An anti-porn addiction movement is on the rise in the US, but filled with pseudoscience, reactionary rhetoric and shame â raising questions
âIs porn addiction real? Less so than claimed, argues Lisa Hagen in a bombshell report for NPR. In this article, the journalist explores the âmasturbation abstinenceâ and anti-porn addiction movement in the US, finding a landscape filled with pseudoscience, reactionary rhetoric, and shame. âIn one study,â Hagen notes, âamong people who self-identify as âpornography addictsâ, the average frequency of porn use was less than ten times a yearâ.â
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âMeanwhile, 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 Iâve 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.â
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âThe subtextual âthreatâ behind âwrongâ porn gets very queer, very quickly. An interviewee for NPR describes a common set of anxieties on the forums he frequented: ââThe common themes were âporn is turning me gayâ or âporn is making me cross-dressâ or âporn is making me want to be dominatedâ or âporn is making me like transgenders [sic]â.â Itâs 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 âporn addictionâ forums seek to close off. If youâre thinking about this stuff at all, they say, you have an addiction that is driving you to seek out âextremeâ material, and you need help. Reading this as a queer guy felt like hearing the Kill Bill sirens going off: itâs 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 âproperâ 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 âagendaâ. UK Rehabâs page on porn addiction advises that âpornography addiction can lead to changes in sexual tastes, desires and practices [âŚ] 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 [âŚ] 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 ânormalâ sex life increasingly difficultâ. What is ânormalâ here? What is âriskyâ? What are the âtastesâ in question?â
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âWomen, in particular, are taught that menâs excessive sexual desires are the root of cheating and disloyalty and sexual violence (rather than the misogyny that makes men disregard womenâs boundaries, for instance), and that they therefore need to surveil and police their partnersâ 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 youâll particularly find in evangelical/religious circles.â
The fact that people will argue in court that this problem that, again, doesnât exist, is responsible for CSA and other sexual violence and not the structure of society and families encouraging and enabling suchâŚ
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âMost people who think theyâre addicted to porn arenât. What theyâre 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.â
This seems relevant to the constant discussion about the subject here, especially given the politics of the people who think porn addiction/porn brain/etc is real














