Is porn addiction real?

Is porn addiction real? Less so than claimed, argues Lisa Hagen in a bombshell report for NPR. In this article, the journalist explores the ‘masturbation abstinence’ and anti-porn addiction movement in the US, finding a landscape filled with pseudoscience, reactionary rhetoric, and shame. “In one study,” Hagen notes, “among people who self-identify as ‘pornography addicts’, the average frequency of porn use was less than ten times a year”.

Silva Neves, the author of Compulsive Sexual Behaviours: A Psycho-Sexual Treatment Guide for Clinicians, also says that “very few” people who complain of compulsive sexual behaviour meet “all the criteria of the disorder”. Clinically significant compulsive or destructive sexual behaviour, including porn use, does exist, she says, but it’s rare. Yet men and boys continue to be funnelled into spaces where their porn use is presented as a huge problem and a threat to their masculinity. So what’s going on?

The NPR report covers a lot of ground, from the misogyny common on anti-porn forums to the dubious advertised health benefits of abstaining from orgasm (it will neither clear your skin nor cure your depression). But there’s something deeper here about how men and women are told to relate to porn – something generally left out of discussions of porn, sex and relationships. Porn has plenty of problems, but those problems are as much with the regulation and shaming of sexuality as they are with the content, and the report depicts both teenagers and adults losing years of their lives to shame cycles around porn use. We’re not getting out of this trap without looking at where that shame comes from.

I’ve been talking a lot to other twenty-somethings about our experiences with porn: as teenagers, in relationships, whether we thought it was pathological, etc. I remember being 16, mentioning pornography within a group of 16-year-old girls, and being surprised at how shocked all of them looked, and how all of them accusingly denied ever having used it. (I recall hoping they were lying.) Reading Polly Barton’s Porn: An Oral History last year made me vividly remember that scene: the persistent sense that porn wasn’t ‘for’ women, and that this was partly justified by the reasonable criticisms of porn’s misogyny, but was never fully about that. Sexual desire was, broadly, a thing girls were supposed to leave the boys to develop, and then to bring to the girls, who would fear it and poke at it and acclimatise to it. The boys were scary, and their porn use was scary – embarrassing, fascinating, symptomatic of some great intimidating hidden world – but of a piece with the way the prospect of sex was scary. Girls looking at porn? That was something else: something wrong, something that challenged the routine. It still happened, of course, but there was enough pressure not to admit to it.

The girls didn’t make that up out of thin air, of course: the vice of sexual expectations for women is tight. But it struck me that the people I talked to had very diverse experiences and use patterns with porn, and yet popular anti-porn forums are very homogenising. A lot of different people will gather under the ‘struggling with porn’ barrier: an evangelical who believes all pornography use is sinful, a straight man who is anxious about his interest in gay porn, a man who is unnerved by his own attraction to violent sex, and a 15-year-old boy seeking help with premature ejaculation may all end up on the same forums. But the anti-porn forums all aimed at the same ‘resolved’ figure: a straight, masculine, self-controlled man, with a straight wife or girlfriend who wants the complete absence of porn from the household, and who will be failed if the man ‘relapses’.

When we talk about porn, we often talk about an industry that is structured by misogyny, heterosexual stereotype, and the subjugation of women. That’s true, but it’s incomplete. Sure, I’m not implying that STEPSISTER GETS STUCK IN WASHING MACHINE [HD] is some scion of sexual liberation. Porn can often make us feel gross, or compromised, or just straight-up bored, particularly people on the sharp end of mainstream porn conventions. (Black men have a particularly hellish experience when it comes to being dehumanised in porn, for instance.) But porn is also a place where you can learn things about what the body can do, and where you can find identifications and desires you didn’t know you had: different body types, different sex acts, different power dynamics. The normalisation of porn use as a sexual rite of passage for young boys and men has always been bracketed by a background hum of threat: you have to do the right porn use, or else you’re gay, or a creep, or something worse. Meanwhile, sex acts outside the norm are often configured as things that only exist to hurt and degrade women or pollute their relationships, rather than as things women could possibly be interested in. Several of the women I’ve talked to have spoken about being into kink, and about how alienated they feel by discourse that kink is just a cover for violence against women, rather than something women themselves can desire and instigate.

Porn can make us feel gross... [but it] is also a place where you can learn things about what the body can do, and where you can find identifications and desires you didn’t know you had

The subtextual ‘threat’ behind ‘wrong’ porn gets very queer, very quickly. An interviewee for NPR describes a common set of anxieties on the forums he frequented: ‘‘The common themes were ‘porn is turning me gay’ or ‘porn is making me cross-dress’ or ‘porn is making me want to be dominated’ or ‘porn is making me like transgenders [sic]’.” It’s pretty clear that men are feeling drawn to the taboo thrills of getting topped, gender-play and gay exploration, whether as fantasy or as real possibility; men are also, I noticed, sometimes seeing straight porn and identifying with the woman. This opens up possibilities and anxieties that ‘porn addiction’ forums seek to close off. If you’re thinking about this stuff at all, they say, you have an addiction that is driving you to seek out ‘extreme’ material, and you need help. Reading this as a queer guy felt like hearing the Kill Bill sirens going off: it’s so clear that any erotic charge towards sex workers of any kind, gay men, trans women, or stigmatised forms of sex are seen as polluting ‘proper’ straight life.

If you read through anti-porn forums and programmes as someone who knows what conversion therapy looks like, you will find its tells in abundance. Heavy emphasis on shaming, while also promising that the programme will provide a way out of that shame; advice that new desires might not go away, but can be ignored and managed; unspoken assumptions that monogamous, cisgender, heterosexual, vanilla sex is the sexual ideal; heavy use of pseudoscience; intimations that the reader is being purposely corrupted by the porn industry or a wider, conspiratorial ‘agenda’. UK Rehab’s page on porn addiction advises that “pornography addiction can lead to changes in sexual tastes, desires and practices […] which can cause huge problems for addicts in relationships. The addict may begin to engage in different forms of sexual experience and expression, which may include risky sexual behaviour […] Even in less extreme cases, as mentioned above repeated exposure to hard-core pornography can lead to changed expectations of partners, which can make attaining a “normal” sex life increasingly difficult”. What is ‘normal’ here? What is ‘risky’? What are the ‘tastes’ in question?

This is obviously dangerous rhetoric for ‘straight men’ who are questioning their sexuality/gender to be exposed to, and it also paints heterosexual sex as an arena where the man sets the expectations and desires and the woman is harmed by the ones she cannot ‘meet’. But sex should be a space where everyone gets to have desires without shame or guilt, even if they feel ‘extreme’. Desires aren’t actions or violations, not by themselves. Burying and shaming them – even if they feel scary – makes everything worse. Women, in particular, are taught that men’s excessive sexual desires are the root of cheating and disloyalty and sexual violence (rather than the misogyny that makes men disregard women’s boundaries, for instance), and that they therefore need to surveil and police their partners’ porn use. This is furthered by the assumption that any desire to use porn at all is a marker of unmanageable sexual vice and voraciousness, which you’ll particularly find in evangelical/religious circles.

Most people who think they’re addicted to porn aren’t. What they’re addicted to is policing their own genders and sexualities

Many of the relationships described on anti-porn forums are already unhealthy or toxic, and what is supposed to be a ‘healing process’ for the relationship destroys it further with cycles of surveillance, punishment and resentment: the male partner’s shame-filled relationship to his own sexual desires is worsened, while the female partner is encouraged to enter a state of constant anxiety and paranoia, where every day is filled with the potential sexual violations her partner might be committing. In these relationships, being either the man or the woman looks like hell on earth – and since a near-impossible condition of ‘sobriety’ from porn is presented as the only route to happiness, most of them will continue to be bitterly unhappy.

Straight culture is in a pretty dire state, and nothing is going to get fixed quickly – not the societal misogyny that influences porn, nor the constant policing of gender and sexuality, nor the still highly restrictive view, on the whole, of what is ‘allowed’ within straight relationships and sex. But to the extent a short-term answer exists, it probably consists of women using more porn/erotica, more open and destigmatising conversations about porn, less hiding, less lying, and abandoning all-or-nothing attempts at porn abstention. It might be counterintuitive, but porn needs to be less of a big deal. If men are failing to be good boyfriends, it’s not because of porn; most people using porn excessively are using it as escapism from something else, or are trapped in shame-related fixations on porn that abstention only makes worse.

Most people who think they’re addicted to porn aren’t. What they’re addicted to is policing their own genders and sexualities, hoping that if they just do so a little more successfully, all their personal and relational problems will fall away.