From the earliest days of ErosBlog, I have been ignoring sex-negative nonsense online about so-called “porn addiction” and “sex addiction”. Apparently it sells newspapers and riles up congregations, but there’s no science behind it. All it does is make people sex-negative people who think porn is bad feel “medical-sciencey” about their distaste for the pleasures of life.

However, when I saw Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too in Psychology Today, I realized I hadn’t freshened up the message since 2017, so it’s time:

Though porn addiction is not diagnosable, and never has been…numerous studies have begun to suggest that there is more to the story than just porn. Instead, we’ve had growing hints that the conflicts and struggles over porn use have more to do with morality and religion, rather than pornography itself…. Now, researchers have put a nail in the coffin of porn addiction. Josh Grubbs, Samuel Perry and Joshua Wilt are some of the leading researchers on America’s struggles with porn, having published numerous studies examining the impact of porn use, belief in porn addiction, and the effect of porn on marriages. And Rory Reid is a UCLA researcher who was a leading proponent gathering information about the concept of hypersexual disorder for the DSM-5. These four researchers, all of whom have history of neutrality, if not outright support of the concepts of porn addiction, have conducted a meta-analysis of research on pornography and concluded that porn use does not predict problems with porn, but that religiosity does.

The researchers lay out their argument and theory extremely thoroughly, suggesting that Pornography Problems due to Moral Incongruence (PPMI) appear to be the driving force in many of the people who report dysregulated, uncontrollable, or problematic pornography use. Even though many people who grew up in religious, sexually conservative households have strong negative feelings about pornography, many of those same people continue to use pornography. And then they feel guilty and ashamed of their behavior, and angry at themselves and their desire to watch more.

Emphasis added by me. More from the article:

Having moral conflict over your porn use (PPMI) does turn out to be bad for you. But that’s not because of the porn. Instead, higher levels of moral conflict over porn use predict higher levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and diminished sexual well-being, as well as religious and spiritual struggles. In one study by Perry and Whitehead, pornography use predicted depression over a period of six years, but only in men who disapproved of porn use. Continuing to use porn when you believe that it is bad is harmful. Believing that you are addicted to porn and telling yourself that you’re unable to control your porn use hurts your well-being. It’s not the porn, but the unresolved, unexamined moral conflict.

And there you have it. It’s bad religion, not porn, that hurts people!

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