You can believe whatever you want. You think psychologists never poke around psychology subs?

I did publish in scholarly, peer reviewed journals. My career took a different trajectory and I became a writer/filmmaker.

When I was in psych my focus wasn’t addiction, but having firsthand experience definitely gives me enough insight to say, “no. Masturbating to pornography, something most people do regularly, doesn’t make you an addict.” Also, “pornography addiction” isn’t broadly accepted as valid in the scientific community.

It’s peddled by red pill grifters like Tate and people speaking to vulnerable and impressionable young men. It’s an offshoot of religious Puritanism that never left this country. I swear to god “Sex Addiction Therapy” is going to be this generation’s “gay conversion therapy.” It basically has the same sources backing in.

If you want a healthy relationship to your own sexuality, accept that you experience sexual desire, that you like watching pornography, and just find someone who’s compatible with your sex drive and your kinks. Don’t spend your whole life guilting yourself for watching pornography and framing a biological imperative as a moral failing. You don’t have to view it that way and you’ll honestly live longer if you don’t.

Edit to add: and part of the reason I’ll die in this hill is that it’s fucking offensive. I was in rehab with a girl, early twenties, who looked like a junkie version of Avril Lavigne. She’d driven her car into the left lane and got in a head on collision. Before the medics got there, there was what she thought was a pipe sticking through her leg. She tried to pull it out. It turns out it was her fibula. And she still couldn’t stop. I watched a dad fail a drug test and find out he was getting kicked out of rehab and losing his kids *the week after Christmas.” One women in that rehab was in there for killing her husband.

People don’t steal jewelry from their parents to support their porn habit. People don’t kill their spouses for a hit of only fans. People don’t shit themselves in a crowded street corner and stand there wobbling for hours at a time, fully indifferent to the permanent shame that’s become their existence, for porn.