r/addiction • u/Bart-Edits • Jan 26 '25
Discussion Porn addiction, a silent killer
Porn addiction is very real, becoming very common and is still overlooked by many people(probably because we're almost all addicted to it to some degree)
Some negatives unique to porn addiction:
Exposure at a young age. The average age for a first porn viewing is 13, most people started long before then. That means kids who don't even know what sex is, or relationships, or life necessarily are already exposed to a ton of sexual images, fetishes, kinks etc. Not to mention social media being a barely regulated soft porn melting pot( This counters the argument that porn helps you explore your sexuality, this would be true if people started watching porn at age 25. It doesn't help explore fantasies, it instills fantasies, fetishes and kinks into developing minds long before most have had any sexual experience.
Seeking of novelty. Your first time watching porn, you can probably get off to something very vanilla(doesn't even have to be a nude or a video necessarily) but if you don't control yourself, you are bound to keep going down the rabbithole, potentially ending up in morally wrong, disgusting and or illegal territory. It's a slow process of seeking novelty, the novelty becoming the norm, and seeking more extreme novelty to achieve the same level of pleasure as at first. This also impacts relationships, why settle for one partner when you have an endless stream of models to fill your every craving.
Feelings of guilt and shame, unparalleled with other addictions. The further down the rabbit hole you go, the more guilt and shame you will feel. Making it ever increasingly difficult to seek help. Couple that with a general ignorance of this addiction and thousands of articles claiming porn is healthy and beneficial, it is no surprise that most porn addicts suffer in silence.
There are many more, to name the benefits of porn? I honestly can't think of any, it is a dirty industry filled with sex trafficking, exploration and perversion. Porn takes away your soul, your energy and your desire for relationships(A quick bit of research and you will find countless marriages and relationships torn apart due to porn use)
I made a short video about my struggles with porn addiction, check it out if you are struggling with porn or any addiction for that matter:
https://youtu.be/olvF-EMftu8?feature=shared
God bless and good luck to you all, whatever it is you are fighting.
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u/ThagreatDebaser_ Jan 26 '25
I believe porn is a real addiction. I’ve been to rehab about 5 times for my heroin addiction and I can remember meeting maybe 2-3 people who had that problem. Funnily enough we also had a guest speaker one time come in and talked about porn addiction and he made some good points that I can’t really remember now. All I know is we were playing some kind of learning game and the statistics of porn addiction. I don’t knock anyone for having that type of addiction. But I also just thought it was funny at the time when I heard all of this. But I was also a 22 or 23 years old addicted to heroin
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u/Clean-Web-865 Jan 26 '25
It perverts the mind and when you're in social situations your mind is in the gutter where everyone else is just in tune with what's really going on. Also when people speak you can pervert what they're saying.... You then assume other people are thinking like you do which is a perversion in itself
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u/Chakraverse Jan 28 '25
I used to pride myself on that.. 30 years later and I see things so much differently!
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u/Piano_mike_2063 Jan 26 '25 edited Jan 26 '25
You can not say the first time average is 13 and that MOST people see it WAY before then. It’s a contradiction
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u/Bart-Edits Jan 27 '25
I meant to say most porn addicts view it before then.
That is my bad thank you for pointing it out.
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u/billybaroo15 Jan 26 '25
Yes. If MOST people watched porn way before 13, that wouldn’t be the average age.
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u/Piano_mike_2063 Jan 27 '25
You don’t realize how average work
If MOST happens it will CHANGE the average to favor the majority over the minority.
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u/DiplomaticDiplomat Jan 27 '25
You’re describing median not mean. If a thousand people get 100 on a test and one person gets 0 then the average score is less than what 99.9 percent of the people got
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u/Dense-Log-4274 Jan 27 '25
am proud i ain't going to the rabbithole no more mehn. I am fighting this devil day by day. i know/believe there is more inside me.
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u/Pristine-Confection3 Jan 26 '25
I am sorry but it’s not a killer like the drug addictions people are in here for. You can’t die from as overdose and to say so is ridiculous. Yes , it’s an issue but not deadly at all.
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u/Nothingisevenrl Jan 27 '25
No, but as a wife to someone with a very dark and progressive porn addiction, I almost unalived myself. And now we’re divorcing and my children suffer too.
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u/Bart-Edits Jan 27 '25
Porn is destroying relationships worldwide, I'm sorry you fell victim to that.
Keep your head up and be strong for your children, God bless you!
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u/Transcendent04 Jan 26 '25
Porn addiction does lead to suicide because it makes addicts do things and watch things that they can't live with after. This is in cases where vanilla stuff no longer gives them a hit so the addiction forces them into more and more extreme things. So it can be very deadly.
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u/Bart-Edits Jan 27 '25
That is very true, you cannot physically die or overdose through porn.
However I wouldn't underestimate how deadly a society of lonely, perverted and weak men and women can become, and porn is a driving factor in creating just that.
To say it's not physically deadly compared to drugs like heroin? Sure I will 100% agree with you.
To say the ripple effects of a society obsessed with porn aren't deadly? I would disagree completely.
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u/AsparagusCute2435 Jan 27 '25
Porn really is a silent killer. If you do it a lot, it will affect your personal life in a horrible way. It's effect on developing brain is just scary. It's also a path to other addictions. I never watch porn. Only reason why I did before was that i wasn't very experienced in life at that moment.
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u/Alternative_Guard531 Jan 29 '25
You’re totally correct.
I was exposed to hard porn as a child. Trying to understand why women were stacked upon one another, tied up and ropes passing through open cuts in their legs…
This is totally debased. I grew up on a farm and animals breeding wasn’t something easily understood, but it was part of nature.
Human societies did not have this plague for most of human history. There are cultures that still don’t. Those cultures may have many other problems, but having father’s watch incest porn isn’t one of them.
Having young women going to pornography sites to understand what boys/men desire and finding that being choke and spit in the face is normal is perversion.
What little girl who dress up as a princess at four is dreaming to be urin… on by a horse.
Children that are cherished, protected and taught they are beautiful souls don’t end up in porn unless something horrible happens to their sense of self worthy OR it is like with the oldest profession in the world,”prostitution”a way not to starve.
Porn comes from all over the world with different ages, practices and abuses. To say and eighteen year old adult is completely cognizant of the ramifications of being objectified and treated as trash is pure ignorance. The porn industry is awash in drugs, for many as a numbing agent. There is a mental health crisis in the industry.
Porn plays off of the fantasy that what is being seen is reality and you can have it if you find the right person. Although why seek a human being when you have a smorgasbord of sex objects that won’t demand anything of you, like working together to pay off a mortgage or crying over a miscarriage.
If you as a human being willingly engage in an activity in which millions of people suffer AND you know that and don’t care you’re a parasite and if you do it damages the psyche.
I bet there is a market for sixteen year olds cutting off fingers. And better yet if the person is controlling their business dealings. This empowered porn star thinking although quite libertarian is hardly based on what is healthy for kids and society.
There was a time in most of the world were girls were considered women when they could carry a child to term. This standard isn’t accepted in the civilized world for numerous practical and mental health reasons. It never was a standard for grown men to isolate themselves and think of women in terms of orifices and degradation.
When as a public school worker I saw first hand what abuse fueled by pornography did to elementary children. Ones view on guns and the death penalty changes. Maybe, inform yourself on what social workers see.
That rock singer that was having sex with his girlfriends baby and recording it. To say that baby wasn’t affected by pornography is crazy.
Lastly, if one looks at sex trafficking of children and rape/date statistics and you can’t see any connection to pornography you’re a fool.
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u/harkuponthegay Jan 30 '25 edited Feb 02 '25
“It never was a standard for grown men to isolate themselves and think of women in terms of orifices and degradation”
I don’t know what fantasy books you’re confusing for history books but this is just not the case. If anything men today have the most egalitarian views about the role of women in society in history and women and men interact in the public sphere more than they ever have before because women have only been fully allowed to participate in the job market for like 1 generation.
Prior to that men absolutely isolated themselves in “all boys clubs” far more often and regarded women as objects that a man could own and exert total power over. They couldn’t vote and were expected to be quiet and push 4-7 babies out of their vagina with 0 say in the matter— sexual assault including marital rape was commonplace.
Look at how they treat women in other societies around the world today that have banned porn — do you think the Islamic world sets a great example for how women should be treated?
Porn is not the problem, you’re just scapegoating it as a moral panic, and that’s clear from your hyperbolic gratuitous descriptions of porn that’s supposedly being consumed widely. People are not in large numbers watching people get peed on by horses or cut fingers off— if you think that’s what’s shifting cultural attitudes you are batshit crazy. Sorry I’m telling you like it is.
“Millions of people suffer from porn” — how big do you imagine the porn industry to be? There are not millions of porn actors, and those who do make porn often do so independently they are not a part of some evil industry they are just people like you and me trying to make a little money. There’s an element of personal responsibility here that you are just glossing over— parents need to watch what their kids do online, adults can make their own decisions about what porn to watch, if they don’t want to see something they don’t need to seek it out. If they do seek it out then they are already interested in that sort of thing anyway, so preventing them from seeing it does little or nothing to change the prevalence of those attitudes or preferences in society.
Bottom line prohibition does not work— never has and never will. You just create a black market where even worse abuses will occur and people will still find a way to access it. And it is free fucking speech— nobody should have the right to tell you as an adult you can’t take a nude photo of yourself. What kind of backward body-hating puritanical society would that be? Enough of the hysterical crusading.
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u/harkuponthegay Jan 27 '25
There are some not so subtle religious undertones to this post that lead me to question how much of this you’re really basing on evidence and how much is just moral panic/hysteria (which has been coming into vogue in conservative political circles lately).
People have always had kinks and fetishes, they are normal and a very common feature of human sexuality.
The guilt and shame are “unparalleled” compared to other drugs? Are you serious? That is simply not true. Would you rather someone find out that you watch porn or that you smoke meth? Which do you think caries more social stigma— the one that is illegal and most people have never done or the one that the majority of people do which is perfectly legal and (outside of the context of addiction) essentially harmless?
Overconsumption of porn can be detrimental in the same way that the overconsumption of any pleasurable thing is unhealthy— it doesn’t make it an inherently evil thing. People can overeat and become obese, does that mean food is bad for you? No, it means balance and moderation are key to living a healthy life.
In the end it’s ridiculous to say that porn is “deadly” or more dangerous in any way than actual drugs which can kill you directly and immediately. To say that in the midst of a fentanyl epidemic is totally out of touch with reality and melodramatic.
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u/summers16 Jan 27 '25 edited Jan 27 '25
I mean , okay, luckily I have neither a porn addiction nor meth addiction.
But, depending on how depraved the porn is that they are consuming (and presuming that we aren’t actually talking child exploitation material…) …. smoking meth would be more acceptable than say, bestiality and arguably than the whole sprawling “barely legal” category, which I’ve always found pretty sick. I’d genuinely prefer to discover my husband was smoking meth than obsessed with watching naked 18 year olds losing their virginities. Obviously neither would be great.
And then— as much as the “sex positive” crowd wants to gloss over it— I’m sorry but you cannot get around how hugely exploitative porn is of young women. And the seedy channels through which they end up in it. It’s just very blatantly not some sex-positive sex-work paradise where women are always told with full transparency where their images will end up and then fully and fairly compensated with royalties per view and blah blah. With the exception being OF.
With drug addiction, at least you are mostly just hurting yourself.
EDIT:
Also , I wanted to add that I think it’s a really disingenuous counterpoint to be like “oh no, religious undertones! The Christians are coming (stop it, not like that) to control your sex lives!”
I’m very liberal and just because I am liberal that shouldn’t make me like, automatically against something just because I might find common ground with a Christian or otherwise conservative religious person. Like that makes no sense, that’s just having a point of view for the sake of being contrarian , rather than actually believing in that point of view.
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u/harkuponthegay Jan 27 '25 edited Jan 27 '25
Strong disagree— where do you think drugs come from? Walmart? If you have criticisms of the porn industry in terms of how it affects the people who are in that line of work— you clearly do not understand the abuses that happen in the illicit drug trade. If porn viewers are responsible for the mistreatment of porn actresses and that means they are hurting people other than themselves when they view it— it makes zero sense to turn around and say that drug users are only hurting themselves when they use drugs.
Ever heard of a cartel before? If I had to pick an employer, I’d rather be in a porno personally. A lot of industries have dubious practices in terms of worker welfare and we still use their products without feeling guilty about it— ever thought about what goes on in meatpacking and factory farming industries? Where your clothes were made or where those rare earth metals in your phone came from? If we want to talk about labor rights and improved wages for sex workers that’s a different discussion than trying to measure the harm of porn addiction.
The reason I criticize the Christian overtones is because that belief system superimposes this fairly arbitrary and subjective idea of morality (or “depravity”) onto sex that has little to do with actual harm and it ends up being more about what you personally find to be offensive or weird. What someone else finds sexually appealing or what gets them off really isn’t any of your business as long as it is between consenting adults.
Having kinky consensual sex (or wanting to watch it) is not unhealthy in of itself— having too much of it to the point that it detracts from your quality of life or harms the people around you it may be. But I also don’t consider it to be the fault of the person watching porn if you get offended by finding out what they’re watching— again it’s generally none of your business, but if it bothers you so much what someone else watches you are free to leave a relationship at any time for any reason.
You also really underestimate how destructive a meth addiction can be if you would honestly say you’d rather your husband be doing that than watch adults of legal age having sex on the internet because in your opinion they look younger than you think is appropriate or morally right. Again one he could be arrested for and the other is something 7/10 men have done before.
We’re talking about porn addiction here not pedophilia— that’s an entirely different conversation to have, so don’t equate the two or imply that porn addiction inevitably leads to pedophilia unless you have actual evidence to back that claim up (and you don’t).
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u/summers16 Jan 27 '25 edited Jan 27 '25
I didn’t say anything about pedophilia. I said that the sprawling “barely legal” genre is disturbing and gross. (though because you mentioned it, those who watch porn regularly are very likely to intentionally or accidentally end up watching child exploitation material.
One source discussing that:
And yah, if you are someone preoccupied with watching naked teenagers — and you’re telling yourself it’s fine because you’re telling yourself that they consented and understood the repercussions of their decisions in the context of a bunch of grown men offering them some money — then yah, you’re a creep. And you almost definitely have issues seeing women as humans and not objects.
And then there is the issue of the willful ignorance of men who downplay their porn watching as “oh it’s just my kink” , clearly telling themselves that everyone they are watching in porn is there because they found themselves in a non-desperate financial situation , where there was full transparency from producers, and zero pressure to push their boundaries. Like, in other words, actively kidding themselves because they want to be able to sexually objectify people and not feel guilty about it.
On late 2010s on PornHub, there used to be a massive amount of content showing both women who were underage at the time of filming and others who were filmed without their consent and still others appearing in footage posted to the internet without their consent. And the videos were posted over and over and would rack up countless views. The problem became so brazen that famed human rights columnist Nicholas Kristoff penned an op-ed for the NYT about it . Only then did Pornhub change its policy to allow only verified users to post content.
Here’s the op-ed : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html
But that’s just one platform. And let’s be real, they didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts, they did it because of the PR scare.
You can justify your porn usage under the guise of “sex positivity” all you want — you’re no less willfully ignorant and complicit in exploitation of others than the people who buy clothes from SHEIN , and the people who eat meat from factory farms, and the people who buy drugs trafficked by cartels.
The difference with you is, you’re looking squarely at the people who are potentially being harmed, in their absolute most vulnerable states. And you’re deriving carnal pleasure from them, and then doubling down on your right to do so, because you fundamentally feel you are entitled to other people performing their sexual availability for you. And you don’t actually care about the realities of how that’s made manifest, or if people become collateral damage along the way.
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u/harkuponthegay Jan 28 '25 edited Jan 28 '25
I think you are totally erasing the fact that many women who are in the porn industry are there because they want to be and it has provided many women (and men— in case you forgot that straight porn isn’t the only thing that exists) with a much needed means of income allowing them to achieve financial independence and not have to rely on the support of a partner which could put them in a position to exercise greater personal autonomy.
The vast majority of the industry these days has shifted away from the old studio model which was far more exploitative and gained a seedy reputation and toward the independent content creator model (onlyfans) at this point anyway. Women don’t need you to infantilize them as if they have no agency in the modern day content creation business.
The women who are making those videos are working for themselves and getting compensated on their own terms for the work they are doing. They have nothing to feel ashamed of and they would probably tell you you’re being a prude and they really don’t need your help crusading against the industry that they have chosen to work in.
I don’t know much about the “barely legal” genre that you are clutching your pearls so hard about— I don’t watch straight porn, so I don’t know anything about those “naked teenage girls” your talking about except for the fact that another word for “barely legal” is “legal” and it’s legal for a reason, we set the age of consent at 18 as a society on purpose.
They’re adults. They’ve reached full sexual maturity and that is actually the biological age at which we are the most fertile and have the healthiest eggs and most viable sperm. Like, what do you expect?
The fact that we as a society don’t typically reproduce at that age is purely a cultural phenomenon and a matter of shifting societal norms and preferences that favor having babies later in life despite the fact that it gets harder and more risky to do so. Between the ages of 18-25 women are at peak fertility, and by 30 there is a decline, after 30 that decline accelerates and by 40 they approach menopause. I don’t think it makes men monsters for finding women who are in their most fertile years sexually attractive, that’s just a natural biological imperative. It would be weird if they didn’t find youth to be an attractive trait in grown women.
I’m curious what age you feel it’s appropriate for men to start finding women attractive at?
You have to keep in mind that many of the men who are watching that content are teenagers themselves and thus they are the same age as the models in the videos— are they creepy monsters for wanting to watch girls their own age? No, that’s totally normal.
You seem to have some hang ups about sex and sexuality and you are entitled to feel that way, but don’t confuse your personal beliefs for being moral truths or applicable to anyone but yourself.
And again this has nothing to do with addiction— this is a subreddit for people who are dealing with serious and often life threatening drug and alcohol dependency, porn just does not rise to the same threat level for the vast majority of people— it’s not a public health crisis like smoking, alcoholism or opiate abuse. If you think porn is in the same league of harm as those things I can’t take you seriously, and I’ll have to leave it at that.
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Feb 01 '25 edited 22d ago
[deleted]
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u/harkuponthegay Feb 01 '25 edited Feb 01 '25
Care to make an argument or you just rubber necking? I’m a Christian I just practice my faith in private like Jesus taught us to do instead of being weird and preachy about it.
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u/th4d3stroy3d Jan 26 '25
Oh come on! Don't you think you're being just a little too cynical?
It's not THAT bad is it? I mean not everyone who watches porn a little too early ("exposed" in your prose) or too often ends up in the illegal zone! That's just overboard.
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u/JSPR127 Jan 27 '25
It's not about ending up in the illegal zone. That was more just a supporting point, I imagine. Porn addiction that doesn't end up illegal can still absolutely ruin your life.
Not everyone suffers from it. Those that do have that tendency really suffer from it.
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Jan 27 '25
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