Pornography · 8 min read

Who Actually Has Problematic Porn Use?

The research answer is not the one either side of the culture war wants. The strongest predictor of feeling addicted to porn is not how much you watch — it is how much you believe you shouldn't.

Written and clinically reviewed by Vanessa Cushing, LPC, NCC, MS — AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist, licensed in Virginia & Florida. The Cushing Counseling team covers Virginia, DC, Maryland & Florida.

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The short answer

Across multiple nationally representative samples, Joshua Grubbs and colleagues have found that religiosity and moral disapproval of pornography predict self-perceived addiction largely independent of how much someone actually uses. The people most likely to say they are addicted are often not the heaviest users — they are the users in the deepest moral conflict with their own behaviour.

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The finding that reorganised the field

In 2015, Joshua Grubbs and colleagues published a paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior with a title that says the thesis out loud: “Transgression as Addiction: Religiosity and Moral Disapproval as Predictors of Perceived Addiction to Pornography.” Across three studies, religiosity and moral disapproval predicted whether someone considered themselves addicted, while how often they actually used was a comparatively weak predictor.

That finding has held up. Grubbs, Kraus and Perry replicated it in a nationally representative U.S. sample in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions in 2019. A 2019 meta-analysis in Archives of Sexual Behavior formalised it as the moral incongruence model. Lewczuk and colleagues reproduced it in the journal Addiction in 2021 in a Polish sample — and notably found the effect was disproportionately strong for pornography compared with gaming, social media or general internet use. A preregistered 2021 study by de Jong and Cook pointed at the same mechanism from another angle: scrupulosity and shame, not frequency, predicted self-perceived addiction.

The plain-language version: “I feel addicted” is often a statement about moral conflict, not about consumption.

  • Grubbs et al., 2015, Archives of Sexual Behavior — religiosity and moral disapproval predict perceived addiction.
  • Grubbs, Kraus & Perry, 2019, Journal of Behavioral Addictions — replicated in a nationally representative sample.
  • Grubbs et al., 2019, Archives of Sexual Behavior — meta-analysis and integrative moral incongruence model.
  • Lewczuk et al., 2021, Addiction — effect is specific to pornography, not to online behaviour generally.
  • de Jong & Cook, 2021, Archives of Sexual Behavior — preregistered; scrupulosity and shame do the work.

Religious and highly conservative communities

This is the group the research is clearest about, and saying so is not an attack on faith. It is a description of what happens when someone holds a sincere belief that a behaviour is gravely wrong and keeps doing it anyway. The behaviour becomes evidence of moral failure, the shame drives secrecy, secrecy removes every source of correction, and the whole loop feels exactly like addiction from the inside.

The German Health and Sexuality Survey — a probability-based national sample of 4,633 people, published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions in 2022 — found that a strict religious upbringing was over-represented among respondents whose answers were consistent with compulsive sexual behaviour, and that this group was more likely to believe pornography was damaging their life.

Our own read of the Big Kink Survey subsample points the same direction from a different angle. Respondents raised in what they described as a repressed environment reported more shame about their arousal than those raised in a liberated one (59.8% versus 55.5%) while reporting slightly less porn use, not more. Meanwhile self-described conservatives and liberals in that sample were nearly identical on both use and shame — which fits the research: it is not political identity that does this, it is the specific conflict between what you believe and what you do.

  • Figures marked “Big Kink Survey subsample” come from our own analysis of the 15,503-response open dataset published by independent researcher Aella. It is a self-selected online sample of mostly younger adults, not a random sample of any population, so read the percentages as patterns among the people who answered rather than national rates.
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Red pill and manosphere communities — a thinner but real evidence base

Here the honest answer is that the research is younger and I will not overstate it. There is no published study I can find that measures narcissism, red-pill ideology and problematic porn use together in one design, so anyone claiming a proven causal chain there is ahead of the data.

What does exist is a line of work by Paul Wright and colleagues on what they call the dependency-resentment hypothesis: men who use pornography frequently and feel dependent on it show more hostile attitudes toward women. It was published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2025 and has since been replicated across several countries in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy and Sexuality & Culture. A 2026 paper in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy by Sparks and Mooney compared pornography consumption, body image and sexual schemas in incel and non-incel men. Separately, a 2025 Archives of Sexual Behavior paper by Franklin-Paddock and colleagues traced psychological pathways into the manosphere through masculinity threat — not through pornography specifically.

Read together, the picture is recognisable clinically: a man who feels he cannot stop, blames women for his sexual situation, and finds a community that tells him his resentment is insight. The porn is not the engine. Humiliation is. And an ideology that converts humiliation into grievance removes the two things that actually help — vulnerability and accountability.

  • Verified: frequent-plus-dependent use is associated with hostile attitudes toward women (Wright et al., 2025–2026, replicated).
  • Verified: incel and non-incel men differ in pornography consumption, body image and sexual schemas (Sparks & Mooney, 2026).
  • Not verified by any study we could find: that narcissism, red-pill identification and problematic use form a proven causal chain. Treat that as a clinical hypothesis, not a fact.

So who does have a genuine problem?

Setting ideology aside, the group that needs clinical help is smaller than the internet suggests and identifiable by cost rather than content. The ICD-11 diagnosis in this territory is compulsive sexual behaviour disorder, and it turns specifically on a persistent pattern of failing to control intense sexual impulses that causes real impairment — while explicitly excluding distress that comes only from guilt or moral disapproval.

In the German national sample, indicators consistent with that pattern in the past twelve months appeared in 3.2% of men and 1.8% of women. A Hungarian national sample using the CSBD-19 screening measure found 5.2% of men and 3.3% of women above the cut-off. Those numbers are a fraction of the share of people who describe themselves as porn addicts.

  • Repeated failed attempts to change the behaviour over a sustained period, not a bad month.
  • Real impairment: work, sleep, money, parenting, or a relationship taking measurable damage.
  • Escalating use to get the same relief, and using primarily to numb rather than to enjoy.
  • Continuing despite consequences you genuinely do not want.
  • Distress that persists even when nobody is judging you — that is the line the ICD-11 draws.

How we treat it — and what we do not do

We do not run abstinence contracts, counters or streaks. In moral-incongruence cases those tools make things worse: they convert an ordinary behaviour into a nightly referendum on your character, and the inevitable slip becomes proof of the very thing you fear.

Instead we separate the two problems that arrived tangled together. First, the shame and secrecy — usually with Internal Family Systems, which treats the part of you that reaches for porn as a protector with a job rather than a defect to be removed. Second, if there is genuine dysregulation, the practical architecture of it: what it is regulating, when it fires, what else could do that job, and what needs repairing with a partner.

For religious clients this often means something specific: making room for your values without letting shame do the enforcing. Plenty of people land on wanting to use less. They get there faster when the reason is their own values rather than self-disgust.

Frequently asked questions

Are you saying religious people are the real problem?

No. The research finding is about a mechanism, not a group's worth: when someone sincerely believes a behaviour is wrong and does it anyway, the resulting moral conflict predicts feeling addicted better than the amount of use does. That mechanism would apply to any strongly held prohibition. It also means the distress is real and treatable — it simply does not respond to the treatments people try first.

If I feel addicted but I don't use much, what is actually happening?

Most often, moral incongruence: the distance between your values and your behaviour is generating the distress, and your mind is explaining that distress with the word addiction. That is not a small problem or a fake one. It is just a different problem, and shame-focused work resolves it far more reliably than abstinence tracking.

Does porn cause men to resent women?

The evidence supports something narrower. Wright and colleagues found that frequent use combined with feeling dependent on it is associated with hostile attitudes toward women, replicated across several countries. Association is not causation, and use alone did not carry the effect — the dependency piece mattered. Clinically, resentment usually has more to do with humiliation than with content.

Do you work with couples where one partner uses porn and the other objects?

Yes, and it is one of the most common versions of this in our practice. The work is rarely about arriving at a verdict on pornography. It is about the broken agreement, the secrecy, and what each person actually needs to feel chosen.

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  • Sex therapy — How we work with shame, compulsivity and desire.
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