I hope we all know this and are just doing it as a bit, but sometimes I do see shit on this website that makes me go “Oh y’all are genuinely just weird prudes”
The “gooner epidemic” is not real, gooning is an incredibly niche kink that very few people engage in.
“Porn addiction” is basically non existent and affects such a small portion of the population as to not be relevant. The idea that most people have in their heads about porn addiction is propaganda made up by evangelicals.
We do not live in an overly-sexually-liberated time. There is not an excess of sexual content or exposure to it.
Most of the time when people talk about “the gooner problem” what they’re actually talking about is a mix of two unrelated things, people living normal sexually liberated lives, and undersocialized young men that don’t know how to interact with people.
Sex is good. We should be having more of it. We should encourage healthy, safe sex featuring whatever kinks you and your partner(s) consent to. Don’t fall for puritan propaganda comrades.
I won’t disagree that there are people who have an unhealthy relationship with porn that negatively impacts their lives.
But that is not what makes an addiction, and a lot of that unhealthy relationship is caused by the stigmatization of porn in the first place.
Having an unhealthy habit of overconsumption actually is the textbook definition of addiction
Addiction requires more than that. At the very least it requires dependence, tolerance, and cravings, which porn addiction generally does not have, and usually requires some level of withdrawal symptoms which porn absolutely does not have.
Another important distinction is that stopping porn consumption generally does not improve outcomes and in fact can make them worse. If I stop smoking cigarettes, after enough time the nicotine cravings stop, and the negative effects of smoking (coughing, lung cancer risk, being stinky) begin to fade. Stopping porn consumption does not make people suddenly able to have healthy, anxiety free sexual relationships, and tends to increase anxiety and shame.
Dependence, increased tolerance and requiring more and more extreme porn, and cravings are all present in individuals with porn addiction.
There are people who are addicted to everything, including things like Minesweeper or Sudoku or cleaning. How you can stake out the absurd position that there’s no such thing as porn addiction is absurd, when sex addiction is well documented and hits the same mental stimuli.
You are fundamentally incorrect and need to read the scientific literature on this. Like, this is not a matter of opinion, what you just said is equivalent to saying “vaccines cause autism,” we have research on this and your claims are not backed up by the evidence.
I’m not gonna talk to each of those points I’m just gonna tackle the first one, there is no evidence of porn dependence. What you’re mistaking for “porn dependence” is almost entirely anxiety, depression, and shame relating to sex and pornography.
If having a sexual experience with another person is anxiety inducing and you’re ashamed and can’t communicate well about it, it’s going to be hard to perform sexually, and you won’t have this issue with porn because there isn’t another person involved. Thats not dependence, it just kinda looks like it because “I can get hard when I’m watching porn but not with my girlfriend”
I don’t trust capitalist porn-industry aligned “studies” that directly cut against the lived experience of me and everyone I know as well as Marxist feminism and practical common sense. The fact you could say that porn addiction doesn’t exist is absurd, just say it’s overstated. It absolutely exists just like sex addiction
I love anecdotal evidence!
Actually that would be more valid than your claim, because some biomedical research is funded and operated by the biomedical industry, whereas research on the effects of pornography aren’t funded by the porn industry like, at all.
These are studies done by universities, which generally have a relatively conservative environment, and definitions agreed on by major health organizations including the WHO. The PhD student researching media ethics and writing her dissertation on the effects of pornography is not a secret stooge of the porn industry, and she’s far more knowledgeable on this topic than you are.
Your analogy is flawed because the people asserting vaccines cause autism have no viable mechanical explanation for why this is the case.
Ejaculation releases dopamine, and every single part of human life that entails dopamine release has associated addictions. Why porn would be an exception has not been explained. You are the one making the absurd claim with no mechanical explanation, not I. In fact, addiction has been documented in hundreds of different asinine and otherwise harmless activities, so the fact you can sit there saying “trust the experts Bro this one is different for some reason I can’t explain” isn’t very compelling when scientific consensus is that there’s even addiction to things like running or video games.
It's amazing how as soon as sex is involved hexbear will just say and upvote shit that could have been said by Phyllis Schlafly. This post is utter gabage, and complete nonsense. Your arguments for the plausibility and existence of wide spread porn addiction is that jacking off feels nice so there's a mechanism of addiction and you just sorta feel like there's a vibe. That's just... nothing, and in the process you have aligned yourself with the evangelical right using their exact argument.
Is it really that stigmatized? Like maybe in very religious communities but overall I think it's fairly normalized.
It’s absolutely stigmatized. We’re at a point where the abstract idea that someone watches porn isn’t super stigmatized anymore, but most people are definitely not comfortable talking about porn or sex in the open, and very much feel shame about their own habits.
Yeah that's true, I guess it's considered kind of a vice that's normalized, kinda like smoking.
What does?