In popular discourse the view that the porn habit is similar to the drug habit comes up often. The broad idea is that with each ‘level’ of porn one develops tolerance and therefore the porn habit leads to users moving to extremes. Moving from more regular, explicit content to more graphic, often more violent content, just as a drug addict would over time increase the dosage of heroin or move from a more acceptable drug (say, marijuana) to a less acceptable, and more dangerous drug (say, crystal meth).

A longitudinal research in this area was published in the journal Social Science Research and reported on succinctly by the Kinsey Institute. The headline is that the moving-towards-extremes view does not seem to be corroborated as both in terms of use (time spent watching porn) and content (type of porn watched) there was no tending to the extreme. On the latter, in fact, there was a drop in the fourth observation period (to 4.6% from 8.1% initially.)

There is the obvious disclaimer to be made here, that cultural context may play a big part in the research and as this study was conducted in Croatia, we should not simply run with the findings elsewhere.

Also, even if one assumes that the findings hold true for India, there is still the point to be made that porn can be a problem even if one is not tending to the extreme. The common sense questions—is watching porn interrupting your daily tasks? Are you missing classes or work to watch porn? Do you feel compelled to watch poorn in public spaces?—all are worth answering from time to time to understand whether you have a ‘porn addiction’ problem. And in case the answer to any of those is yes, it is a good idea to seek help. And where do you turn to for help? Well, just write in to m@misters.in and we will help you figure it out.