Sex existed (and made people obsessed) before mass media.
Reading the comment you are replying to, I don’t think they were trying to say it didn’t, but that it’s different now (for the reasons they enumerated)
> People wouldn't be addicted to sex if the media wasn't shoving it down your throat
Just read the Illiad to see how sexual obsessions have driven people since the dawn of history.
Pervasive sexually explicit (by today's standards) imagery most definitely has existed to varying degrees throughout antiquity.
I like the idea of an app to help porn addiction though. People can become addicted to anything, and another tool in the toolbelt for those people is nice and wholesome IMO.
a) Those are not pervasive at all. Pottery and statues are expensive and slow to produce and are found only in specific places.
b) Those are all low-level representations with a totally different purpose. A fertility statue is not comparable to a constant stream of young girls in bikini on Instagram.
"Fertility statue addiction" has never been a thing.
I have a room full of phallic statues from various tribes that proves this wrong.
Also I don't know how familiar you are with fertility statues, but a lot of them actually function as dildos too. And you can DEFINITELY get addicted to those!
How do you know? I'm not asking rhetorically, I'm genuinely curious how you know this. We do have ancient myths about people falling in love with statues.