the discussion around porn addiction treads very closely to the swerfy shit.
I consume a lot of porn, stuff I’ve written myself, I dont like a lot of the sex positive in your face shit, but really, from my experience when youre ‘consuming too much porn’ to the point that its fucking up your life, the root of problem there probably isnt porn.
HRT really helped get some of my more destructive behaviours under control.
anyway this is obviously a pretty personal thing for a lot of people, I’m not here to fight anyone.
be kind to yourselves comrades.
Honestly, after developing a bad alcohol habit for awhile, I question a lot of the accepted wisdom of what constitutes addiction. There’s a huge contingent of people in the recovery industry who claim that drug and alcohol addiction is a ‘disease’, but in opposition to that line of thinking are other psychologists and scientists who disagree with that designation. To those that don’t accept te disease model, alcohol and drug addiction is a matter of maladaptive behavior. People make a choice, and because of the degree of physical dependency involved in drug use those bad choices are hard to break out of. The bottom line though, is we have a choice, no matter how hard it is to make it in the face of a powerful substance and ingrained behaviors. I do think that people need guidance when they develop these types of addictions, but not the type that is commonly recommended and proscribed for addiction (namely treatment and recovery centers). For me the thing that helped me the most was seeing a counselor and figuring out why I behaved the way I did, and how to make changes to my thinking to stop engaging in those behaviors. This entire country really needs reckoning to change how we deal with and overcome addictions and the way we think about them, as the way they are currently thought about is at best unhelpful, and at worst, dangerous.
I mean im a lot less concerned with the harm done to the men who consume porn than the harm done to everyone else.
All this tells me is that if you remove the “moral-incongruence” of thinking that porn is bad people no longer feel bad about consuming porn for hours every single day.
In my opinion that means the porn industry (the owners not the workers) has an incentive to push shitty right wing views towards women because you have less moral issues with porn if you don’t view women as people.
But on the other side of this, the porn industry has an incentive towards the atheistic because it is primarily religion pushing shame around porn.
i miss exhibitionists. they wanted people to look at them and we wanted to look, no money changed hands and everybody was happy.
It will return to that when communism erases the existence of an “industry” for porn.
When there is no money to make doing it, almost all of the people doing it will stop. What will remain will be the exhibitionists and the real hobbiests.
title seems kinda sensationalized, going off the abstract of the paper they’re citing. god knows i can’t actually read the goddamn paper, i love academia
there’s not really a debate about whether the feeling of shame around being addicted to porn can come from religious circumstances, and i think it therefore makes sense that many people would feel they’re “addicted” even when they’re not really due to that shame, which seems to be what the paper is about. that doesn’t disprove the idea of pornography being addictive, it just links religious shame and feeling like one is addicted together (i assume anyway, again can’t read the paper. god i love that you have to get ur info from clickbaity articles rather than research papers themselves, what a good system)
I don’t think this is correct, read the article quote below it counters your point entirely
Secondly, and more to the point, the meta-analysis found that “[M]oral incongruence around pornography use is consistently the best predictor of the belief one is experiencing pornography-related problems or dysregulation, and comparisons of aggregate effects reveal that it is consistently a much better predictor than pornography use itself…” The analysis did find small effects between use of pornography and self-perceived problems with pornography, but the researchers suggest that this is likely an artifact of the simple fact that, in order to feel morally conflicted over your use of porn, you actually have to use some porn. If the concept of pornography addiction were true, then porn-related problems would go up, regardless of morality, as porn use goes up. But the researchers didn’t find that. In fact, they cite numerous studies showing that even feeling like you struggle to control your porn use doesn’t actually predict more porn use. What that means is that the people who report great anguish over controlling their porn use aren’t actually using more porn; they just feel worse about it.
The title is 100% sensationalized. I think the author is conflating a variable’s usefulness as a predictor of porn addiction associated behavior with that variable having a causal relationship with porn addiction associated behavior
From my own anecdotal experience, I only “struggled” with porn when I was actively religious. The shame from the religious aspect (I failed god, failed my future wife, my grandma saw me do it from heaven) only worsened my mental state and made me binge for more porn.
I have little to no shame associated with it now since im not really religious anymore and I consume way the fuck less porn overall.
So I see what they are trying to say and yeah, sex work is something that will always exist and no one should feel that shame for indulging in it
oh no there for sure is a correlation how i said, it’s just not that addiction isn’t real for anyone at all because of that correlation existing
Yeah there definitely is, I don’t think my experience is typical of most sex addicts. People have addictions for a variety of reasons or even no reason at all
i appreciate you sharing your experience
I mean, can’t anything be an addiction?
Their argument was no.
If the concept of pornography addiction were true, then porn-related problems would go up, regardless of morality, as porn use goes up. But the researchers didn’t find that. In fact, they cite numerous studies showing that even feeling like you struggle to control your porn use doesn’t actually predict more porn use. What that means is that the people who report great anguish over controlling their porn use aren’t actually using more porn; they just feel worse about it.
[…]
It is noteworthy that in this research, and in the numerous commentaries in response, no one is defending the porn-addiction model. None of the researchers looking at data on porn-related problems have chosen to argue that an addiction model or treatment strategy is appropriate. To be sure, some researchers still defend a compulsive model, or suggest that pornography itself is too broad a concept to be neatly captured by a single theory. The editors of the Archives of Sexual Behavior invited commentaries on this article only from researchers, who must argue based on science, as opposed to anecdote. None of them argue that porn is addictive, that it changes the brain or one’s sexuality, or that the use of porn leads to tolerance, withdrawal, or other addiction-related syndromes. Put simply, while the nuance of porn-related problems is still being sussed out, the idea that porn can be called addictive is done, at least in the halls of sexual science.
It’s a little bit like how you can stop being a bastard by ceasing to be a cop. Being a cop isn’t addictive, it’s an active thing you choose to be. You must put in energy every day to get up and go do it. If you’re giga-addicted to alcohol and you don’t consume it you’re subject to a litany of addiction-related syndromes (like dangers of withdrawal with which I am unfamiliar). If you stop being a cop you might be subject to a crisis of identity or lack of income, but these would probably be more circumstantial than what they classify as addiction. I miss my dog when I go into the rooms where she used to sleep, but the lack of my precious baby angel doesn’t put me in danger of overloving another dog because my tolerance went down or something. I wasn’t addicted to my dog because she wasn’t addictive.
They conclude thusly (the finding was religiosity is the main predictor of reported problems with pornography consumption):
Helping people to consciously examine and consider their religious beliefs about sex, masturbation, and porn with modern, adult, self-determining eyes, may help them reduce the pain and suffering caused by this moral conflict.
If you call something addiction without the addictive nature, you do harm in the clinical sense (your first directive is to first do no harm). Your clients would be better served with the tools, techniques, and attitude of dealing with compulsions. It’s the same way you don’t just wipe an eating plate with bleach to disinfect it and instead use soap and water even though they’re both cleaning products.
in a medical context today, “addiction” implies substances, and it is only relatively recently that the field has been willing to consider whether behavioral addictions - sex, food, exercise, video games, or just the Internet in general - qualify as “true” addictions. Only in 2013 did the editors of the DSM… reclassify “pathological gambling” as a “gambling disorder” and place it alongside substance addictions. Critics worry that we are over-pathologizing everyday life; a former editor of the DSM has said that behavioral addictions should not be labeled as mental disorders “merely because we like doing them a lot and miss them when we stop.”
What’s missed in those debated is that these are not new addictions but rather a reemergence of an older way of looking at addiction, dating from the inebriety movement of the late 19th century. The movement cast a wide net, and a variety of behavioral problems were understood as inebriety, including habitual problems with many substances… The Journal of Inebriety, the flagship publication of the AACI used the word “addiction” for the first time in reference to chocolate.
Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge. His point in the book is that the strict medical definition of addiction is newer and has engendered a lot of debate among researchers and practitioners. Even though morphine is known to cause physical dependence, a lot of people who use it, even habitually, don’t end up becoming addicted, so it could be construed that there is a behavioral or psychological component as well, and that behavioral component could surface in other contexts. Addiction as a physical, substance-oriented phenomenon is just one perspective.
For sure. I’m reminded of the mice in isolation choosing drug water and mice who are otherwise fulfilled with stimulation, friends, etc. choosing the normal water instead. Physical dependency to a fulfilled mouse would probably be like dealing with a sprained ankle or a cold. They’re not going to keep hurting their ankle.
I suppose the argument is that, in the absence of physical harm and a lack of necessity for health, then one must question what the harm of the behavior is. This is to say that food isn’t an addiction because without it you can’t survive. With gambling, it’s clear that there’s a harm because you run out of money. With porn, you run out of cum. Do you or the people you care about give a shit? Is it getting in the way? Like are you missing appointments and classes to masturbate? Are you exposing others to adult material? If not and you don’t care, the psychologist doesn’t need to get involved. To my understanding a mental health professional is trying to alleviate the pain and symptoms of mental distress. If you’re not developing a physical dependency/physical harm, the compulsion isn’t distracting you, and you don’t feel incongruent for doing it, then the psychologist for whom this piece is written, needn’t concern themselves.
If you feel incongruent, it’s worth exploring with the “modern, adult, self-determining eyes” that the author mentions. Your solutions aren’t one size fits all. Maybe your path away from pain is saying that porn is… le good! or you believe there are more ethical sources of pornogrpahy so you only use that type you resonate with. But also, maybe, your relationship with pornography was a proxy for some other argument with a significant other or your #1 compulsion when you’re avoiding discomfort. Where if you make peace with the reason for the proxy the urge to use goes away as well. Maybe you lament doing it instead of being awesome, so you should escape your comfort zone before you jork peanits.
Did I do honor to what you quoted and elaborated on or did I walk away rambling?
Hmm based on the last paragraph, it sounds like the argument has more to do with what the word addiction means which isn’t really productive in my view. I think certain things can be more addictive than others to people with different personality types
which isn’t really productive in my view.
The author made a case for why such a distinction is important.
I will add something to the arguments made by the authors of this study: Having demonstrated that it is the moral conflict and self-identity of porn addict which is harmful, it is thus upon us to confront the social, media, and clinical use of this concept. It causes and perpetuates harm by focusing attention upon porn rather than the true cause: the moral conflict over one’s sexual desires. Clinicians who continue to promote the idea of porn addiction are, like those who promote age-regression hypnosis or recovered memory therapy, engaging in malpractice. Websites and advocacy groups that promote and encourage identification as porn addicts are doing harm to their followers, and can become like the hucksters promoting naturopathic treatment despite federal medical groups identifying such treatments as ineffective and potentially harmful. Ultimately, all should be held accountable for their inaccurate, outdated, and exploitative actions.
Chuds love to just blame somebody instead of interrogating a situation.
gooners rejoice gooning is healthy
alls i can say is i’m definitely not getting prostate cancer
idk I’ve struggled with porn addiction most of my adult life which has lead to me seeking out hard stuff that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t be comfortable with discussing. I’ve talked about trying to give up porn on here and failing over and over again, and I’m by no means a religious person.
i think anything can be addictive to specific people. I struggled hard with an addiction to dxm – the active ingredient in most cough syrups – but was told that it is not an addictive substance and that I just simply just stop taking it. Most people would probably agree with that, but I nearly ended up trying to get myself thrown in jail just so I wouldn’t have any opportunity to get ahold of the shit for long enough to get over it. Even to this day from time to time I think about doing it even though I know the hell it will lead me to if I do. It was easier to quit drinking alcohol, which was in no way easy to do, than it was to quit abusing dxm for me.
I think certain things just have a draw to certain people. Maybe most people won’t have an addiction, but some will.
edit: i initially put dmx … woof woof
Dextromethorphan is a psychotropic substance that carries a potential for abuse and dependence. On the basis of the currently available data, its reclassification as a prescription drug should be considered.
Dextromethorphan Withdrawal and Dependence Syndrome
Looks like you’re not alone.
oh wow… i never knew. my sister actually got me checked into a rehab through some herculean effort and the whole time everyone told me it was all in my head… even the therapists didn’t believe that you could get addicted to dxm
I’ve previously used a lot dxm, the accessibility of it made it very easy to use as a mental escape, even if it made me feel terrible and was fucking up my life. Solidarity comrade.
The best thing for me was filling my time with other things, heck I’d smock cigs over dealing with what dxm did to my mental health
dxm did help me accept I was trans though, but i think therapy would have been better than crying under a blanket on a wednesday
For a time when I was very heavily abusing dxm I also thought I was trans. I almost scheduled a visit with a doctor to talk about my options to transition. A sudden change in my living situation forced me to cut back on the dxm use substantially, though not completely, and that desire to transition stopped almost as suddenly as it began, but that is probably just coincidental. I don’t think dxm was the reason why I had a sudden fascination with cross dressing and wanting to be a woman though. I think it just helped me explore that to the nth degree very quickly and then I just realized that it wasn’t for me.
if you look beyond the hook it’s moral disapproval in general, not exclusively religiously based.
some people tried giving it up, because it was causing porn-induced ED, they are so desensitized that only porn makes them "hard. there were a couple forums about that.
LMAO even a hypersexuality researcher caved
prefacing this by saying i’m a dumb ass, but i don’t know about this. i remember watching ‘true life: i’m a porn addict’ as a kid on mtv and this dude was so addicted to porn all he could do was live in his grandma’s den and goon all day. he said it ruined his entire existence and has him enslaved. i don’t see how that’s anything other than an addiction
Eh, I wouldn’t take too much stock in a reality show on MTV. They can choose what clips they show in the show, it’s very much not raw footage, so they could just convey “oh my god, what a freak”.
The wacko Christian types want to classify any porn consumption as an addiction and a problem widespread in America. Yeah it happens but it’s hardly the most important issue for us.
well i’m not a wacko christian obviously so that’s not what i was talking about lol. duster addiction isn’t a widespread issue but it’s still a problem, isn’t it?
Oh god I remember that one, if I remember right he had a girlfriend too
