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
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.
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.
This is a really good writeup.
The people who believe in “porn addiction” do always seem to be either hyper religious or part of that weird atheistic purity culture, you know the one, the one that weirdly crosses over into keto diets, eugenics or anti vaccination fears, like they’re channeling Dr. Kellogg’s various phobias.
people talk about how we need to bring back “don’t feed the trolls” rhetoric for modern internet ragebait and I agree but also I think the most useful thing from the Old Internet that I miss is LURKING
be a lurker. just read things and think about them without feeling the need to weigh in or call out or disseminate everything you encounter. it’s so nice and so freeing and it’s a good way to learn things.
I have frequently regretted getting involved in shit that didn’t involve me online but you know what I’ve never regretted doing? Lurking. literally lurk moar
Genuinely its just a rule now that if there’s some fucking controversy I will always believe the tma person over whatever opinion reddit or twitter is telling me
Do not believe reddit telling you the gaming youtuber was abusing their girlfriend do not believe tumblr telling you the werewolf incest roleplayer was soliciting nudes from minors do not believe sarah z or her chud informant when they tell you andrew hussie is a manipulator whose switch to any pronouns was a publicity stunt to make homestuck look more woke. Don’t adopt the opinions the internet tells you to and dont spread the lies and defamation they want you to spread.
My mother- who was a single parent raising me alone in my early youth- has never believed in baby talk. So when I was born, she started from day one talking to me and treating me like I was an adult.
As a result of this, I had rather high expectations of other adults from a very young age, and despised being talked down to. The worst was being asked sweetly and stupidly y over and over, “can you say “hello”?” in a way that felt like I was an animal being coaxed into performing a trick.
In my earliest years, I learned that using certain words and phrases could convince new adults to treat me the way I preferred. So to combat the annoyances of being treated like a subhuman idiot, I began purposefully expressing myself with a broad vocabulary.
My mother started teaching me how to read when I was three. By the time I was five, my favourite thing to read was Calvin and Hobbes anthologies, partly because I loved tigers, but mostly because in every other book I’d read, kids my age were written as stupid babies with no thought process or agency who nobody seemed to think of as capable of thinking or contributing. Calvin, though, was only a year older than me, and had a rich inner world, and was capable of speaking meaningfully and eloquently while still being a kid. Calvin was a kid the way that kids WERE, not the way adults saw us.
As a consequence of this, I think, I developed a prematurely warped sense of humour wherein- again, starting around age five- the funniest thing in the world to me was to approach adults and instigate conversations wildly beyond my age range. Like “oh, you’re slowing yourself down for me? Bold of you to assume I’m not already four steps ahead”.
I imagine this was probably very annoying, as I mostly didn’t actually have the experience or context to fully understand a lot of the subjects I was talking about and was mostly just imitating the persona of a mildly disinterested and somewhat philosophical old woman, but I genuinely understood enough vocab to bluff around the gaps in my knowledge long enough for the funny part to happen.
My preferences to spend more of my time fucking with adults instead of my peers slowly widened the already-existing gap between me and the majority of my schoolmates, which honestly didn’t bug me much because the two friends I DID have were way more fun than the rest of them anyways. But I was probably a bit emotionally stunted by this point anyways
Cut to me, age nine or so. Annoying know-it-all, deeply ironic, and the kind of kid who would rather lick a carrot peeler than suffer through the torture of meaningful emotional vulnerability with any adult ever
First real health class
We get the Puberty talk
Skin-peelingly awkward
Mr. Q, our fifty-ish something teacher, brings out a question box and a bunch of scraps of paper. Says he wants everyone to write down at least one question and he would pull a handful of them out anonymously to answer.
I cannot resist
We all submit our questions
Question one. “What is a vulva”
Diagram. Clinical and age-appropriate response.
Question two. “Is love nothing more than a chemical reaction designed to ensure the survival of the species?”
Long awkward pause
Teacher clears his throat
[This is hilarious]
Teacher speaks
“Uh…….”
“Well, um. I suppose… I love my wife. And I love my children. Or I would describe what I feel for them as love.”
Oh No
[Dawning realization that I have trapped myself and everyone in this room in a Feelings Talk]
[Panic and stare directly through the floor until he stops talking about his personal emotions regarding family and society and shit]
[Pain And Suffering And Hell because this is, in fact, what I signed us all up for, because boarding a plane to Alaska means that you are definitely going to Alaska, no matter if it was a joke or not, because the plane doesn’t give a fuck, because it is a plane and you are a moron]
The lessons in humour I learned that day have stuck with me ever since
Sincerity always wins
You Can Press The Big Red Button Whenever You Like But You Cannot Un-Send The Nuke
Sometimes you will be a lesbian to your parents and a straight man to your partners parents and a gay man to your partner and a woman to your grandparents and out to your friends and stealth to your classmates and a nice young lady to the cashier at the coffee shop and then people on your computer will ask you to choose which of these identities you ACTUALLY are and which you are Appropriating The Oppression Of because don’t you know they contract each other. You can only be one thing solidly forever
Finally broke down and looked up “67” on wikipedia today, and i love that wikipedia had to include the fact that people are using the meme as evidence of “brain rot” in younger generations because of how low-effort it is. And like, i have no horse in this race, i’m clearly out of touch enough with what the kids are saying that i have to go look up memes on the internet to understand them, but brain rot? I’m pretty sure kids have been saying random numbers as memes since… like, the beginning of language. the beginning of numbers. I’m guessing that some time around 15,000 years ago in hunter-gatherer tribes all around the world a scene played out where one kid shouted “hey look, four rocks!” after seeing a few rocks on the ground, and every other kid in the tribe shouted “four rocks! four rocks!” and the adults just stood around like “what the fuck are the kids on about now?” and then had to live with the kids saying “four rocks!” every time they saw four of literally any object together. Like, this does not seem like a new phenomenon.
You make a compelling point. Especially because “four rocks” IS hella fun to say. Thanks for the new way to confuse my friends when hiking!
