Response to BRAVE Column: Porn on the Brain

By Mo Juenger, Editor-in-Chief

There are many forms of addiction that are legally and medically considered valid, and “porn addiction” isn’t one of them. To call it real feeds into the very real problems of pop psychological medical misinformation and sexual shaming. 

Last week’s BRAVE column brought up some excellent points about how porn can negatively impact prepubescent children, promulgate non-consensual sex and lead to sexist perspectives. I agree that these are possible outcomes of excessive or early porn use are possible.

The column also advocated against porn addiction, a condition that is not recognized by the American Psychological Association, in great detail. I take issue with BRAVE’s emphasis on this. I believe porn can be overused as an inappropriate coping mechanism, and some people display addictive tendencies surrounding its content. 

However, I think the organization’s overreliance on “porn addiction” as a negative consequence of porn usage minimizes its overall role in society and intentionally overstates perceived risks of porn consumption. 

I invite you to briefly consider how we perceive the idea of addiction in the United States. The DSM — the guiding medical manual for psychiatry and psychology — does contain entries for substance abuse and addiction, but it does not consider porn addiction a part of this category. The DSM outlines drug and alcohol abuse as legitimate forms of substance abuse. 

The law also does not consider porn addiction legitimate, though it does provide an outline to which we might compare porn addiction. Alcohol abuse, in many scenarios, leads to misdemeanors or light charges. Marijuana abuse could lead to felony charges on grounds of the abuser’s intent to distribute. More serious drug abuse, involving narcotics like heroin or methamphetamine, are almost always charged federally. 

Porn is not a controlled substance. That doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t harmful; non-controlled substance addictions, like gambling and online gaming have wreaked havoc in many people’s lives. In fact, the DSM does contain entries for gambling and online gaming addictions. But the average American understands that there is a massive chemical difference between a gaming addiction and a heroin addiction.

A gambling or gaming addiction would rely on the user connoting a behavior with an irregular serotonin or dopamine boost. These people receive an atypically high amount of pleasure from an activity most associate with a moderate amount of pleasure. That fact doesn’t invalidate their struggles, but it does make them distinctly different than those of a person struggling with substance abuse. 

People struggling with substance abuse aren’t solely relying on internal chemical wants; they have developed chemical dependencies on something their bodies are unable to create in-house, like alcohol or some drugs. 

Substance addiction and other DSM-defined addictions actually alter users’ brain chemistry so that users become unable to experience pleasure without the aid of alcohol or drugs. There is no scientific evidence that porn use, even excessive porn use, does this. For this reason, the DSM does not consider porn addiction real. 

So if there’s no scientific evidence legitimizing the concept of “porn addiction,” why has the concept become so prevalent in pop psychology and on Xavier’s campus? Psychologist Dr. Nicole Prause studies the intersection between moral values and addiction, and she says that people consuming porn often wrongly consider themselves to be addicts for several reasons. 

First, porn is typically consumed secretly and decontextualized. A porn watcher often does not talk to others about what they’re watching and how often they’re watching it. They therefore don’t know which types of porn usage are typical and healthy and which are irregular or dangerous. This lack of context and knowledge can lead to anxiety and cause people to falsely believe they are addicts. 

Second, porn usage is typically tied to masturbation. Masturbation, another practice that typically lacks context, can clash with a person’s religious or moral views. When those clashes happen, porn users often experience shame and falsely assume that because they masturbated, they are “wrong” or “bad.” With those negative thoughts in mind, users might assume that because they continue to masturbate to porn — even though they consider it morally wrong for them — they must be an addict. 

All in all, this is not to say that everyone should be watching porn. Some people can develop obsessive practices around porn usage or even just overuse it, without any of it being a condition like addiction. For others, porn might not align with their ethical, moral or religious views, and that’s fine. 

Consuming porn is the same as consuming any other form of media, like television: Some TV shows are too old and feature content inappropriate for young viewers. Some TV shows are created unethically and exploit labor. Some TV shows just aren’t your cup of tea, and some of them are. Watching TV isn’t shameful or addictive, and neither is watching porn. But when we stigmatize these activities or tell people that they can give them nonexistent conditions like “porn addiction,” we continue feeding into a negative cycle of shame that needlessly makes porn users feel shameful.