Reminder: Porn Addiction Is Not A Thing

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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“Run Away, Run Away!” From The Sex Addiction Mafia

I want to share this article by Dr. Marty Klein, who continues to hold the line against the “sex addiction” bogosity.

I don’t treat sex addiction. The concept is superficial. It isn’t clearly defined or clinically validated, and it’s completely pathology-oriented. It presents no healthy model of non-monogamy, pornography use, or stuff like S/M. Some programs eliminate masturbation, which is inhumane, naïve, and crazy.

Oh, I observe people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and a few other exotic states. That accounts for some of what laypeople call “sex addiction.”

What I mostly see instead of “sex addicts” is people who are neurotic or narcissistic. They can’t quite believe that the normal rules of life (“tell the truth,” “all behavior has consequences”) apply to them. They make promises they intend to keep–but then they want relief from frustration, or loneliness, or anxiety so much, they are unwilling to keep their promises, even promises to themselves. And some “sex addicts” just can’t come to terms with having one, relatively brief, life. They want several lives, so they can have everything.

Solid sane stuff. But, to be honest, my attention was more captured by the dude who featured in the intro to Dr. Klein’s piece:

Before he even sat down, my new patient blurted out why he had come. “My wife says I’m a sex addict, and she demands I get treated immediately,” he said.

No further than this did I read, before two pertinent memes with a common soul began warring within my breast. In the order they burst into my mind, they were 1) DTMFA! followed briskly by 2) “Run away! Run away!”

Lest there be any mistake, my sympathies are with this dude. There’s a frequent belief, among monogamy-minded wives, that their wifely prerogatives include not just the right to demand their husband’s exclusive sexual attention, but also the right to demand his lack of sexual attention — to, if they so choose, stop having sex with him while simultaneously expecting him to remain faithful and even refrain from porn and masturbation. It’s selfish, unrealistic, and disturbingly common. (And, yes, sometimes you can flip the genders and get the same story — not as often, but it happens.)

I myself am with the comedian who once said “I’m a pretty good dog, when you get down to it. But if you don’t scratch me once in a while, it’s going to be hard to keep me on the porch.”

So, back to our protagonist. It’s a lead pipe cinch that he’s guilty of some sort of sexual misconduct, if his wife claims he’s a sex addict. So, what turns out to be his special flavory of dickery?

Well, getting handjobs at massage parlors, which I myself consider a bit inappropriate for a married man. So, no “Husband of The Year” award for him. But the context? Exactly as I suspected upon reading the opening sentence:

The poor guy looked like a lot of Silicon Valley engineers: light blue button-down shirt, khaki pants, shoes that desperately needed a shine. He had started going to a massage parlor a few months after his baby was born. After about eight or nine desultory hand jobs in the course of a year, he’d confessed to his wife.

I told him I might work with him, but why did he need this specific approach?

“Because Maria said that either I’m a sex addict and I couldn’t help it and I need treatment, or I’m just a selfish bastard and she wants a divorce.”

He wanted to keep his marriage and kid. To do so, he had to admit he had a disease and get it treated. He was desperate. He would do anything. I told him I might be able to help him deal with the power struggle in his marriage, and help him stop avoiding conflict (his wife happily abandoned him when she had the much-wanted baby, then unilaterally invited her mother to move in with them for a year–and he couldn’t confront her because “I love her so much”). I said I could probably help him feel better about himself, and help him feel less guilty about masturbating.

But I couldn’t treat his sex addiction because I didn’t believe he had such an ailment. In tears, he left. The town’s best-known sex therapist had failed him.

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Annie Sprinkle Debunks Sex Addiction

I’ve long been hostile to the idea of “sex addiction” because it strikes me as nonsense on its face. Sex is a core biological imperative, like breathing or excreting, making a “sex addiction” as nonsensical as a “crapping addiction”. Pathologizing normal behavior is something I recognize as a tool of control, a way to twist people up inside so that you can more easily guilt them into changing their behavior (joining your church, giving you money, working longer hours, whatever.) Thus, for me, concerned talk of “sex addiction” is a red-flag warning that the speaker is likely to be a sex-negative culture warrior or a woo-woo-therapy-selling charlatan.

I’m pretty good at being dismissive of nonsense, but I’m not always so good at patiently explaining why it’s nonsense. “Suffering fools gladly” equals a skill I was behind the door when they were passing them out. Fortunately, we have Annie Sprinkle to bear what I cannot, and she’s written a nice article succinctly explaining the nonsense that is sex addiction prattle. There’s lots, but this paragraph fragment is exemplary:

Sex addiction often makes a disease out of what is often quite reasonable sexual behavior. It emphasizes negative aspects of sex. It takes away some of the personal responsibility for sexual choices and blames problems on a ‘disease’. It offers simple solutions to complex problems. Marty Klein points out that, “Sex addiction legitimizes sex-negative attitudes and supports sexual guilt.” It can make people feel badly if they simply have an active and varied sex life. Sex addiction can be used as a way to put down socially disapproved of behavior.

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