Trevor is a self-identified porn addict who stumbled upon pornography in a manner familiar to many who hit puberty in 90s suburbia: Skinemax. Things progressed quickly from there; Trevor said he was soon “stealing magazines from stores and barber shops, starting with softer core stuff like
Playboy and
Penthouseand quickly getting into
Club and
Hustler.” After being introduced to a colossal game-changer (the internet), Trevor found porn on file-sharing sites like “LimeWire and Kazaa.”
Buck discovered porn in a similar fashion, first coming across it by accident when “clicking a link online and being very excited by it, but also scared to watch, mainly out of fear of getting caught.” Buck feared his mom would track his browsing history, leading him to seek out more nondescript websites that still hosted pornographic content, like
New Grounds.
At the height of Trevor’s self-diagnosed addiction, he watched porn three times a day, anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour per session. He says his habit impacted other aspects of his life, including sexual performance. “I was seeing a girl and I couldn't get it up when we tried to have sex, even [while] taking Cialis or Viagra,” he said. She later left him “down and out.”
While Buck “didn’t start regularly masturbating to pornography until [he] was about 12,” he said porn consumption became his full-fledged addiction by 18, when porn and masturbation occupied every minute of his free time.
Buck’s addiction was fueled by discovering a particular fetish he was too embarrassed to share with anyone, including me. Because of his unusual preference, Buck said that “masturbating to pornography felt preferable to actual sex since I didn’t have to worry about anyone judging for getting off to something
weird.” When he watched porn, Buck felt free of shame and pressure.
His behavior evolved into a kind of self-abuse. "I would jerk off until my dikk was chafed," he said. His habit left him wincing during each session. Buck said that at the peak of his problem, he spent almost every hour of the day masturbating.
Both Buck and Trevor admitted that they have other compulsive habits. “I eat heavily; I used to smoke a ton of weed; I drink with some regularity,” Trevor said, although he cited porn as his greatest addiction yet.
Buck admitted “problems with heroin and meth in the past” and blames his porn addiction for exacerbating his meth addiction. He also self-diagnosed himself as having Pure Obsessional OCD, a variant of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which can include obsessions without observable compulsions or obsessions of committing acts they consider harmful, violent, or immoral.
Buck explained,“It’s hard to distinguish between what is a consequence of the addiction and what is a consequence of the underlying issues that led up to the addiction.”
He sought help and his therapist swiftly prescribed Klonopin, which he’d take when having panic attacks that fueled his masturbation. However, he’d often “find [himself] blacking out and waking up masturbating again, thus triggering another panic attack.”
Buck also attended several Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings but didn’t find them helpful. He did, however, find one effective method when his therapist engaged him in talk therapy. Buck was able to accept his kinks and alleviate his anxiety “that there was something wrong” with him.
Trevor, on the other hand, took his treatment into his own hands. Panicked and depressed, he found solace on the website
Your Brain On Porn, which seeks to educate consumers about porn’s negative long-term effects and claims to provide studies about porn users’ brains. Trevor hypothesized that his erectile dysfunction (ED) came from watching so much porn (although he experienced the problem years before his struggle with porn consumption), and felt the website’s “huge amount of testimonials” gave him “some hope for the recovery process.”
In my search for answers, my attention was piqued by David Ley’s
Psychology Today article, “
We Must Rely on Good Science in Porn Debate.”
“Whenever we talk about pornography use, we're really talking about masturbation,” Ley told Complex. “Ninety percent of pornography consumption goes along with masturbation.” He explained how most people claiming that porn is addictive or dangerous are actually using coded language to talk about masturbation. Citing “public health” concerns is often a shield used to attack masturbation for moral and religious-based reasons.
“Porn addiction is a label that has been used for nearly 40 years,” Ley said, pointing to an incident in the early ‘80s when
Focus on the Family and James Dobson successfully removed Playboyfrom 7-Eleven shelves under the guise of combatting “porn addiction.”
But the real bombshell here is that, according to Ley, “There's no science behind this.”
Sex addiction, pornography addiction, masturbation addiction—none are recognized as disorders by the American Psychiatric Association. But if they aren’t disorders, why do we see narratives of this affliction again and
again?
It’s a multiplicitous problem, and two of its biggest constituents are God and money.
“First, there’s this large, powerful, wealthy industry that provides sex and porn addiction treatment, and they do so for cash,” Ley said. “Insurance doesn't cover these treatments because it is not a real disorder, and insurance won't pay for treatment of not-real disorders.”
He explained that the first rehab center dedicated to sex and porn addiction was founded by Dt. Patrick Cannes in 1987 Mississippi and called “the Gentle Path.” Methodology focused on a 30-task model, a variation on the popular 12-step model. Carnes recently moved his practice to Arizona, and claims the desert is known for its “healing effects.” (David Duchovny also went to a sex addict treatment facility in Arizona, and paid about $1,000 a day for that privilege.)
Carnes, like NYC-based psychotherapists I interviewed, adopted or slightly modified Alcoholic Anonymous’ 12-step program for addiction recovery. Ley claimed that there is no evidence of its effectiveness, and recent reports confirm that AA may have a staggeringly low success rate, estimated
somewhere between 5 and 10 percent. Ley explained that the model “may, in fact, harm as many as 30 percent or 40 percent of people because it is a spiritually-based religious program.”
Another propagator of porn addiction is religion; predominantly-Mormon Utah has the highest porn-addiction treatment programs per capita in the country. According to Ley, many of these organizations argue that exposure to pornography can turn people gay.
“Now, there's research that shows, number one, that's not true,” he explained, adding “Number two, homosexual men and bisexual men, queer people, transgender people, are at tremendous risk of being stigmatized by these folks because LGBT folk use and watch more porn than heterosexual people—not because porn is addictive, but because porn is a safe place where they can find orientation-consistent stimulation material.”
There have been
several studies that concluded people who identify as porn addicts are more likely to be from religious backgrounds with strong moral prohibitions against porn.
“Groups like Fight the New Drug, The XXX Church, these are moral, religiously-based groups,” Ley explained, adding that these organizations are “fighting a moral battle, but they're hiding behind the language of public health policy.”
