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Home > Sex > The 10 Steps to Porn Addiction: Where Are You?

The 10 Steps to Porn Addiction: Where Are You?

By David Wong December 10, 2007 922,834 views
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Porn addiction? Please.

Let's try a little experiment, right now. Don't click on this link. It has a naked woman in it. Two naked women, in fact. One of them is stunning web pornstress Luba Shumeyko...



...and both are nude, lounging uncovered on a bed. Wiggle your mouse finger and you can see them both in high-res glory. But don't click it. We're proving a point here.

Recently some chick testified before the Senate about porn addiction. The entire red-blooded male internet had a good chuckle at the odd, puritanical fundamentalists poisoning our government, wondering when they were going to suggest that online porn was the work of a Pagan witchcraft conspiracy or even demons uploading from the second circle of Hell.



I would have laughed along with them, but I noticed that of the six Firefox tabs I had open, five were tuned to porn.

But still, this idea of "addiction" is ridiculous. Right? I mean, to hear that lady talk, some of you actually had to concentrate to keep from clicking that naked link up there, feeling a sort of nervous anxiety in your gut at the thought of the two tanned, nude girls laying on the sheets, gently caressing each other. Oh, I'm sure some of you clicked purely out of curiosity and know that the link didn't lead to porn at all. This one, however, does. But don't click it.



So I wanted to prove scientifically just how ludicrous this theory was. Using the power of the internet and my not-unlarge website audience, I gathered almost 100 volunteers to start with, all of whom were regular porn users. Now, to simply ask them if they were addicted would have been as useless as trying to wipe our asses with a handful of scorpions. Nobody likes to be told their favorite things are harmful or, even worse, a sign of some kind of weakness. Our knee-jerk reaction is to rush to the defense of our vices and in my years on the 'net I've simply never heard anyone admit to being a porn addict.

Krunkass12: Dudes, I just booted up HL2 for the first time. Simply awesome. I've got to change my pants now!

RckJmsBtch: Cool. Picking mine up tomorrow. Speaking of pants, it looks like my penis is going to have to take out a restraining order on my hand because I'm a slave to porn addiction.

Krunkass12: Ah. I, too, my friend, am whipped by the lash of a porny master.

Also, there's such a libertarian nature to the internet that anyone who takes the anti-porn side in a conversation is immediately cast down into the pit of hypocrites and book burners and Bible-thumpers, down with Fallwell and Bin Laden and webevangelist Jack Chick.



From www.chick.com


Besides, I once knew a girl who smoked for eight years and every day of it she swore she could quit effortlessly and any time she wanted. Addicts tend to be the last to know they're addicts.

She didn't realize she was hooked until she tried to quit.

So that's what we did. When I asked for volunteers I told them they would have one task: to try to quit porn. Then we'd see how long they could go without going in search of photographic nakedness, either on the web or on their hard drives or at the back of their closet shelf.

If there is a better way to gauge addiction, I don't know of it.

We paused after two weeks and calculated the results. How do you think we did? How would you have done?

Here's your last chance at nude Luba and her beautiful friend, for real this time, totally bare and on the sheets and one second away. Is it hard not to click on her?





I should probably note here that I am not a trained scientist.

Anyway, the numbers:

Of 94 subjects, 52 (or 55%) failed to go
just one week without porn.


That's right. Focusing their mental energy on the task of resisting the 2D naked temptress, having to face the public admission of failure when they did, some of them probably lying their asses off, not even half of them lasted seven days.

24 of them couldn't even make it through three days.

Of our 94 subjects, we had a core group of 28 (30%) who seemed to have little problem giving it up and they are still porn-free as of the writing of this article. All the rest, 66 of the 94, gave in.

Surprised?

I was. But I got the sense that the participants were even more surprised. The original data and comments from the participants are HERE. Here is the dropout rate in graph form:



The details are thus:

"Porn" for the purposes of this study was defined as "any picture or video you suddenly lose interest in after masturbating."

Only subjects who already regularly looked at porn were accepted. It seemed logical, since a study on Nicotene addiction, for instance, would be conducted only with smokers.

A "failure" was only counted when the subject intentionally clicked on and ogled the porn. Porn briefly and accidentally glimpsed, such as porn spam in their inbox, didn't count. That would have skewed the results as a man on the internet is a proverbial bottle floating in an ocean of naked JPEG's and pushy pornmongers.























Now, before you go running back to your favorite message board with your objections...

Things you're probably asking:

I thought you said you had a hundred subjects...

We had 96 and two of the subjects never reported back in. We had 92 males and 4 females.

Surprisingly, *ahem* the females had little trouble abstaining when compared to the guys. Three of the four ladies (or 75% for you who are really bad at math) are still porn-free.

Do you actually think these results are valid? This was an anonymous survey conducted on the internet.

That's correct, which is why you're seeing these results on an internet comedian's website rather than the New England Journal of Medicine. Yes, these were faceless people with fake names (a porn study where the subjects went by names like Johnny Hard On and James Bondage probably will give the Nobel committee pause).

This is all just food for thought, like anything you read on the 'net. But also remember that if porn enthusiasts had a motivation to lie, it seems it would be to claim they went longer than they really did, not the opposite. As I said, nobody wants to paint their favorite hobby as being an addiction or as something they'd be better off avoiding. I can easily imagine some of the contestants broke down but didn't admit it. I don't believe any of them stayed porn-free but lied to say they failed.

So wouldn't that mean the real results would lean more on the addiction side rather than away from it?

Someone might also complain that a call for a survey on porn addiction would automatically draw people who suspect they are porn addicts (thus skewing the results again). But you could also say the opposite, that people dependant on porn would tend to stay far, far away from a study that requires them to go without it.

Lots of your subjects had no problem giving up porn. That proves it's not addictive. Besides, I once went a month without net access and I had no problem...

No substance on the face of the Earth is 100% addictive to everyone who touches it. I went to college with a guy who tried crack Cocaine on three separate occasions over the course of a year. He finally decided he just didn't like it.

No, my results would seem to show porn is less addictive than the 'ol Colombian pipe candy, but more addictive than, say, corn on the cob. Maybe it's on the level of Caffeine. I don't know. Try the Porn-Off yourself and find out.

Masturbation is a bodily function and the sex drive is a perfectly normal and natural thing. So how can you call any of it an "addiction?"

Unlike the old "Master of Your Domain" Seinfeld episode, this was not a ban on masturbation. The lady who talked to the Senate said it was porn that was addictive, not Whacking the Mole. That is indeed a bodily function and forbidding the subjects from Shaking Hands with the Bishop would have skewed the results. I did not.

Yes, I'm aware that porn is chiefly a masturbation aid but I suppose the thinking is that men were Punching the Munchkin long before porn was invented. Thus, if you are unable to Polish the Lance without the assistance of porn then you could say you're a porn addict, since physically you shouldn't "need" porn to do that. My pet chimpanzee certainly doesn't.

Also, part of the premise of porn addiction - or any addiction - is that indulgence only makes the need grow. A person may be using porn to help him masturbate but porn also makes him want to masturbate and the desire to masturbate makes him want porn. It's a cyclical mechanism that runs and grows on plentiful boobs and testosterone (interestingly, the internet itself can be descrbed in the same way).

Or, think of it this way. Even in a country where food was scarce, you'd think something had gone wrong if you saw people making billions selling pictures of food. Clicking on naked Luba won't let you pork her. The real woman is likely on a different continent and you're only porking yourself.

So people like porn. That doesn't mean they're "addicted." Why do we have to call everything an addiction now? I like the Lord of the Rings movies, so are you going to call me a LOTR addict?

There's a distinct difference between simply enjoying a thing versus having a compulsion to do it. It's "want" versus "need." I like wearing jeans, for instance. I would wear them every day if allowed. But when my workplace banned them and I went three straight years without wearing a single pair, the lack of jeans didn't cause me anxiety. I didn't sit there at my desk and fidget and have to constantly turn my mind away from my jeanlessness. I didn't have to constantly stop myself from reaching for them in my closet.

Compare that to John, who had to be virtually restrained in a straightjacket when he tried to quit smoking. Or compare that to the guy who loses $20,000 at the blackjack table and has to sell his children on the Thai sex market to pay off gambling debts. That's addiction. When you come back and do something again and again because your brain has gotten hooked into thinking you have to, everything else be damned.

Or, to put it the way the American Heritage Medical Dictionary does, an addiction is a "Habitual psychological and physiological dependence on a substance or practice beyond one's voluntary control." It goes beyond simply losing the enjoyment.

Note: I assume the writers of that volume figured we wouldn't be so moronic as to think "air" and "food" are included in that definition. You'll fall over dead without them.

Who says porn is bad for you?

Not me, not in this article. That's a totally different topic.

I suspect that many of the online discussions of this project will take that tact. "What is it with these fundies being ashamed of the human body!!!" "Why do they want to censor free speech and naked artistic expression!?"

No, it's not about any of that. I would not propose censoring even one naked photo (that would, in fact, only heighten the "thrill factor" for the pornlovers). This was to judge this one simple premise, whether or not pornography is addictive.

But even being addicted to a harmless thing would have to be a negative, wouldn't it? People with Obsessive Compulsive Disorders, for instance, may have a compulsion to flip a light switch on and off seven times before they can leave a room. Certainly there is no harm in flipping a switch. But still, the fact that they feel a compulsion to do it against their conscious will and the fact that it costs them time and energy makes people consider it a bad thing.

Or, if you found out that you have been a loyal customer of Crest toothpaste, not because you like their brand, but because they've been secretly adding a highly addictive chemical to it over the years, wouldn't you be a little pissed off?

"David Wong?" Didn't you used to star in adult films yourself? Doesn't coming here and raving about porno addiction make you a hypocrite?"

That was a long, long time ago.



Besides, only Nixon could have gone to China.

Why is everybody talking about online porn as a scourge when porn has been around since the dawn of man? Isn't this more technology fear-mongering meant to scare the elderly?

This study included online and offline porn both, but among the people you know internet porn is probably 100 times more common than paper porn. The reason porn addiction is in headlines now as opposed to 20 years ago is the absolute saturation of internet porn. It's endlessly available, for free, with no effort, without having to stare down your old Sunday School teacher behind the counter of the convenience store while you ask for the new copy of ASS! magazine.

But more than that, it's the ultra-specific nature of internet porn that has sharpened its hooks to a needle point. I remember being 14 and seeing a copy of Hustler and almost being turned off of sex altogether. Shot after shot of splayed women with a camera view so close to their crotch you could see their kidneys. I mean, I was into naked women. But that kind of gynecologist-level view wasn't to my taste. And sexual tastes tend to get very, very specific.

Every guy has a specific fantasy and by God, the internet will find that shit out. Granny dressed as a schoolgirl? Oh, it's out there. A woman dressed as Alf getting raped by Frankenstein? They've got whole webrings devoted to that.

Whatever gets your heart pounding, it's out there. And it will find you.












Yes, I collect e-mail subject lines.


Other crap I noticed:

Many participants immediately treated it as an addiction.

The participants were not strangers to me and were largely people I "know" in an online sense. And while I had heard lots of jokes over time about being alcoholics or hoplessly fat or hopelessly poor, I had never, ever heard any of them talk about being porn addicts.

Until we did the study.

From the first hours on, lots of these guys were suddenly talking about "withdrawal" and talking about how tomorrow was going to be a "tough day" with time alone and high-speed access. They were using the language recovering addicts use, which I admit both surprised me and creeped me out a little.

I don't want to be melodramatic here. Nobody had to be rushed to detox for emergency nipple infusions. The point is they immediately treated it like a task, something that would require actual effort and planning and that would ultimately meet with failure.



Boredom was the killer.

I guess that's how vice works, in the vaccuum. Many of the most successful abstainers were also the busiest, the ones who had long workdays away from net access or trips to go on or school projects to finish on deadline.

But in a general sense, that's how all habits work, good and bad. Most of us eat lunch at noon because that's lunchtime. And if it's your habit that after school at 4:00 PM is Porntime, you'll have a tough time going without it unless you find something else to fill in the pornslot. Among our test subjects, many, many lonely hours were spent playing violent video games.

Also, many subjects noted that they were having sexual thoughts more often and with less stimulation. A flash of cleavage, a tight pair of jeans. Some found themselves seeing sexual overtones in the most innocuous situations and images.



But there is not much need for debate on this. If you're a porn user there's only one thing you need to do to test my results.

Try it yourself.


We have an ongoing porn-off HERE. Or, gather some of your own forum or chat room comrades and test your will.


The Ten Steps to Porn Addiction: Where are you?

1. You find yourself using a great deal of porn;

2. You often look at porn rather than other things that are not porn;

3. You call in sick to work so you can look at porn;

4. You look at porn while at work;

5. You apply for and take a job where looking at porn is a requirement;

6. You hide your porn habit from your friends and family;

7. You no longer feel the need to hide your porn habit from friends and family;

8. You find yourself reading porn at a funeral;

9. You read porn at the funeral of a man whom you killed for his porn;

10. You have paid for internet porn.


-DW



Okay, you've waited long enough for naked Luba. If you absolutely must see her and you're sure you can handle it, and you're an adult, here she is:

WARNING: NOT SAFE FOR WORK:

The author of this article has a horror novel called John Dies at the End coming out in the fall of 2009, unless the UN resolution demanding its worldwide banning is passed before then.


Recommended for Your Pleasure

334 Comments

Why don't you take your anti-porn bullshit elsewhere, hmm? Unless they're really old or female, people will either masturbate or f**k, and most likely do both. And it is retarded to, when given the option of masturbating to porn or not to porn, choose not looking at images of what turns you on. Of course people find it difficult not to sue pron, try asking people who regularly have sex not to have sex *gasp* all couples who f**k together are obviously addicted. In summary, your premise is true, but the premise does not support the conclusion; your argument is, like you, invalid.

11/20/2009 2:07:27 AM
QuickCommenter

I mean
IF MASTURBATION=OK
THEN PORN=OK
IF PORN =NOK
THEN MASTURBATION =NOK

Right?

11/18/2009 7:04:28 AM
Deusmc313

Are we really talking about masturbation?

Masturbation=okay
Masturbation W/ porn= +okay
Masturbation w/porn + lube= Great?

But even the Dalai Lama agrees that masturbation is wrong.

I like masturbating though.
I like porn too
I am just like you.

11/18/2009 6:52:21 AM
Deusmc313

Kalicha -

I couldn't agree more with your comment:

"I think the real porn problem is when you can't get aroused without porn. When a paper girl turns you on more than a real girl, you've got a problem."

That is the real problem with pornography (that some people, obviously not all) eventually have a skewed vision of what sex is/should be.

I had a friend who wouldn't have sex with his girlfriend for weeks at a time - she then found out that he had been looking at porn daily. It was a comfort, and an addiction for him.

The real fear is for people that feel the need to escalate what they see - and slowly become more and more interested in violent, etc pornography.

Yes porn has been around forever, and masturbating is a perfectly normal thing - its that internet pornography has changed a lot of things...

11/16/2009 11:12:05 PM
z9z9z9

Did anyone else look up Luba Shumeyko after reading this article? I did, and it was worth it. twice.

11/8/2009 6:53:20 PM
zombies!

You're an idiot, zoltron...

11/5/2009 2:07:47 PM
Passy14

First time viewer, first time poster, 5-year porn addict.

I have deleted more than 300 gigs of video and pictures, and I have another 300 that I have been trying to get rid of. I spend 3 hours a day, at least 5 days per week, downloading more without taking a few seconds to really look at it. I probably have enough of a variety to start my own site, if they were intended for that purpose.

I cannot begin to explain how badly I want to stop this. I have wasted so much time with this, when I knew there were more important or productive things that I could or should have been doing. Not only am I living with clinical depression; I have a condition known as Aspergers Syndrome, which is a neuro-biological pervasive developmental disorder on the Autism spectrum. People with AS often develop a "special interest" in a certain subject, and pursue it as if it were, for lack of better words, their life's work. Unfortunately, my special interest in non-traditional forms of human sexuality has hooked me on Internet pornography.

I have tried quitting several times, first by looking for favorite videos and pictures and then deleting the rest. That didn't stop my appetite for what I hadn't seen yet. It was suggested in this article that the more successful participants were busy people. I absolutely recommend this strategy. I've been trying it myself by exercising, but I still want to delete most of it. And the only way to do that is to watch it, and make sure I'm not getting rid of quality material. This begins the addiction again, because deleting most of it still means I have to look at all of it.

That's about all I have to say.

10/15/2009 11:36:32 PM
bioengine

Hey Zoltron.
If you were asked to abstain from doing something you like to do, but not offered anything for it, would you accept the challenge?
I will assume you said "No".
Clearly that means you didn't want to participate in the hypothetical study. You did not find it to be interesting. You did not care to see the results.
If someone asked me to not eat tacos for another year, I'd say f**k off.
Clearly, because the people in this study were willing to participate, it's because they were interested in the study. They were curious about what the results would be, or at least something to that effect.
That was their motivation.
They wanted to see the results.
Curiosity.

Did you notice how close to half of the people were able to abstain? It's odd how your whole argument is based on saying there was no motivation, yet people were still willing and able to abstain.

10/5/2009 3:30:23 PM
zachstaska

dude you posted way too f*****g much zoltron

10/2/2009 7:42:14 PM
BabyCthulhu

What? Porn is addictive because of some ad-hoc study where a lot of guys failed to stop looking at it simply because you asked them to? Oh, right. Sure, that makes sense. You know, I'll bet if you asked 100 tea drinkers to quit drinking tea for a week a good portion of them would "fail" too. Why do I think they would fail? Do I think it's because tea is so addictive? No. I think they'd fail because there'd be no real motivation to "succeed."

Your "study" is flawed in that you're asking people to abstain from something they enjoy without giving them any real motivation to do so. I'll bet if there was a $100 prize for not looking at porn for a week then you'd get a near 100% success rate then. As it is, you're calling people addicted to porn simply because they likely decided halfway through your little impromptu "study" that what you were asking them to do simply wasn't worth doing. That's not addiction - that's simply a cost/benefits decision.

It goes right back into the want/need argument that you made in such a skewed way. The people in this "study" didn't prove that they "needed" porn simply because they didn't *want* to continue abstaining. Rather the people in this "study" just showed that they *wanted* porn more than they *wanted* the *nothing* you were offering for successful abstinence. You didn't demonstrate addiction here - you just demonstrated that about half of the people in your "study" saw no point in denying themselves something they like in exchange for nothing at all. The only thing that surprises me is that *more* people didn't decide to say "screw it" during the study than what your results show.

That bit you did about trying to tie using porn to masturbate to porn addiction was really nice - very disingenuous of you to be sure. You can masturbate without any kind of lubrication, but it's certainly a lot better with lube than without. Because of this, I always choose to use lube when I can. Does this make me a lube addict? According to you, and your statement about how wanting (needing in your words) to use porn to masturbate makes someone a porn addict, I'd guess it does make me a lube addict. Of course, that would only be true if your line of "reasoning" made sense in the first place - which it doesn't. Just because people find masturbating with porn to be much better than masturbating without doesn't make them addicted.

Again, simply because people see enough benefit/take enough pleasure in doing something to not want to stop doing arbitrarily doesn't make them an addict. I know you explicitly differentiated between "want" and "need" at one point in the article but - at the same time - it looks as if much of your article was written in such a way as to deliberately attempt to conflate the two together in an effort to portray peoples *choice* to use porn as an addiction to it. Because of that, I found this article to be pretty intellectually dishonest - which, I've found, is a common feature in articles about "porn addiction" and the other claimed "harmful effects" of porn. I wonder why...

10/2/2009 1:25:35 PM
zoltron

yes it bloody well is! its an addiction if you're addicted ie. if you cant stop yourself either seeking it out or using it when presented with easy access (what fucked up dictionary are you using? buy a bloody new one!). if it gets in the way of your life then its a problem. smokers that i've met say that they dont care about the damage done to their life span, so its not getting in the way of their "normal life" but its still an addiction!
besides im fairly sure the guy who made this article wrote such a long list of disclaimers to specifically avoid creating arguments like this and giving fodder to moronic crap like you.
oh and btw, if "the "study" in this "article" were done with scientific rigor, and the results were utterly valid" then it would prove that some people do/do not find it difficult to give up porn. thats it, and thats all thats neccesary. thats all any study finds in psycology because the complexities of the human mind make it bloody difficult to say anything for sure. oh and yeah i know i sound like a real dick shouting like this, and its not even something i feel strongly about! god!...i need to go lie down now...

9/2/2009 2:28:53 PM
Amner

Functioning definitions for addiction generally require that the activity get in the way of normal life. If you masturbate to porn, even if you find it had to stop, as long as it's not getting in the way of normal everyday activities, it isn't an addiction. This is why many, many activities we do daily and have a hard time stopping (like watching TV, reading the newspaper, wearing a certain style of clothing, wiping our asses with toilet paper and not pinecones, etc) are not usually considered addictions, while injecting black tar heroin or freebasing meth on a regular basis are. Meth generally has a far more negative impact on one's life if smoked regularly than, say, catching an episode of the daily show before cranking one out to a lesbian fisting video.

In conclusion, even if the "study" in this "article" were done with scientific rigor, and the results were utterly valid, it still wouldn't prove one damned thing.

9/2/2009 7:09:46 AM
Mistwalker

since the begining of time the rib was taken out of the man (exuse the sacriligious reference) and Men were ment to populate the world through procreation. Not Manogomy. It is admirable that men and women seek their personal ways of being wholesome to their real mates whom they have vowed manogomy to by searching for other sources of self expression. After all it is not perversion to look at other women and explicit acts is is a way of curbing natural desires for polygamy and doing the right thing. The best case senerio is for a woman and a man to enjoy the cravings for beauty and out of the box acts as a way to inhance their sexual activity. Closed minded people make it a sin or addiction out of thier fear of their humanity. They fight it and it catches up to them. For instance, try not eating and see how long you last. it is not an addictionit is humans fighting against nature and they will always loose.

8/22/2009 9:21:39 PM
longjohnson

Jack Chick? Isn't that anal retentive old bastard dead yet? Maybe the vibrating corn cob he keeps up his ass gives the illusion that he's still moving.

8/15/2009 2:13:52 AM
cheesemeister

A serious article? I'm surprised :P

My take:
1) Once a habit is formed it's hard to stop
2) Guys are more likely to start due to social factors
3) Therefore, it's harder for them to quit even if the biological playing field is even

8/10/2009 12:27:34 PM
firinne

www.gethelpwithporn.com

8/6/2009 1:50:16 PM
burnsrunner

If porn addiction is affecting your relationship, you have to read, Love and Pornography, by Victoria Prater and Garry Prater. http://gethelpwithporn.com/

A different, but honest and compassionate approach, which is why it works.

8/6/2009 1:48:10 PM
burnsrunner

GOTTA......HAVE......PORN........

The freak in the photos that claim to show porn looks like he would not know what to do if he ever saw a set of tits.

What's better than porn?

Having a woman that sends you pron when you are deployed.

8/5/2009 5:27:13 PM
AngrySailor302

I wish David Wong would write more articles. He is compelling in a way not typical for a comedy website.

8/1/2009 4:22:31 PM
IWantToComment

I think the real porn problem is when you can't get aroused without porn. When a paper girl turns you on more than a real girl, you've got a problem.

7/30/2009 2:15:02 PM
Kalicha

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