Garza brings to Getting Off.

What sets this courageous and riveting account apart from your typical misery memoir is the absence of any precipitating trauma beyond the garden variety of hurt we’ve all had to endure in simply becoming a person—reckoning with family, learning to be social, integrating what it means to be sexual. Whatever tenor of violence or abuse Erica’s life took on through her behavior was of her own making, fueled by fear, guilt, self-loathing, self-pity, loneliness, and the hopelessness those feelings brought on as she runs from one side of the world to the other in an effort to break her habits—from East Los Angeles to Hawaii and Southeast Asia, through the brothels of Bangkok and the yoga studios of Bali to disappointing stabs at therapy and twelve-steps back home. In these remarkable pages, Garza draws an evocative, studied portrait of the anxiety that fuels her obsessions, as well as the exhilaration and hope she begins to feel when she suspects she might be free of them.

Getting Off offers a brave and necessary voice to our evolving conversations about addiction and the impact that internet culture has had on us all—“a profoundly genuine, gripping story that any reader can appreciate” (Vice). “In reading Garza’s insight into her own experiences, we better understand ourselves” (The New York Times Book Review).

For the girl who needs to meet her inner woman

A very insightful book about a very real problem in our society. Men and women alike are faced with sexuality and pornography as a means of self identity. Erica Garza speaks about her truest experiences which can allow us to shed a light on our society. Today we face a constant stream of desensitization of sex, easily seeping into everything we do. Thus a sex addiciton can be born. Read this book but not with the gleam as someone may read getting to hear how someone gets off and their promiscuousity, instead as someone needing help from themselves. We are our own worst enemies in instances like this, and it is affecting young women everyday. It takes a strong and true desire to find the woman or man inside insearch of creating a healthy balance of sex and love. Thank you for sharing this taboo conversation of female sex addiction, as a means for normalcy so we can have the conversation.

The way that Erica shares and exposes her rawest self with a lack of checking in on herself sheds light on the unhealthy behavior patterns created, and the grasp it can have on your soul; Bringing you down and never letting you reach your truest potential, like with any true addiction. When you face her demons with her in this book it becomes a book of healing and confronting the demons that lies in this seemingly "cool" addiction.

Interesting read

This was a very interesting story but I really struggled to finish it because it sounded so repetitive. Maybe it wasn't fully for me

...very forthright.

She is unflinchingly honest in talking about her insecurities and how she used sex to self-medicate along with alcohol.We are all flawed creatures,and are all seeking some type of redemption or peace.That is what she writes about.She describes her exhausting masturbation sessions; and using pornography and cumming to dose any relationships that she encountered or developed.

Helpful

Our background demographics hardly lineup at all but Ericas story I think has enough universality that anybody who has dealt with some form of addiction can find a piece of this to relate to.
I wanted to read about sexual addiction and I got exactly what I was looking for.

wear your seatbelt

I found it quite bizarre, that someone else, could tell my story with more honesty than I could be with myself.