A couple of 20-year-old developers make $500,000 a month promising to help men to stop watching porn, but exposed their private porn watching habits.
A couple of 20-year-old developers make $500,000 a month promising to help men to stop watching porn, but exposed their private porn watching habits.
Reading through this thread has been a bizarre experience - I genuinely couldn’t have imagined the amount of pushback you get here just for speaking up for people struggling with this. It seems exactly the kind of thing I’d have expected deep compassion for, given the userbase here.
Still, my conclusion is that much of it boils down to the term “addiction” - since it’s a medical term, people seem to think that once you medicalize it, you’re paving the way to ban it.
Personally I don’t care what term we use. If people prefer “compulsive porn use,” then fine. For me the point has always been the lived experience of what people mean when they talk about living with a porn addiction - even if it officially doesn’t count as one. In my opinion it does, because it checks virtually all the boxes of the standard definition: you need more of it, you seek out more extreme stuff, you get cravings when you stop, and you keep going long after the negatives have started to outweigh the positives. If that’s not addiction, then I don’t know what is.
Its crazy that everyone is comfortable with the idea of social media being able to cause an addiction, but when the said social media is about sexually explicit content, it automatically becomes ultra healthy and extremely good with no limits and its use always legitimate and to encourage. Porn sites are, at their core, still social media designed with the very intention to keep people into the loop of consumption. Porn sites don’t profit from people who use it every once in a while but to users who watch it hours and hours of it on a daily basis
Then we can argue to the fact that it’s is technically an addiction or not, but if you got all the symptoms of an addiction, if it impacts your life and you still do that even I it means postponing important things of your life, craving it inappropriate moments and constantly feeling the pulsion to do that no matter what even in public, THAT IS AN ADDICTION! I have seen firsthand people who have COMPLETELY changed just by removing porn, including myself. Again, not removing sex or masturbation, but just removing EXCLUSIVELY porn (and maybe increasing how much they have real sex in real life). It can definitely change your life to the better. Moreover, the guy who linked the studies is acting like porn isn’t a multi-billion dollars industry managed by huge corporations with basically unlimited power