Viral ‘Quittr’ porn addiction app exposed the masturbation habits of hundreds of thousands of users

https://lemmy.world/post/44095762

Viral ‘Quittr’ porn addiction app exposed the masturbation habits of hundreds of thousands of users - Lemmy.World

A couple of 20-year-old developers make $500,000 a month promising to help men to stop watching porn, but exposed their private porn watching habits.

Men will do literally anything other than go to fucking therapy. Jesus. Guys. You’re allowed to watch porn, let’s just direct the fear of people finding out into finding ethical porn you don’t need to feel guilt for. Or better yet, pay for your porn and support creators directly.

Also find some hobbies that get you out of the goon cave. Take up fucking birding and go find some different boobies.

You’re not wrong, but like gambling, porn addiction exists, but that goes to your first point about therapy. I don’t understand why anyone would load this type of information into an app. I assume it’s ignorance to technology, which is sad, but I can’t help but think how anyone would think it’s a good idea.

Porn / sex “addiction” does not exist. Some nice folks who were super invested in proving it gave up a while back.

Most people have perfectly average porn / sex use, and are shamed by a partner or cultural messages.

A small percentage of people deal with “OCSB”, out of control sexual behavior.

Just because many people don’t seem to notice their addiction that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The methodology used to disprove the existence of porn addiction is just to completely and utterly ignore all the people who experience it and than claiming it doesn’t exist
I haven’t read any such study myself, but it sounds like a BS study. Anything that controls a person’s life can be considered an addiction. There are certainly people where porn has controlled their lives. One person who’s been very vocal and brutally candid about how it was ruining his life is The Primeagen, a coder on YT. My best friend’s father died in huge debts because he was buying copious amounts of porn outside of his means, and phone sex lines. That’s addiction.
We are talking about sexual addiction and bro linked studies about average and moderate use of adult content lmao

Reading through this thread has been a bizarre experience - I genuinely couldn’t have imagined the amount of pushback you get here just for speaking up for people struggling with this. It seems exactly the kind of thing I’d have expected deep compassion for, given the userbase here.

Still, my conclusion is that much of it boils down to the term “addiction” - since it’s a medical term, people seem to think that once you medicalize it, you’re paving the way to ban it.

Personally I don’t care what term we use. If people prefer “compulsive porn use,” then fine. For me the point has always been the lived experience of what people mean when they talk about living with a porn addiction - even if it officially doesn’t count as one. In my opinion it does, because it checks virtually all the boxes of the standard definition: you need more of it, you seek out more extreme stuff, you get cravings when you stop, and you keep going long after the negatives have started to outweigh the positives. If that’s not addiction, then I don’t know what is.

Its crazy that everyone is comfortable with the idea of social media being able to cause an addiction, but when the said social media is about sexually explicit content, it automatically becomes ultra healthy and extremely good with no limits and its use always legitimate and to encourage. Porn sites are, at their core, still social media designed with the very intention to keep people into the loop of consumption. Porn sites don’t profit from people who use it every once in a while but to users who watch it hours and hours of it on a daily basis

Then we can argue to the fact that it’s is technically an addiction or not, but if you got all the symptoms of an addiction, if it impacts your life and you still do that even I it means postponing important things of your life, craving it inappropriate moments and constantly feeling the pulsion to do that no matter what even in public, THAT IS AN ADDICTION! I have seen firsthand people who have COMPLETELY changed just by removing porn, including myself. Again, not removing sex or masturbation, but just removing EXCLUSIVELY porn (and maybe increasing how much they have real sex in real life). It can definitely change your life to the better. Moreover, the guy who linked the studies is acting like porn isn’t a multi-billion dollars industry managed by huge corporations with basically unlimited power