What is Porn Addiction?

Melissa Killeen

How bad is pornography use?

“It is as though we have devised a form of heroin . . . usable in the privacy of one’s own home and injected directly to the brain through the eyes.”

—Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, Princeton University

In 2006, the global pornography industry was valued at more than 97 billion dollars, more than the revenue of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple, and Netflix, combined. This is not an inconsequential phenomenon, yet there is a tendency to trivialize the ravages of porn. The sex industry has successfully characterized pornography as a First Amendment right. If pornography addiction is viewed objectively, evidence indicates that it does indeed cause harm to people, their families and their communities. Here are some statistics on the enormity of the pornographic industry:

• $3,075.64 is spent on pornography every second
• 28,258 people are viewing pornography every second
• 372 people are typing adult search terms every second
• 68 million daily pornographic keyword search engine requests,  which is 25% of all search engine requests.

China, South Korea and Japan are the largest consumers of pornographic material. The Chinese porn industry is roughly $28 billion. This amount can feed 62 % of the world’s hungry. The United States comes up fourth in global pornographic consumption, but is the largest producer of pornographic material. Every 39 minutes a new pornographic video is produced in the United States.

25 % of the pornography viewers in the United States make between $50,000 and $75,000 per year, which means they are engineers, technicians, directors, clergy, doctors, lawyers — educated and upstanding members of any community. Here are some very, scary statistics on illegal pornography use in the United States:

• 116,000 daily requests for child pornography
• 100,000 websites offer illegal child pornography
• 11 is the average age of a child’s first exposure to porn
• 1 in 7 youths have received sexual solicitation from the Internet; that translates to three kids in your child’s classroom have been approached online

On the surface, heroin and porn don’t seem to have a lot in common. One is purchased in seedy alleyways; the other is free to download. One habit can get expensive pretty fast, while the other is about the price of a high-speed Internet connection. As a recovery coach, I know the painful consequences of either addiction. However today, pornography addiction is an unrecognized epidemic.

Next week, in part 2 of What is porn addiction?, I will explain the scientific reasons proving why pornography is so addictive.