Comment by AlecSchueler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlecSchueler | Hacker News Reader

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It's addictive for one. There are increasing number of support groups for men who are struggling with pornography use and for their spouses in dealing with having a dependant partner.

It creates a space for people to explore and normalise their distressing sexual interests without questioning the root causes.

Producers will often intentionally seek out vulnerable young women and groom them with promises of fame and riches, only for them to become reliant on painkillers and other drugs to cope with the reality of it.

It creates a market for the abuse of trafficking victims. Most sites don't require verification of consent and most users don't care.

It teaches men to objectify their partners and to see them as something to be shared. There is a huge market now for non consensual revenge pornography. Reddit has seen multiple subreddiys dedicated to non-consensual intimate media.

It provides a safe space for people to express racist, misogynistic and otherwise antisocial viewpoints.

PornHub in its front page today has videos of stimulated assaults and incest. For young viewers it gives them the idea that it's normal to be sexually interested in these things.

I'm not religious. I'm sex positive and believe in being open with children about the realities of life. Pornography stole years of my life, warped my views of relationships and prevented me from reflecting seriously on my own traumas.

Sugar is addictive. And it might have more effect on your lifespan than the consumption of pornography. Quality of life, too.

Yes it is, and that's why we teach our children about nutritional health and, in some places, regulate things like school dinners and products aimed at children.

What point are you making in relation to the topic at hand?

I can't read GP's mind, but sugar doesn't require ID verification to buy in the state of Utah, for example.

No, but driving a car or possessing a gun does. Different solutions for different issues is hardly a contentious proposal.

Earlier you were concerned about the possible risk of addiction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35788237

Are cars or guns regulated because of addiction? No. So GP compared porn to sugar, which is considered addictive and has probably more concrete evidence of self-harm than porn. I think the comparison is apt? Certainly fairer than comparing porn to driving a car or gun possession, which is sort of absurd.

Addictiveness was one of the multiple points I made about pornography. The other aspects apply to pornography and not to sugar. So it was apples and oranges to begin with.

But in terms of addiction potential alone Utah already has precedent in legislating for that. Example: Utah doesn't allow minors to purchase alcohol because of its addictive nature.

Most of your other points related to how pornography is produced, not to its consumption. Thus it wouldn't matter who is watching it, and thus ID check seems irrelevant.

Some of the aspects of the porn market are not great, but they should be investigated by the relevant authorities. Hiding them from only certain people won't make them go away.

They might if sugar was able to be consumed for free with virtually unlimited access. I'm not sure it's a very good analogy.

It more or less is? It's extremely inexpensive.

Extremely inexpensive is infinitely expensive when you're a 13 year old with 2 dollars to your name.

It does not need to be literally the same thing to be a useful point of comparison, which is the nitpick argument bumby was making.

I was replying to your own position of it being extremely inexpensive. I understand that comparisons and metaphors are never 1 to 1. If you have another point to make then I'll gladly hear it out.

Not nitpicking, I’m just saying a weak analogy doesn’t strengthen your case. Equating sugar to porn misses some of the important aspects of what makes porn potentially dangerous.

Lottery tickets are extremely inexpensive. But what do you think would happen to consumption of lotto tickets if they went from $3 to free, especially in a frictionless environment where you can just download them?

Lottery tickets are substantially more expensive than sugar. And if lotto tickets were free, (1) there would be no harm in consuming them and (2) you would also win $0, and no one would buy them.

That’s kinda the point. Sugar is also "substantially" more expensive than "free" pornography. With your analogy of sugar, there isn’t the same asymmetry of risk/reward as there is with “free” pornography.

The reward of lotto tickets is a function of cost with the current approach, but that’s the wrong point to get wrapped around the axle. Consider instead that if the lotto reward is funded by taxes. The point is the risk/reward profile gets skewed.

As an aside, I’m pretty sure you can find evidence that excessive gambling is a net negative.

It is free. It LITERALLY is in unlimited access. It's in everything you eat...unless you live in a cave and only eat squirrels and rabbits. Especially in the US where High Fructose Corn Syrup is in nearly every product that's consumed. Pornography is no where near as dangerous as the obesity epidemic in the United States, which costs the citizens and corporations billions and billions of dollars a year on healthcare alone. But sure, let's focus on porn.

Nobody is claiming obesity isn’t a risk. But it’s an error to equate sugar to the obesity for one. It is also not "literally" unlimited access unless the cost of sugar is zero and that's easily falsifiable. I'm assuming your point is that people can have as much sugar as they want. Two, food is necessary to life but porn is not. That makes controlling food much, much harder. It would be like someone addicted to sex having to walk through a brothel every day to get to work. Sugar is inexpensive (but still not free) and we’re experiencing the bad effects so I’m not sure what you’re pointing out other than as vices get more free and more accessible, the scale shifts towards worse outcomes. Your whole point boils down to whataboutism rather than debating the actual points.

Lastly, I’m not sure you made any case that pornography is relatively safe.

We can tackle multiple issues at once. My country taxes sugar already.

And does Utah have a strong sex education curriculum, to teach children about it?

I assume no - it's just a ban on sinful behavior.

Let's hope they are also exploring the avenues indeed.

Why do I see this fallacy all over anti-porn threads? Keto diets might be a fad and about as difficult as quitting porn, but still.

Sounds more like an argument for regulation targeting externalities surrounding sugar and artificial sweeteners than against regulation targeting pornography.

> It's addictive for one.

Citation needed. Porn addiction doesn't exist [0].

[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/porn-addiction

It would fall under Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder[0] in ICD-10. [1]

Pornography Addiction as a unique pathology is still not recognised but the issue is still young. We can see that it's an issue in that more than half of US divorce cases mention compulsive pornography usage. [2]

You can read more about Pornography Addiction and what I mean by that over at Wikipedia. [3]

You can see support groups for self-identifying addicts in places like Reddit. [4][5]

Furthermore, mutual support groups for partners of addicts. [6]

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_sexual_behaviour_...

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10

2: https://s3.amazonaws.com/thf_media/2010/pdf/ManningTST.pdf

3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_addiction

4: https://old.reddit.com/r/PornAddiction/

5: https://old.reddit.com/r/pornfree/

6: https://old.reddit.com/r/loveafterporn/

Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder is not an addiction. The Wikipedia article that you cited begins with the following sentence: “Pornography addiction is the popular but unscientific[5] application of an addiction model to the use of pornography.”

[5] Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/2018...

I'd love to stop believing in it but it's destroyed a large part of my life.

The issue with defining it as an addiction is more of a question of separating from other compulsive issues than not recognising the compulsive issues of the thing itself.

Yes, I understand there's a difference between compulsion and addiction but I'd expect the users of Hacker News to understand enough about how the dopamine system works to see the relationship between the two.

I'm sorry for your struggles. I hope that you are doing better.

Thank you, I greatly appreciatie your well wishes and the human sentiment behind your remark. I'm glad to have places like this and people like yourself that challenge my beliefs, even when, or especially when, they are rooted in my personal experience.

> I'd love to stop believing in it but it's destroyed a large part of my life.

With all due respect, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that you destroyed a large part of your life? It seems like you're blaming porn, as if everyone who is exposed to it becomes addicted. Is it like heroin? Or is it more like alcohol, where many people consume it without becoming addicted, but a few people ruin their lives over it?

>Is it like heroin? Or is it more like alcohol, where many people consume it without becoming addicted, but a few people ruin their lives over it?

It's more like a TV addiction or a video game addiction where the over consumption is a coping mechanism for other things that are wrong in your life.

Hence 'porn addiction' not really existing.

You're a bit overly focused on semantics here and misinterpreting the rationale behind it.

Behavioral addictions are acknowledged in DSM-5 although this does not extend to compulsive sexual behavior at this time due to insufficient (yet growing) evidence to suggest similar neurophysiological mechanisms for a clinical textbook to label it as 'addiction' [0][2].

A recent review article breaks down the differences from gambling which is considered a behavioral addiction in DSM-5[1] and had not been in prior editions.

Whether or not CSB/hypersexuality is an 'addiction' in the medical sense is controversial amongst medical experts and essentially interchangeable with what a layperson considers to be an addiction and it is therefore very reasonable especially noting the overlap of salience, conflict and relapse[1].

Although there is insufficient evidence at this time to conclude either way whether diminished satisfaction has a similar mechanism to tolerance or lack of control has a similar mechanism to withdrawal there is also no strong evidence to support the argument that CSB is not an addiction and consequently they are currently treated as separate entities.

The pertinence of this is to not conflate conflicting/controversial expert opinion with generally regarded truth and therefore stating that parent is 'wrong' for believing it is addiction when many experts share the same opinion[3].

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/add.13297

[1] https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2006/11/2/article-p166....

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4677151/

[3] https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2006/11/2/article-p210....

"It seems that POPU (Problematic Online Porn Usage) is not only one subtype of hypersexual disorder, but currently the most prevalent since it also frequently involves masturbation. Although this is difficult to accurately determine given the anonymity and accessibility factors that make pornography use today so pervasive, we can at least confirm that the patron of consumption for pornography has changed for roughly the last decade. ... As far as we know, a number of recent studies support this entity as an addiction with important clinical manifestations such as sexual dysfunction and psychosexual dissatisfaction. Most of the existing work is based off on similar research done on substance addicts, based on the hypothesis of online pornography as a ‘supranormal stimulus’ akin to an actual substance that, through continued consumption, can spark an addictive disorder. However, concepts like tolerance and abstinence are not yet clearly established enough to merit the labeling of addiction, and thus constitute a crucial part of future research. For the moment, a diagnostic entity encompassing out of control sexual behavior has been included in the ICD-11 due to its current clinical relevance, and it will surely be of use to address patients with these symptoms that ask clinicians for help."

Porn addiction has not been classified as an addiction in and of itself because researchers are unsure that it is its own addiction, or a subset of other sexual related addictions and disorders. So it is highly likely that porn is addictive, but medical professionals are hesitant to declare "porn addiction" as a diagnosis without seeing if it is separated from other problematic sexual behaviors.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6352245/

Thanks for sharing this reference.

> researchers are unsure that it is its own addiction

Yes. Indeed, this is the reason experts object to the term “porn addiction”. Some “addicts” might be consuming a lot of porn, but that doesn't mean that porn is addictive --- just like how alcoholics use bottles a lot, but bottles are not addictive.

Let's hope that public discourse will continue and draw attention to the need for further research.

I've been addicted to pornography myself and spoken with many men who say the same, as well as many women who have had their relationships and mental health destroyed by being partnered with people like myself.

The current state of research and recognition is not always reflective of reality. I'd hope that anyone familiar with the history of science could accept that.

The fact that you were addicted to pornography means that you probably would have sought out and encountered lots of other people in the same problematic situation as yourself. I would look to your own tunnel vision as to why you tend to see it's perceived negative effects everywhere.

I'll take peer reviewed research over anecdotal data any day of the week.

I know someone who struggled with porn addiction. The person you replied to admitted to struggling with it. It's real, as an empirically observable fact.

A struggling person finding relief in porn doesn't mean that porn is addictive.

The porn did not "relieve" anything, it was the source of the problem.

Thanks for sharing your anecdote. Because it hasn't been my experience, I prefer to take scientific studies as my guide.

What studies? The link you shared is a click-baity ("Science stopped believing in X and you should too") article by an individual clinical psychologist referencing (and overstating) the findings of a proposed etiological model and accompanying systematic review which suggested moral incongruity as one underlying cause, perhaps the key cause in these authors opinions[0].

Notably this study predated the addition of compulsive sexual behavior disorder to ICD-11 and was neither validated nor accepted as the correct model (hence excessive use of 'proposed' and 'preliminary'). You may also notice there are seven separate commentaries in response to this study with an eighth by the original authors in which they acknowledge the several limitations of their proposed model[1] and make the following statement:

"Rather than present an argument against CSBD, it is our intention and belief that our model of PPMI adds needed nuance to ensure the accurate use of the CSBD diagnosis."

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-018-1248-x

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-1406-9

That's like saying 'sleeping too much is the source of depression'. Viewing too much porn is a result of a different problem. Happy and healthy people aren't accidentally becoming addicted to porn.

Happy and healthy people don't usually become addicted to heroin either.

Sure they do. There are literally thousands of stories of people who were in a car wreck, sports accident, or some kind of injury and then they get prescribed Oxy and when that runs out they are so addicted they end up getting black market pills and then when they can't afford that they move to heroin.

Opiates are insanely physically addictive and you can easily accidentally become addicted to them using them as prescribed, hence all the lawsuits.

The conversation rate from pill addiction to heroin is order of magnitude 10%, even ignoring the logical leap made in saying people who get addicted to pills all have happy fulfilling lives. I think it’s substantially correct to say that happy and healthy people, by and large, don’t get addicted to heroin.

>even ignoring the logical leap made in saying people who get addicted to pills all have happy fulfilling lives.

Well lucky for you, I didn't make that claim!

Either your comment wasn't responsive to Georgelemental's or you implicitly made some version of that claim.

Do you have sources for any of these points, or are they all personal opinion?

I chose these points specifically because I felt I could back them up with sources if pressed.

I began with personal opinion and then removed everything I felt wouldn't stand to scrutiny, even if I do still believe it.

I chose not to include sources immediately because that would have required a great deal of upfront effort on my behalf, which I wasn't willing to spend since this is also a place where I come to find relaxation as well as intellectual stimulation.

If there are any particular points you're interested in discussing I'll be glad to share the basis for my belief and go into discussion.

If it's all of them then that still goes but it may be a week before I get back to you.

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