Don't Worry, You're Not Really Addicted to Porn (Because No One Is)

This article is from the archive of our partner .

Good news for internet pornography viewers (basically, everybody on the internet): a new study has deemed that porn addiction, as an illness, is essentially nonexistent. Published in the latest issue of Current Sexual Health Reports,  the study titled “The Emperor Has No Clothes: A Review of the ‘Porn Addiction’ Model” posits that there is “poor evidence” for the commonly-claimed idea of porn addiction and that it “fails to meet standards of addiction.”

Nerve explains what that really means: 

Dr. David Ley, author of a new study in the Current Sexual Health Reports, says that slapping the label of porn addict on net smut enthusiasts is not only missing the point, but ignoring the benefits of watching porn … furthermore, a limiting 27 percent of articles on porn addiction actually contain any empirical data. In fact, in studies, there's been no evidence of any of the commonly hyped life-crushing negative effects of porn addiction.

One of the interesting points of the study’s argument is that the concept of porn addiction is fueled by “a large, lucrative industry” that stands to make money by offering pseudo-treatments for an addiction that doesn’t really exist. The same people diagnosing your horrible, degenerate porn addiction are the ones making bank off of curing it. Basically, it’s a sham.

It's also a convenient way for anti-porn activists to make their arguments about porn's dangers. Maybe this debunking will quell some of the fear mongering (see: "8 Signs Your Partner Is Addicted to Porn") and convince people that pornography can actually be part of a normal, healthy sex life. 

So fear not – if you catch yourself watching porn more than once in your life, you don’t actually have an addiction. In fact, you might just be a normal human being.

Photo by Graja via Shutterstock.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.