Is porn a net negative to society?

[RendHeaven]

4 minutes ago, soos_mite_ah said:

It's not the majority that has an addiction. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7044607/

@soos_mite_ah I really appreciate your effort to understand in an unbiased manner.

I don't trust self report in the slightest. The moment I read "self reported" in the title I stopped reading.

Do you know how long I pretended to verbally not have a porn addiction while jerking it to a flickering screen in shame every night? and I was a self-proclaimed truth-seeking Actualized.org follower who was educated on self deception lol. And yes, my sex drive is very high, but that doesn't make my behavior an outlier. literally every single one of my highschool and college mates were frequent porn watchers (I interrogated them in the past lol). you think they would cleanly say "yes I'm addicted to porn" on a questionnaire? 

You are very generous towards the words of men. This is probably a good thing. Don't become cynical like me  

[RendHeaven]

mm also keep in mind that article was published in 2019.

you can't discount the impact of covid lockdowns in 2020. If majority of men were not porn addicts in 2019, then you sure as hell must believe many of them changed during the span of 2020.

And society opening up in 2021 doesn't revert you once you've established a pattern of easy reward.

[Leo Gura]

It's a net positive because humans are not conscious, mature, nor developed enough to manage heathily without it.

Such a level of maturity and development cannot be achieved through legal bans.

There is no better alternative at this time.

Edited June 24 by Leo Gura

[soos_mite_ah]

Just now, RendHeaven said:

Do you know how long I pretended to verbally not have a porn addiction while jerking it to a flickering screen in shame every night?

You don't have to answer this but did you ever get a diagnosis? Because unless you get an offical diagnosis from a doctor, whether you're part of a study or you're talking casually among friends, it's self diagnosis. 

1 minute ago, RendHeaven said:

literally every single one of my highschool and college mates were frequent porn watchers (I interrogated them in the past lol).

That could also be self selection bias. Birds of a feather ya know. 

1 minute ago, RendHeaven said:

You think they would cleanly say "yes I'm addicted to porn" on a questionnaire? 

I mean if it's totally anonymous, I can see more people being honest since nothing is at stake. I do get the biases that can come from self diagnosis or a lack thereof though such as people miscontruing what actually counts as an addiction clinically to where they're either assuming they have an addiction when they don't (i.e. moralizing the one time they watched porn) or they are in denial of the addiction to themselves. 

I read through the study and it looks like they do try to control for that by adding additional questions to the reporting such as the frequency of usage and their attitude towards porn. 

[soos_mite_ah]

2 minutes ago, RendHeaven said:

you can't discount the impact of covid lockdowns in 2020. If majority of men were not porn addicts in 2019, then you sure as hell must believe many of them changed during the span of 2020.

That's fair. I wouldn't be surprised if there has been a spike since COVID and how that has given rise to even more lonliness and isolation. 

At the same time, I highly doubt that it spiked from 11% to like 30% or more. I would estimate at most like just under 20% and that's being generous.   

[RendHeaven]

1 minute ago, Leo Gura said:

It's a net positive because humans are not conscious, mature, nor developed enough to manage heathily without it.

Such a level of maturity and development cannot be achieved through legal bans.

@Leo Gura I acknowledge this if you take a snapshot of the past few decades in a vacuum

but to really answer the question of "net positive" vs "net negative" with emphasis on NET, you have to look 100 or more years into the future.

It's not so clear to me that more and more men being pulled into digital hyperreality is actually good for humanity long term.

Sure it saves us from potential human rights violations right now by blunting male fangs - but the trade off is that men and women en masse are losing the ability to relate on a basic sexual level. This will contribute to population collapse and severe mental health issues on both sides. Furthermore, now that standard porn has been unleashed with no checks and balances, it can only snowball more out of control from here.

I don't foresee a future where right now we need porn because we're not conscious enough, but one day we will suddenly become more conscious and no longer need porn. No. We're just going to have more and more and more porn, and it's going to become dynamic and AI and VR and unstoppable. The genie is out of the bottle.

Ultimately we cannot really know net positive VS net negative because we are not omniscient future-seers. I tend to vote net negative because I have a cautious skeptical personality, but that is bias.

[RendHeaven]

9 minutes ago, soos_mite_ah said:

You don't have to answer this but did you ever get a diagnosis?

@soos_mite_ah of course not lol. way too much pride to walk into a doctor's office and declare my "porn problem." hetero men are stubborn like that, you should know that by now

10 minutes ago, soos_mite_ah said:

Because unless you get an offical diagnosis from a doctor, whether you're part of a study or you're talking casually among friends, it's self diagnosis. 

you don't need a doctor to tell you that you compulsively cannot stop a behavior. It's a very simple test. You say "i'm not gonna do x" and then you watch in horror and amazement as your body defies your mind and you start doing x while rationalizing why this time doesn't count.

11 minutes ago, soos_mite_ah said:

That could also be self selection bias. Birds of a feather ya know. 

True. but all horny men are birds of a feather

For a guy to not be susceptible to porn, he either has to have no sex drive/physiological disinterest in sex, or he has to already have his ideal sex life IRL. hopefully we can agree that the majority of men are in the middle - they do have a sex drive but are not living their ideal sex lives IRL

13 minutes ago, soos_mite_ah said:

I mean if it's totally anonymous, I can see more people being honest since nothing is at stake.

What you're missing is that they don't want to be honest to themselves.

Being a porn addict means not letting YOURSELF find out. this is really deep, please try to steelman this before you challenge it

[Emerald]

14 minutes ago, RendHeaven said:

@soos_mite_ah I really appreciate your effort to understand in an unbiased manner.

I don't trust self report in the slightest. The moment I read "self reported" in the title I stopped reading.

Do you know how long I pretended to verbally not have a porn addiction while jerking it to a flickering screen in shame every night? and I was a self-proclaimed truth-seeking Actualized.org follower who was educated on self deception lol. And yes, my sex drive is very high, but that doesn't make my behavior an outlier. literally every single one of my highschool and college mates were frequent porn watchers (I interrogated them in the past lol). you think they would cleanly say "yes I'm addicted to porn" on a questionnaire? 

Now, I'm not trying to minimize your addiction at all, if that's the way you think about it.

And of course, it's probably not healthy to consume pornography every single day... even if daily masturbation is perfectly fine.

But based on my sexual relationships with men, it's quite normal for a man to ejaculate once a day or once every other day.

That's probably about average for most men to ejaculate like 3-7 times per week.

And if you don't have a partner, then it makes sense that you would find another outlet for sexual release because that instinct is still there.

From the way you write about it, I have a sense that you believe you should just be able to fight these natural instincts... and that you feel shame when you give into them.

But that would be akin to feeling shame in giving in to the drive to eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom... even if sexual release isn't seen in the same light as these other bodily instincts.

I bring this up because, every now and again, I'll get on a discovery call with a young male prospective coaching client who wants to do NoFap. And 100% of the time so far, the guy is dealing with shame issues... about human sexuality, about how his body operates, and for very normal human urges.

So, if you're sure that it's an addiction, then I respect that.

But framing it this way could obscure a deeper issue about shame in the body... and getting into binge and restrict cycles with regard to sexual pleasure because of the resistance to the sexual instinct.

[Hardkill]

27 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

It's a net positive because humans are not conscious, mature, nor developed enough to manage heathily without it.

Such a level of maturity and development cannot be achieved through legal bans.

There is no better alternative at this time.

What about the people who do porn for a living?

Even though every man watches it and a lot of women watch it too, I sometimes get concerned about the actors, especially the female pornstars, who do it. 

Edited June 24 by Hardkill

[Natasha Tori Maru]

It's also a lot of fun to watch it together with your partner.

Especially if you are exploring each others sexuality and how you mesh.

[RendHeaven]

@Emerald Hey I completely agree with you.

I'm not against urges or fapping at all. I touch myself all the time without porn. It's awesome

In fact, believe it or not, I'm not even against porn. I personally think porn is beautiful (too beautiful!).

What I'm against is the unconscious habit loop of needing screens as a crutch for your masturbation. And then furthermore not being self-honest that you have a dependency on screens. It's this lack of self honesty which creates further isolation and fragmentation and tangible societal harm down the line. believe it or not, this is becoming more and more the norm. You really think young guys jerk off with their eyes closed, indulging in rich vivid imagination in 2025?? they can barely get off tiktok.

The problem is that pure, genuine urges for release and pleasure are merging and defaulting into digital hyperreality, a supernormal stimulus that is addictive by definition.

I only sound anti-porn because I'm purposefully beating the drum on how reward mechanism hijack is built into porn by default.

The only point I'm protesting is the idea that porn is benign as though it were just another youtube video that you could simply turn off and choose not to watch. This misunderstands what porn actually is to a young lonely horny man.

I am pro fap.

[RendHeaven]

29 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

Even though every man watches it and a lot of women watch it too, I sometimes get concerned about the actors, especially the female pornstars, who do it. 

I think the onlyfans-meta with independent creators slowly replacing industry and studios and contractors is a huge triumph from the perspective of actress safety and sovereignty

[Basman]

3 hours ago, RendHeaven said:

No, chatGPT is wrong and is mirroring your view back to you because you asked a leading question.

I can easily say "chatGPT give me reasons porn is scientifically inherently addictive like heroin" and it will appear to take my side.

If you unironically think that endless, simulated (i.e effortless) depictions of naked, 99th percentile beauties is not INHERENTLY PHYSIOLOGICALLY behavior-warping, you're not thinking.

This captures the most primal reward seeking incentive for hormonally healthy heterosexual men. Yes, not all people get addicted, but that doesn't mean there isn't a bell curve distribution where the bulk of men are in a compulsive consumption loop. Another issue is at what point you decide to call it an addiction. Many people engage with porn frequently but are convinced that they are not addicted. I consider them addicted and in denial.

There's undeniably a social game at play behind the anti-porn movement that isn't grounded in facts but in identity validation. There just isn't the concrete evidence to prove that porn is defacto bad for you or bad everyone. The critique is a caricature of porn. That is my main problem. Even the term "porn addiction" isn't an actual real diagnosis grounded in science.  

It's much easier to blame porn for a lack of meaning and success than complex sociopolitical factors that socially and spiritually bankrupted your life (neoliberalism, atomization, etc.).

[AION]

 

[Sugarcoat]

18 hours ago, Schizophonia said:

I would say that sex (and love) is a karmic game, it's based on limiting beliefs; so looking at it objectively, it's just "raw chicken," as you would say, who do moves together.

For example, we can imagine two people who play at "life is brutal" and therefore get together to have gentle, romantic sex that, for a limited time, puts an end to the evidence (libido = "death drive") that "life is brutal."

"Life is brutal, "so" let's unite against this brutal world with a bouquet of roses between our teeth, blablabla..."

Or, on the contrary, two people who have the belief that "people/the world are weak and mediocre who slow me down" and who get together to have we guess a more brutal sex.

And so on in the infinity of the spectrum of belief that constitutes an ego.

Sex can reflect other parts of a person yea 

[integral]

It’s an outlet that takes humanity’s corruption and channels it somewhere.

It likely helps tame men and reduce the level of rape and violence.

Same thing with violent video games, helping give men an outlet.

But things like Instagram have done the opposite, by feeding and enhancing women’s body image insecurities and relationship standards to a hypergamy mess.

Edited June 24 by integral

[Ash55]

12 hours ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

It's also a lot of fun to watch it together with your partner.

Especially if you are exploring each others sexuality and how you mesh.

wow never thought a girl would say that



I would say it is net negative how ever if you beaned it you get more predatory porn industry so the porn production will be much worst so that makes it net positive in a sense, but the industry it self is insanely exploitative  unconscious objectifying to human
 

[Schizophonia]

12 hours ago, Emerald said:

Now, I'm not trying to minimize your addiction at all, if that's the way you think about it.

And of course, it's probably not healthy to consume pornography every single day... even if daily masturbation is perfectly fine.

But based on my sexual relationships with men, it's quite normal for a man to ejaculate once a day or once every other day.

That's probably about average for most men to ejaculate like 3-7 times per week.

And if you don't have a partner, then it makes sense that you would find another outlet for sexual release because that instinct is still there.

From the way you write about it, I have a sense that you believe you should just be able to fight these natural instincts... and that you feel shame when you give into them.

But that would be akin to feeling shame in giving in to the drive to eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom... even if sexual release isn't seen in the same light as these other bodily instincts.

I bring this up because, every now and again, I'll get on a discovery call with a young male prospective coaching client who wants to do NoFap. And 100% of the time so far, the guy is dealing with shame issues... about human sexuality, about how his body operates, and for very normal human urges.

So, if you're sure that it's an addiction, then I respect that.

But framing it this way could obscure a deeper issue about shame in the body... and getting into binge and restrict cycles with regard to sexual pleasure because of the resistance to the sexual instinct.

Nofap increases motivation to find someone or just be proactive in life in general.

Edited June 24 by Schizophonia

[Emerald]

20 hours ago, RendHeaven said:

@Emerald Hey I completely agree with you.

I'm not against urges or fapping at all. I touch myself all the time without porn. It's awesome

In fact, believe it or not, I'm not even against porn. I personally think porn is beautiful (too beautiful!).

What I'm against is the unconscious habit loop of needing screens as a crutch for your masturbation. And then furthermore not being self-honest that you have a dependency on screens. It's this lack of self honesty which creates further isolation and fragmentation and tangible societal harm down the line. believe it or not, this is becoming more and more the norm. You really think young guys jerk off with their eyes closed, indulging in rich vivid imagination in 2025?? they can barely get off tiktok.

The problem is that pure, genuine urges for release and pleasure are merging and defaulting into digital hyperreality, a supernormal stimulus that is addictive by definition.

I only sound anti-porn because I'm purposefully beating the drum on how reward mechanism hijack is built into porn by default.

The only point I'm protesting is the idea that porn is benign as though it were just another youtube video that you could simply turn off and choose not to watch. This misunderstands what porn actually is to a young lonely horny man.

I am pro fap.

As long as it's coming from that place, I see no issue in it.

I just have experienced that sometimes the driver towards NoFap or anti-porn perspectives comes from shame in the sexual instinct.

[RendHeaven]

25 minutes ago, Emerald said:

I just have experienced that sometimes the driver towards NoFap or anti-porn perspectives comes from shame in the sexual instinct.

Yeah this is common