SnepShark

i am going to read this in full once i’m not at work but i really appreciate what i’ve read so far

really good post satah

hey wow thank you for sharing

thank you so much for writing this, I really appreciate it

thank you for writing this, it's very thoughtful and gave me a lot to think about in turn.

i couldnt agree more...

though alcohol is a tiny bit different in that it can change physiological processes leading to i think an actual dependency on regular alcohol consumption... something like that.

im just lucky i dont like how it makes me feel, otherwise i would be easy game... i did quit smoking 10+ years ago with little effort. was broke, watched a motivational video telling me how nicotine moves your baseline miserable lower and lower and the highs are just little hops compared to the drops... or something anyway. it helped me, and... yeah. i did have the occasional smoke afterwards, but all in all i wouldnt have finished a single package by now... (especially with those ginormous packages... idk 60? ....the tobacco industry can see the end, so the users gotta buy more stake to keep it alive... ugh, yuck!

anyhow. im not free of woes, but i think, if i wanted to, i could quit anything (that doesnt change my body functions) by myself... and im not gonna pick up habits that appear irrecoverable to my particular situation, so i should be golden for now... hehe... ._.

Thank you so much for this

shout out to your craft, I'm floored by how complex and accessible this is simultaneously, thank you for sharing

Incredible post. Thank you.

Huh. I think you did win us over a bit, which surprised us- one thing that super conservative raisin' really gives you, in the process of escaping, is a maybe-slightly-overreactive immune system to hints of sex-negativity or shame conditioning, so we were really ready to disagree.

But you're right, I think, and the temptation to dismiss actual pain with snark and disbelief is still bad, yeah. And shame is a type of pain, even when it's misdirected (by our standards).

And yeah, being an ex-/non-practicing/whatever smoker, the things said about not resetting feel... Correct. It reminds us of how we hate the way medical intake forms talk about smoking (and, probably, alcohol) because it makes us stop and think every time- am I not a smoker because I haven't smoked in 3 years? Is that what you think, doctor? Did I stop being not-a-smoker when I stopped and had one with my aunt-in-law in a parking lot last month because I like talking to her and there's a nostalgia in conversation and a cigarette? Did I stop when a relationship was imploding last year or my job was demanding the year before that, and I bought my own pack and smoked through it in a week or so? How binary is "smoker"? Because I don't feel like the same person, or at least the same kind of person, as when I needed half a pack to focus my way through a day of retail and a night of verbal sparring. Something's different in the way that I smoke even when I do smoke, and while I acknowledge and remain vigilant against the possibility it could go back to what it was... It hasn't. So idk, am I a smoker? How binary is this binary?

Sorry, that was a rant that probably should've been an independent post but... You said a thing, it resonated, I wanted to express how. >-.-'<

Thank you for this post.

Great post, thanks so much for sharing.

I've also been pretty hesitant to indulge in the "is X a real addiction?" debates. The ones that come to my mind are porn, gambling, and gaming. While I'm sure there is a biological reason why it would be important to draw some sort of distinction, it doesn't feel super helpful when people need support.

Like, if someone feels they're "addicted" to X or their behavior shows symptoms of addiction to X, I feel like they need support rather than like, a semantic debate. I guess one rough part about it is that the semantic debate could determine whether certain support groups get formed or if your health insurance covers it or whatever, which sucks that those things hang in the balance of semantics.

I feel like depression and shame can spiral into so many different "addictions" or "compulsive behaviors."

You get into it with the "addressing the shame" bit but the giant backlash against 'porn addiction' is because of the groups trying to widen the shame around porn. A survey was done and most self-identifying porn addicts were using porn like, once a month.* Now. I have had (haven't beaten) serious problems with alcohol, been to the hospital with it more times than my fingers and toes, lost jobs etc etc etc. If that once a month is like my 'once a month' where it means a week drunk and a week in pain and all the wikipedia symptoms of DTs after that then that is a Problem. If it's more like your 'one craft beer' then it's outsiders trying to assign shame to that behavior.

And like, peer pressuring people to do things that they don't want to do is not ok! I haven't experienced people trying to get me to sleep with all my friends or sex positivity to the point of you-must-be-pansexual. For the most part I haven't even really been pressured into drinking except like once when I was 19, although that's a major problem for other alcoholics.

Now, there are other people in the comments that are detailing the major negative life consequences that have been caused by their porn addiction. I believe them and I don't think they're alone. The meme of 'porn addiction isn't a thing' comes from groups trying to assign people with objectively below-average masturbation habits as addicts, which is where at least my vitriol about it comes from. And I think it is consistent with what you are saying that: if people are feeling Shame about their once a month jerkoff and have had no consequences otherwise, the better answer is to assuage that shame rather than treating for addiction.

My (mild, it's just cohost and this does look a bit like concern trolling) fear is that above the cut gets taken as the word without all of your (outstanding) context with fash nofap groups being the only ones extending a hand, peer pressure, etc. I still think pushing back against an extensive, externally imposed definition is important.

*not implying you haven't heard this

edit: tangential but also the application of 12 step to support groups where it is wildly inappropriate: No, victims of abuse should not be required to "apologize and make amends" with their abuser! Or try to inventory what they did wrong! And it's unfortunate that what's something like a 12 step industrial complex pushes the doctrine and gets a large say into what "society" defines as addicts, gets pushed onto children by the state, I could rant on

As someone whose both life and livelihood are often under attack by a deeply sex negative culture, i want to be honest about the fact i definitely felt myself prickling defensively as i made my way through the first few paragraphs.

while i think my reflex is justified in most circumstances (since there are very real forces, both institutional and social that have been leaning more and more on "porn/sex addiction" as a boogeyman to use as a cudgel against people), reading this does have me rethinking my own language and feelings around the topic. While i dont believe sex and porn addiction are real in the sense that true prudes and institutional puritans mean when they say it (you know, as this fundamentally corrupting thing), i can now see that it is real in the sense that sometimes people who are hurting call for help using whatever language they have access to, and shaming them over their choice of language is not the help they need.

thank you for writing this. I want my sex positivity to be rooted in compassion and love for my fellow human beings, and this helped me see a spot where i was closing myself off from that.

God people making themselves out to being sex educators and then weaponizing sex positivity like that makes me so mad, and I'm not gonna lie, that the sort of mad that gets into "actually want to hammer nails into a baseball bat" territory

I'm still internalizing this; the immediate thought is that the time has come for an Addiction Spectrum

this is an extremely thoughtful and incredibly well-written post. i apologize if my response is excessively grim, but: i suspect that the reason that people insist that porn addiction Isn't A Thing is, at the end of the day, pretty straightforward: lots of them make it, have friends who make it, or consume it. especially for those first two categories, the economic incentives are not in favor of nuance around the concept of addiction! this is especially the case because the connotation of any type of Thing Addiction is that the Thing is itself toxic or addictive. cigarettes and alcohol are both toxic in a very literal sense (alcohol significantly less so than cigarettes, but the liver still has a job to do in a way that's not true for soda afaik), and i think that those being the most well-known types of addiction goes a long way toward shaping the idea of what an addiction capital-I Is.

so porn artists, who figure pretty largely in this discourse, have lots of incentives to dismiss the concept of porn addiction. if you're a porn artist and porn addiction is "real," that suggests that your livelihood is bound up in the production and distribution of something which is in and of itself toxic and addictive. that idea both threatens your income and puts you in an unpleasant moral position, so the incentive to push back is extra strong. and, unlike cigarettes and alcohol, porn genuinely doesn't fuck anybody's lungs or liver up. if your rent checks are at stake, why not take the easy road? is empathy for some catholics on reddit really more important than your next paycheck, or your buddy's? even if it is some gay person with trauma who's concerned about this, do their feelings matter more than your buddy's ability to buy groceries? ultimately idk if "porn addiction isn't real" is really meant to be anything besides "stop telling people that my/my buddy's/my favorite shop sells poison."

idk. as the person i actually am i empathize with half of this and sympathize with the other half. though it's for different reasons i have to keep a similar level of distance from alcohol as you as a matter of psychological safety, and i tend to wish that sex would play a far smaller role in art and culture than it actually does. but i saw how poorly queer people responded to an attempt to build up an asexual community on tumblr over the course of 2010-2020, and that was purely based on a reaction to a perceived political threat ("the asexuals threaten our freedom to have sex.") i dunno if compassion is in much greater supply for a population which seems much further away from cohost than ace people ever were on tumblr

there's a lot of comments here to this affect, but i wanted to say, i really appreciate you lending your perspective and experience to the discussion.

Thanks so much! I think everyone should read this in full. I understand why the "disease" model of addiction is so popular (phrasing it as something outside of individual control instead of a moral failing is good) but it feels very similar to the very common Protestant belief that there are Bad and Good people, and that if a good person acted like a bad person it must have been The Devil making them do it

Thank you so much for writing this post. 100% worth reading, extremely nuanced, extremely well-written, and it addresses a lot of important stuff. I couldn’t agree with it more.

(Edit: I tried to hide the stuff below under a collapsible tag but it looks like HTML doesn't work in comments)

If you’ll permit me to share my own (second-hand) experience with this subject… My mother is an alcoholic, though apparently she’s sober now (she lives half a country away so I’m relying on what I hear about her through my aunts). It has taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact that she is not an inherently malicious person, she was just extremely unwell and wasn’t getting the support and treatment she needed to be healthy. I wanted so badly to hold onto my anger at her, my pain at the way she treated me and the rest of my family. I wanted to believe she had some inherent evil so that it would be easier to hate her.

But as I educated myself more about alcoholism and addiction as a whole, as well as my mother’s other conditions (anorexia, bipolar disorder), I came to realize that none of that was the case. Yes, she did terrible things while she was drinking. Unforgivable things, even, and the fact that she was drunk, starving, and off her medication at the time doesn’t absolve her of responsibility for her actions. But prior to her most recent episode (for lack of a better term), she had been a loving wife and mother. She wasn’t secretly a horrible person underneath a pleasant façade the whole time, she was struggling. Struggling in a way that was extraordinarily destructive to both herself and everyone around her, but that doesn’t mean she was any less deserving of help and support.

I can’t say that I hate her anymore, knowing what I know now about addiction and all the other things she was dealing with. It still hurts, and I’m still healing myself, and I never want to see her face again, but I don’t really hold it against her anymore. Instead, I just wish there were more support systems for people in her situation, because it would have saved all of us lots of pain, her included (not to mention everyone else who’s ever struggled like that). I do know that I cannot and will not ever touch alcohol myself—I don’t want to learn the hard way whether I got the genetic predisposition towards alcoholism from her, and I have trauma besides—but I find myself able to empathize with her now, and reading first-hand accounts like this help me empathize even more.

I found this post really enlightening because of the nuanced and thoughtful handling of what addiction fundamentally IS, because that is something that is needed and something that often does not get a lot of thought.

I am a fan of InnuendoStudios, so I've long been familiar with the differences in goals and strategies between left and right. So it wasn't surprising to see you point out that The Left™ is always more badly set up to actually engage real people with problems, because its fundamental target is the right, while the right fundamentally works to both undermine the left and recruit more people.

In serving up answers that are both simple and wrong, they have far more of an access to people, because they appear to actually be engaging with the issue and the person at hand, and they will offer their time and effort for free in order to "help", they will listen, and the only thing in it for them is your eventual joining of some hate movement or other.

On the other side, meanwhile, everyone is always guarded and hostile because there's few ways to tell someone who is just asking questions from someone who is Just Asking Questions without giving them actual time and attention, which means that arguing Why helping people is good often comes before actually helping people.

None of this is to detract from your actual points, which are again very well expressed, I just wanted to put this post into the broader pattern as I understand it. I'm not sure what one conclusion to draw from this. Perhaps that touching grass and engaging with real people is important? That the left has an image problem and that we need to actually help real people with real problems rather than focusing on policing bad opinions the majority of the time? Or perhaps that the answer to a thought terminating cliche is not another thought terminating cliche, and that humans by and large are complicated, and that "Have you tried not being X" has never been an effective solution. Maybe all of those.