Guvna B Details Porn Addiction Recovery on New Album
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- Isaac Borquaye (Guvna B) was attacked in an unprovoked racist incident at an east London coffee shop in 2021, losing sight in one eye for several months; the Metropolitan police closed its investigation after six months due to a lack of leads.
- His 2023 album The Village Is on Fire—featuring a closeup of his bloodied eye on the cover and voice notes from cousin and actor Michaela Coel—became one of his most streamed records.
- In 2023, Borquaye entered rehab for a pornography addiction he describes as 'a battle I've had for most of my life,' separating that same year from the mother of his two children.
- This Bed I Made spans 11 tracks exploring shame, secrecy and the possibility of relapse, with jazz-influenced instrumentation and audio clips from physician and addiction specialist Gabor Maté, who frames addiction as a response to pain rather than moral failure.
- A British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy survey found more than half of therapists recently reported pornography addiction rising among British men over the past year, contextualising Borquaye's public disclosure.
- The World Health Organization classifies compulsive pornography behaviour as an impulse control disorder rather than an addiction, and the American Psychiatric Association has no formal diagnosis—though Borquaye argues it produces the same dependency, costing him his marriage and presence as a father.
- Borquaye runs creative writing workshops in secondary schools and prisons, pushing young men to develop emotional vocabularies rather than 'channel that into I'm gonna stab you or shoot you.'
Why it matters: By publicly framing his recovery as a reckoning with shame rooted in his Ghanaian upbringing and faith background—contextualised by the BACP survey showing rising pornography addiction among British men—Guvna B challenges the cultural silence around male sexual dependency, particularly in faith communities where confessing imperfection is taboo, and offers a counterpoint to UK rap's traditional machismo.
