Actor Terry Crews is most famously known as "Old Spice guy." Credit:YouTube Crews's unburdening, which so far extends over three videos with more to come, offered a primer on why people become addicted to pornography and how they can defeat it. Crews said he "literally had to go to rehab" for his problem, which he's been over for "six, seven years now." He said it compromised his relationship with his wife, with whom he has five children and who he once felt "owed" him sex, and forced him to lead a double life. "I believed that I was more valuable than my wife as a human being because I was a man," he said. "And when you believe that you are more valuable than another person, you kind of feel like they owe you. . . . And I was wrong." His criticism for the medium, which he started exploring at 12, was unbounded. "It changes the way you think about people," he said. "People become objects. People become body parts. They become things to be used rather than people to be loved."

Crews, 47, said his use of porn was related to anxiety, loneliness and depression. "Every time you look at pornography is a desire for intimacy," he said. "You are trying to fight your feelings of being alone by filling it with pornography in an attempt to feel that you are with someone and you know someone. But the problem is pornography is an intimacy killer." For women, he advised: "You cannot accept any pornography in your man's life. Anything that will make you feel denigrated, make you feel less than, you cannot accept it." He also said: "Sexual energy is something that you can harness like electricity. And you can use it in the right way at the right time and it will bless you... But if you let it go all over the place, you might get electrocuted. Your relationship will get electrocuted."

In one video - recorded while Crews drove his wife's car down Sunset Boulevard - he also said that porn, ubiquitous in the Internet age, must be eliminated. "It's kind of like when you got a roach in your house," he said. "I promise you, there are 10,000 more roaches. You got to stamp them out . . . sometimes you got to take some walls down. Sometimes you got to excavate. Sometimes you got to literally raze the house and start over." There was no question, he said, that he needed help. "If day turns into night and you are still watching, you probably got a problem," he said. "And that was me." Crews's widely viewed confession was met with praise as others shared their stories.

"God bless you Terry!" one commenter wrote. "I'm 100 (per cent) sure that you're breaking many obstacles in so many minds!" "Please pray for me, my husband, & our daughter!" another wrote. "My husband is fighting this addiction. He left 9 months ago, wants a divorce, & says he's never coming home. I know God is bigger though!" This is not the first time Crews, who moonlights as a motivational speaker, has gone public about porn. "My father was addicted to alcohol, and my mother was addicted to religion," he told Wendy Williams in 2014 about his strict upbringing in Flint, that included "violence" and "abuse. " "So what happened was you had an addictive household." "So you would go in your room at 12 years old and watch porn?" Williams asked as Crews's wife looked on in the audience.

"You go to the uncle's house," he said. "It was always the uncle's basement. Everybody's got an uncle's basement." To women, he added: "You don't know how powerful you are. Men get addicted to looking at pictures of you. That's how powerful you are." Such comments came as he publicised his 2014 book Manhood: How to Be a Better Man - or Just Live with One. "I soon established a pattern where, anytime I was dealing with anxiety, I acted out with pornography," he wrote. "One the one hand, I felt bad because I knew I shouldn't do so, but at the same time, it was exhilarating, a rush, like taking a drug." Washington Post