Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too

This is the case with literally all addictions. Food, gaming, drugs, drinking. In some cases the addiction can is physically destructive and has to be treated first to stop the abuse of the body (drugs, drinking, sometimes food). Other times it's not physically going to kill you and you need to treat the root cause first. But all addictions stem from dissatisfaction with life, anxiety, depression.

Porn is absolutely problematic but there's a difference to it distorting societal views and expectations around sex and whether or not it's addictive. Porn gets an interestingly unique bad rep. These are fantastic points to bring up to help center ones understanding of addiction medicine and porn's effects on society. Thank you for sharing the links.

He's citing valid results from actual research papers, but I think he might be presenting it slightly misleadingly, perhaps with an underhanded motive, by implying no one has any issues with porn. But the general conclusion from the article seems to be that porn itself isn't harmful or addictive, but that other factors can cause it to be harmful. If somebody is using porn excessively, then it's most likely because there's something else wrong, the porn is the result of the problem, not its cause. At least that was my take.

Gary Wilson's Your Brain on Porn is a problematic source. It's not a peer reviewed academic source and its citations should be taken with a pinch of salt. The tone of the website often appears downright unhinged, especially when discussing the work of clinical experts such as neuroscientist Nicole Prouse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Wilson_(author)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Prause

Clinical Psychologist David Ley's publishing history includes many relevant contributions to peer reviewed publications.

https://www.davidleyphd.com/publications

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Ley

Neither APA's DSM-V nor WHO's ICD-11 recognise any addiction disorder related to pornography. While ICD-11 recognises compulsive sexual behaviour disorder (CSBD), the absence of a close fit to established addiction models has been remarked. On the other hand, there is a substantial cottage industry based on this pseudoscientific concept.

I'm inclined to agree with you.

There are two forms of addiction:

• chemical addiction introduces components into the body that the brain develops a dependency on, or that bonds with our receptors to affect our other hormones. (caffeine, nicotine, opiods, etc)
• compulsive addiction release high amounts of the brain's 'feel good' hormones (dopamine, seratonin, endorphins). Behaviours that reliably release these are not inherently bad, but they can be very habit-forming (weed, gambling, video games, etc).

Porn and sex addition are compulsive addictions. Our brains are designed to chase dopamine, its the 'habit-forming chemical' or the 'reward chemical' for most of the choices we make. If something releases it easily without much effort (eg: porn vs socialisation), releases it at higher intensity (eg: gaming vs books), and releases it immediately/consistently (eg: food vs exercise) then we're more likely to choose it.

People also 'self-medicate' with these vices, so a lot of addiction to thinks like porn and video games is less about those things being bad, rather that people missing things in their life (self-actualisation, purpose, fulfilling relationships, etc) tend to compulsive behaviours to feel better about it for a while. It's like taking painkillers for a fracture you can't afford to set.

Compulsive addictions are addictions because people struggling rely on them heavily in order to cope, and don't have anything else to replace them with. The behaviours themselves aren't bad, but being reliant on them is, in place of actual self-care.

As society gets more and more demanding, more expensive, more isolated, etc; more and more people are self-medicating with weed, food, online shopping etc.

Porn addiction is very real, but I don't think it's an issue with porn itself anymore than binge-eating is an issue with food or online shopping is an issue with retail. While all those industries react to consumer demand for money's sake (porn gets more extreme, food fills with sugar, online stores promote FOMO deals) the reason the industries see so much demand is that we have a society of people with unmet needs and poor supports, reaching out to just feel good for a while.

The abstract of the meta-analysis might help you understand what they found

The notion of problematic pornography use remains contentious in both academic and popular literature. Although the mental health community at large is divided as to the addictive versus non-addictive nature of Internet pornography, substantial numbers of individuals report “feeling” as if their use of Internet pornography is problematic. The present work seeks to construct a model related to problematic pornography use that is clearly derived from empirical literature and that provides directions to be tested in future research. The focus of the present work is on those perceptions as they relate to the overarching experience of moral incongruence in pornography use, which is generally thought of as the experience of having one’s behaviors be inconsistent with one’s beliefs. To this end, we put forth a model of pornography problems due to moral incongruence. Within this model, we describe how pornography-related problems—particularly feelings of addiction to pornography—may be, in many cases, better construed as functions of discrepancies—moral incongruence—between pornography-related beliefs and pornography-related behaviors. A systematic review of literature and meta-analysis is conducted in order to evaluate support for this model, and the implications of this model for research and clinical practice are discussed.