Could you say more about this? This link isn't that helpful since the main content was removed.

The link went to here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/2018...

I think the argument is that even very disordered and disregulated consumption of porn doesn't resemble what we typically define to be an "addiction". There's a meaningful difference of degree and of kind between a bad habit that's difficult to shake, even a deeply entrenched one, and medical/psychological addiction, and researchers have repeatedly concluded that porn consumption never reaches the standard of the second.

I don't really believe porn addiction ever really was normalized. The layperson definition of "addiction" is just something that someone is habitually occupied with. The medical definition of "addiction" is more like something that you have a serious dependence to, to the point where it impacts your life and it would cause distress to be without it.

And don't get me wrong, I am not saying that there are not people with a sex or porn addiction, but I think it is woefully uncommon. I'm pretty sure if you take the average person that the Internet classifies as a "gooner" or "porn addict" and took away all of their porn, they would be completely fine. It's the same for those stupid mobile games, too. They get the vast majority of their money from a small minority of people, and even then, not all of those whales are addicted either, some of them are just well off enough and choose to spend their money on frivolous things, no different than people with thousands of vinyl figures (and although I think they have a bad taste in figures, I doubt most of them have a serious problem.)

What I do think was normalized in the late 90s and early 2000s was extrarordinary crudeness and overt sexuality, but I don't think there was really a point at which people were normalizing getting psychologically dependent on pornography. It'd be kind of hard to normalize that since it's more about the specific person than it is the thing they're dependent on.

This also does not mean that social media or algorithms aren't fucking with our brains in other ways. And I'm going to be honest, I have absolutely no idea what the porn algorithms are or what they're doing. I don't use Pornhub or sites like Pornhub (yes, I know, "sure you don't", but I'm serious.) I do use YouTube constantly, and I don't think I'm addicted to YouTube. I'm not addicted to Technology Connections or Practical Engineering. I'm sure the YouTube recommendation algorithm is fucking with my brain, but I wouldn't call anything it's doing an addiction. I'm also sure this is true for a majority of TikTok users, even though it's a ton more... well, what us laypeople would call "addicting".