Very grateful for the work that went into this! I saw a couple porn artists on Twitter attempting to scaremonger about porn addiction a few days ago and it made me so tired. Really excellent read!
A few pulls:
There is no official porn addiction diagnosis in the United States. A condition called "hypersexuality," which included a subsection for pornography, was considered and rejected by the psychiatrists who compile the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The proposed condition was not approved because the range of normal sexual behavior is so broad that it's hard to define what is outside that range, according to an official with the American Psychiatric Association.
Internationally, the World Health Organization did approve a condition called compulsive sexual behavior disorder. But it lists important caveats, including that it should not be diagnosed based on moral judgments about sex and masturbation or be assigned to adolescents with commonplace, high levels of sexual interest.
Beyond the potential psychological or financial harms, other scholars who've studied online masturbation abstinence communities often find they contain a lot of anger toward women.
Kelsy Burke, a sociologist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the author of the book The Pornography Wars, says once someone is in nofap spaces online, it's a short leap from self-help to more extreme, misogynist messages.
"Undergirding arguments about porn addiction is that the sex industry, which is made up of mostly, you know, women who are sex workers, that they are the source of temptation and that they are, frankly, ruining men's lives," said Burke.
People increasingly seek out health information and support on social media. Meanwhile nationally, young people receive less sex education on key topics than in the 1990s. Only 13 states mandate "medically accurate" sex education.
"We're not taught how to view sex as just something that's normal. And we're not being educated properly about anatomy and consent and pleasure like we should, and it just leaves people with empty hands," says former NoFap.com user Derrick.
As an adult, unlearning much of what he took in from masturbation abstinence forums has been a long process, sometimes even bringing him to tears. He's not angry, but thinking back, he just wants kids like he was to be cautious about whom they trust.
"I could have been happy during that time, rather than stressed out and anxious."
As a proud representative of the chastity kink community, we welcome former repressed weirdos who are working through it.
You got a complicated relationship with sex because of society? Great, you're a bottom now, here's a kink3d and a hitachi, good luck.
