Kabir*, 26, is looking for porn on the internet compulsively, as he has done every day before and after work since he began full-time work.

Instead of socialising or working, Kabir spends almost £400 a month talking to sex cam girls, who charge him for the opportunity to instruct them how to undress or pleasure themselves on camera. He drinks Red Bull and black coffee to stay awake. Frayed and ashamed, he now wants to stop.

I find him on a sex cam confessions thread of the forum “NoFap” – an anti-porn use site where men, desperate to stop looking at porn, counsel each other.

Many of the users of NoFap are also non-porn consumers: wives of addicts; mums trying to wean their sons or sometimes daughters from porn, and even siblings looking to stage an intervention.

“I’d cancel plans to sit and talk to sex cams and it destroys my social life,” says Kabir. “I risk getting sacked at work because I check in on their web pages on my phone during office time. I initially liked the sex cams because it was more involved than just porn, you’d chat to a sexy girl and then you’d get a sexual experience. But now I have become so obsessive about it the thought of dating or stopping makes me anxious.”

To all intents and purposes, Kabir is a sex addict – just like celebrities Russell Brand or David Duchovny – unable to break the destructive habits of compulsive sexual behaviour. But, unlike other sex addicts, he is not actually having any sex.

Kabir is part of a whole new generation of consumers driving the explosion of online pornography. In 2018 market leader Pornhub revealed its videos were watched 33.5 billion times that year, by 92 million daily visitors (up from 64 million in 2016.)

Last year, a study by BBC Three of more than 1,000 Brits revealed 55 per cent of men said porn had been their main source of sex education, while a study by Natsal (National surveys of sexual lifestyles) of 34,000 respondents showed those who had not had sex in the previous month had risen to 29 per cent.

This new breed of younger sex addict - one unable to cope with flesh and blood encounters - is now populating addiction centre waiting rooms across the UK, says The Laurel Centre’s Paula Hall who has been a specialist in sex and porn addiction for fifteen years.

She says clients who arrive at her suburban Leamington Spa clinic, are split into age lines - older adults who are compelled to engage in damaging physical flings - and younger adults who are so fixated with online materials they are either no longer interested in sex at all or have discovered real sex cannot match their online experiences.

“A lot of the younger patients we are working with - aged around 18 to 28 - have never had a sexual experience without pornography or sex cams,” she says. “They are adamant it’s physically impossible. They have no experience of fantasy without pornography.”

Even if they experience real sex - they find it disappointing. Hall says: “Some of these youngsters are amazed their partners have body hair or sweat or their flesh is soft. That they don’t orgasm on touch. Real sex - rather than on a screen - smells in a way that is different from what they imagined - they are used to a sexual experience that isn’t messy or unclean.”

Other British clinics report similar findings. Nuno Albuquerque, Group Treatment Lead at UK Addiction Treatment says his practice encounter “no sex, sex addicts” every month. He says, “These particular patients have, over time, become psychologically dependent on masturbation, but when it comes to actual human contact and intimacy with another person, they’re unwilling or even unable to perform.”