Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too

The whole article is a good read, but the last paragraph summarizes the topic fairly well:

Many of the moral values we were raised with, about sex, race or gender, are no longer fully applicable to the modern world. Because of religious opposition to sexual education, many people struggling with masturbation don’t understand what is normal, or that their sexual interests are healthy. Helping people to consciously examine and consider their religious beliefs about sex, masturbation, and porn with modern, adult, self-determining eyes, may help them reduce the pain and suffering caused by this moral conflict.

From my own perspective as an American born into charismatic Christianity, my specific upbringing regarding sex was surprisingly more anomalously open than what I saw with others around me. That said, everywhere I went within the region and those tangential to it, the foundation for sexual repression was nearly universal: intercourse for reproduction, pleasure bad.

Excluding occasionally open-minded outliers, it was as one would likely naturally suspect with religious control: (most) people who are raised to believe that

1. they need some man reading from a book to tell them what to believe, and
2. the man reading from a book is the moral authority because he says he is and everyone else agrees that he is

will naturally usually assume that, since millions of other are doing the same, and all those millions of others are reinforcing everything being ingrained, only the morally degenerate would disagree.

None of this does anything useful to address the the innate sexual drive most (but not all) humans experience, and instead only demonizes it, rather than nurturing it and promoting a healthy understanding of it.

Normalizing sexual and emotional health is completely anathema to the standard puritanical religious experience, so there’s little to no emotional regulation being taught to those made to believe as they’re indoctrinated: intercourse for procreation, anything else is lustful and sinful.

(As always, all cases have outliers and exceptions, geographic regions will have their own cultural differences, and within this topic I am one myself. I speak to the generalized nature of religion and its effects on sexual education and emotion regulation. YMMV.)

I never believed in it. Because it was, since I can think, a religion and conservative propagated thing. Never anything to do with science.