Is “Porn Addiction” Real? Is Masturbation an Autistic Stim?
Autistic Advice #7
Welcome back to Autistic Advice, a semi-regular advice column where I respond to reader questions about neurodiversity, accessibility, disability justice, and self-advocacy from my perspective as an Autistic psychologist. You can send me questions or suggest future entries in the series via my Tumblr ask box, linked here.
Today’s question comes from an anonymous Tumblr user, who is very concerned about an Autistic friend who’s currently in treatment for “porn addiction”. Here is their question:
My answers might frustrate you a bit anon, because I don’t believe porn addiction is real, and I know that porn addiction treatment sure isn’t.
By this I mean there is no evidence-based reason to believe that porn addiction is a useful or explanatory way of understanding what is going on with your friend or how he might find healing. He might not be happy with how often he watches porn — maybe due to shame, maybe due to it really taking up a lot of time in his life, maybe because he relies on porn for escapist purposes — but the solution in any case is for him to find ways of meeting his emotional, social, and sexual needs that feel good and healthy for him, not to try and eradicate his needs because he thinks they’re “wrong.”
The concept of “porn addiction” is one for which there is no scientific support. So-called porn addiction has none of the neurological or biochemical markers we typically associate with addiction and dependence. Porn users show no evidence of developing a tolerance toward their behavioral ‘drug’ of choice, nor do they experience withdrawal or face any health risks for using, which are all traditional hallmarks of addiction in the literature. Many therapists now believe that both porn addiction and sex addiction are unhelpful ways of understanding any compulsive behaviors surrounding sex that a person might show.
An extensive review of the psychological literature published in The Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2019 concluded that the leading predictor of a person reporting “porn addiction” symptoms is religiosity, not their actual porn use habits. In fact, many people who claim to be porn addicts do not watch porn particularly often, or with any negative life consequences. From this, the authors have concluded that believing oneself to have a “porn addiction” is evidence of feeling morally conflicted about sexuality and porn use; it’s not evidence of consuming porn too frequently, or in a compulsive or damaging way.
When we feel ashamed of what we need, we mistakenly experience our needs as “addictions.” To find another robust example of this, we need only look to the eating disorder recovery literature. Eating disorder patients who have restricted calories to an extreme degree often mistakenly believe themselves to be “sugar addicts” or “food addicts” and that their issue is uncontrollable “binge eating,” when actually they are experiencing the natural effects of starvation.
My Eating Disorder Wears Many Masks
Every time I think I’m recovered, I find my eating disorder hiding somewhere new
People who are malnourished cannot stop thinking about food. When people deny themselves sugar, carbohydrates, fats, or any other nutrient they’ve been tricked into thinking is inherently sinful or unhealthy, they become more likely to desperately crave it and binge on it. The binge-purge cycles we typically associate with bulimia are often a natural consequence of extreme hunger, a healthy coping mechanism the body deploys in order to save the lives of people who haven’t been eating enough for a very long time.
Extreme hunger sufferers may require upwards of 3,000 or 4,000 calories per day in order to rebuild the tissues anorexia destroyed. I am a former eating disorder sufferer whose symptoms landed me in the hospital with a severe low red blood cell count and a heart murmur — I’d been restricting and over-exercising for a decade. When the will to deny myself food reached its limit and my body demanded calories, it did so with a vengance. I ate almost nothing but snack cakes, vanilla protein shakes, cereal drenched with molasses for months.
On this intuitive, necessary refeeding diet, my health bounced back. It turned out that fats, sugars, and carbs were exactly what I needed. Many essential vitamins can only be absorbed and stored in fats. The brain runs on glucose. Carbohydrates have been the chief source of fuel by most cultures throughout human history. And molasses is high in iron, so mainlining it remedied my terrible anemia.
The very cravings I feared and tried to repress in myself were the ones that saved me. Hating myself into self-disciplined backfired, and the animal in me that loved to live roared forward and took hold of all he craved. This is a very common experience for eating disorder sufferers. It’s also common among trans and gay people who have attempted conversion therapy to render ourselves cis and straight. (I also did that, by the way, and it also didn’t work).
My Dalliance with Detransition
At the emotional low point of the pandemic, I tried becoming a woman again.
The limits of repression are well known to many Autistics, who find that despite all the external pressures pushing us to stop stimming, we just cannot stop doing the hand-flapping, chair-wiggling, and high-pitched chirping that regulates our stress levels and gives voice to our joy. Applied Behavioral Analysis Therapy has tried to condition all stimming out of Autistic people for decades, punishing us for our needs using electric shocks, scolding, and even prolonged social isolation.
And yet Autistic people keep stimming. Because we need it. Because it feels good. Because eventually shame fails to contain a human’s fullness, even when they believe they deserve it.
ABA Therapy was created by Ivar Ole Lovaas, the exact same person who invented anti-gay conversion therapy. Lovaas believed he was protecting unusual kids, teaching them to stop acting strange and queer so they might find social acceptance.
But decades of scientific research have revealed that trying to train a stigmatized person into behaving more ‘normally’ does not work. It only leads them to feel immense internal conflict over their natural desires, to the degree they may even become depressed or suicidal about them. Even in the depth of their self-loathing, their desires do not go away — and so these stigmatized people are forced to meet their needs in messy, hidden ways that only entrench their shame even more. Much like your friend repeatedly striving to curb his porn ‘addiction’ only to inevitably succumb to it, shamefully concealing his habits from his wife.
Do you see what I’m getting at here?
I don’t think any treatment for porn addiction is valid or helpful. Porn addiction centers tend to rely on religious conversion therapy tactics that only further entrench a person’s shame and typically backfire explosively. Anon, you mention that porn is one of your friend’s special interests. But an Autistic person can’ t condition themselves out of a special interest any more than a queer person can condition themselves out of being gay or trans. We can’t condition ourselves out of having fetishes, or from needing to stim, either.
Watching porn is meeting some need in your friend’s life. It might be that need is a simple need for sexual gratification, or that masturbation and porn watching is an Autistic stim for him. It may be the case that absolutely nothing is wrong in his life, other than him feeling terrible about jerking off.
There’s nothing terrible about jerking off. Most years of my life, I have spent about two hours per day masturbating. It hasn’t gotten in the way of me living a rich life filled with creative pursuits, loving friendships, and impactful professional work.
I spent a lot of my time masturbating even as a child, long before learning about sex or discovering porn. So it may be the case, Anon, that your friend’s apparent porn addiction has nothing to do with him being “unlucky” and stumbling across internet pornography at a young age. At a very young age, I went looking for porn online— because I was already an avidly sexual being with highly specific fetishes I yearned to see realized. When I found there was porn online devoted to my fetish, I felt for the first time that I was not defective.
Later, as an adult, I discovered entire digital communities devoted to making art and writing stories about the fetish I once believed no one on earth had in common with me. I can’t tell you how much shame melted off of me when I found my fellow freaks. In the ensuing years I pursued my passion with an extreme hunger, attending kink conferences, making erotic art with new friends, participating in consensual sexual relationships — and yes, jerking off to porn.
Much like the extreme hunger that had saved me from my eating disorder, my hunger for porn and sex healed my body and self-concept. In the depths of my shame I thought I was an incurable monster undeserving of pleasure. Then I discovered I was just a gay guy who felt the most comfortable and alive surrendering power to other queer people. Now I’m in an affirming, healthy relationship that meets my need for power exchange, and I’m the most happy, healthy, and fulfilled I’ve ever been.
Masturbation is an Autistic stim for me, I’ve come to realize. It’s one of the few activities that consistently soothes me and slows down my otherwise frenzied thinking. For a few years in my teens, I attempted to “quit” masturbation, just as I’d tried to stop eating and tried to stop testosterone. My mom had caught me masturbating and told me to never do it again, so I’d attempted to scrub the vile habit from my life. It didn’t work because shame never does. It took several years of private, ashamed indulgence before I could open up to partners about my needs and fantasies again.
Anon, it is clear your friend has a relationship to porn that he wants to change. He has every right to determine that for himself. But for all the reasons I’ve outlined above, an addiction recovery approach is highly unlikely to work. So what’s the real issue? If it’s shame, he might need to heal his relationship to his desires. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is one of the only supposed ‘treatments’ for porn addiction that shows any sign of working, because it aids patients in acknowledging and making peace with their libido, rather than trying to destroy it.
Let’s say that his main problem is not only shame, but that he truly is using porn to an excessive-seeming amount, or in order to escape his real life. Then we have to ask, what’s he trying to escape from? That’s the real question at the heart of most conversations on addiction.
When homeless people shoot heroin or take pills in order to sit comfortably on cold streets, their core problem is not that they’re ‘addicts.’ It’s that their lives are so painful substances offer their only brief glimpse of peace. Similarly, it would be wrong and unhelpful to say a depressed person is ‘addicted’ to sleeping. It might be their only respite from violently negative thoughts is being unconscious.
Anon, I would recommend you and your friend read the book Saving Our Own Lives by Shira Hassan; it’s a book all about liberatory harm reduction as an approach for understanding addiction, substance use, sex work, self harm, and many more stigmatized behaviors. According to this book, no coping mechanism is inherently good or bad, each person is the authority on their own body, and everyone deserves support finding the best ways to meet their needs. I think you both might get a lot out of it. I know I sure did, as someone who has engaged in nearly every stigmatized behavior listed.
In my opinion, Anon, your friend is embarking on a sex-shaming variety of Applied Behavioral Analysis, and I think we all know at this point just how psychologically ravaging and ineffective that enterprise is. I desperately hope he rethinks this approach and finds a way to examine whatever underlying issues are manifesting as “porn addiction” in a better way. But then again, that’s me proclaiming judgement on his actions from the outside, which is exactly what got him in this horrible spot in the first place.
Neither you nor I can convince your friend to see himself or his addiction differently, and trying to do so would only further send the message that he can’t be trusted to manage his own life and body. All you can do, as his friend, is ask questions about what he is going through and believe in what he says. Really respecting his body autonomy without judgement will probably mean a whole lot to him. From the sound of it, he hasn’t been able to find nonjudgemental support from anywhere, including from his wife, who sounds very well-intentioned, but understandably can’t be impartial.
Perhaps there is some pain in your friend’s life that porn helps distract him from. Maybe masturbation is a stim for him. Maybe he enjoys lying and keeping secrets, and could find a more consensual way to eroticize that desire. Maybe he’s depressed and jerking off is the only time he doesn’t want to die. Perhaps his job is absolutely terrible and exploiting the hell out of him, and so engaging in a little time theft by polishing his knob feels rightly thrilling. Or maybe he watches porn a very average amount and just feels bad about it because of evangelical Christianity or the childhood scolding of a sex-shaming parent.
I don’t know. You don’t either. Only your friend can decide what meaning he makes of his life and how he handles his body. None of us can make him into somebody that he isn’t, or force any decisions on him. All the available data suggests that we can only work with our desires, and learn from them — we cannot change them or make them go away. Sometimes, as my own life illustrates, that’s actually a very good thing.
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