An anti-porn addiction movement is on the rise in the US, but filled with pseudoscience, reactionary rhetoric and shame – raising questions
“Is porn addiction real? Less so than claimed, argues Lisa Hagen in a bombshell report for NPR. In this article, the journalist explores the ‘masturbation abstinence’ and anti-porn addiction movement in the US, finding a landscape filled with pseudoscience, reactionary rhetoric, and shame. “In one study,” Hagen notes, “among people who self-identify as ‘pornography addicts’, the average frequency of porn use was less than ten times a year”.”
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“Meanwhile, sex acts outside the norm are often configured as things that only exist to hurt and degrade women or pollute their relationships, rather than as things women could possibly be interested in. Several of the women I’ve talked to have spoken about being into kink, and about how alienated they feel by discourse that kink is just a cover for violence against women, rather than something women themselves can desire and instigate.”
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“The subtextual ‘threat’ behind ‘wrong’ porn gets very queer, very quickly. An interviewee for NPR describes a common set of anxieties on the forums he frequented: ‘‘The common themes were ‘porn is turning me gay’ or ‘porn is making me cross-dress’ or ‘porn is making me want to be dominated’ or ‘porn is making me like transgenders [sic]’.” It’s pretty clear that men are feeling drawn to the taboo thrills of getting topped, gender-play and gay exploration, whether as fantasy or as real possibility; men are also, I noticed, sometimes seeing straight porn and identifying with the woman. This opens up possibilities and anxieties that ‘porn addiction’ forums seek to close off. If you’re thinking about this stuff at all, they say, you have an addiction that is driving you to seek out ‘extreme’ material, and you need help. Reading this as a queer guy felt like hearing the Kill Bill sirens going off: it’s so clear that any erotic charge towards sex workers of any kind, gay men, trans women, or stigmatised forms of sex are seen as polluting ‘proper’ straight life.
If you read through anti-porn forums and programmes as someone who knows what conversion therapy looks like, you will find its tells in abundance. Heavy emphasis on shaming, while also promising that the programme will provide a way out of that shame; advice that new desires might not go away, but can be ignored and managed; unspoken assumptions that monogamous, cisgender, heterosexual, vanilla sex is the sexual ideal; heavy use of pseudoscience; intimations that the reader is being purposely corrupted by the porn industry or a wider, conspiratorial ‘agenda’. UK Rehab’s page on porn addiction advises that “pornography addiction can lead to changes in sexual tastes, desires and practices […] which can cause huge problems for addicts in relationships. The addict may begin to engage in different forms of sexual experience and expression, which may include risky sexual behaviour […] Even in less extreme cases, as mentioned above repeated exposure to hard-core pornography can lead to changed expectations of partners, which can make attaining a “normal” sex life increasingly difficult”. What is ‘normal’ here? What is ‘risky’? What are the ‘tastes’ in question?”
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“Women, in particular, are taught that men’s excessive sexual desires are the root of cheating and disloyalty and sexual violence (rather than the misogyny that makes men disregard women’s boundaries, for instance), and that they therefore need to surveil and police their partners’ porn use. This is furthered by the assumption that any desire to use porn at all is a marker of unmanageable sexual vice and voraciousness, which you’ll particularly find in evangelical/religious circles.”
The fact that people will argue in court that this problem that, again, doesn’t exist, is responsible for CSA and other sexual violence and not the structure of society and families encouraging and enabling such…
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“Most people who think they’re addicted to porn aren’t. What they’re addicted to is policing their own genders and sexualities, hoping that if they just do so a little more successfully, all their personal and relational problems will fall away.”
This seems relevant to the constant discussion about the subject here, especially given the politics of the people who think porn addiction/porn brain/etc is real
