16 reasons to quit porn
16 reasons to quit porn
We often only discover the impact pornography has had on our lives once we stop watching it. At a time when pornography is easily accessible to virtually everyone, research clearly shows its negative, long-term effects on individuals, relationships, and society as a whole.
Whether you're looking for motivation to stay porn-free or want to better understand how pornography affects your life, we've put together 50 powerful reasons to quit. These reasons come both from scientific research and from the real experiences of people who have already chosen to live without pornography.
This article is a loose translation of a Fight the New Drug piece. All sources can be found in the original article.
1. Move toward a healthier view of sex
Pornography creates a false picture of sexuality while presenting itself as a form of sex education. What it doesn't tell you is that this made-up, pornographic world sells unhealthy expectations about sex. It's no secret that porn is highly unrealistic, and often outright toxic. Even so, 1 in 4 young people believe porn is the best source of sex education. Another study shows that young people often imitate pornographic scripts in their own intimate relationships — and later judge this as harmful themselves. In short: porn doesn't help build a healthy view of sex in any way.
2. Porn can become a vicious habit
Many porn users are surprised by how hard it is to quit. While many aren't addicted in the clinical sense of the word, a large share of experts agree that in some cases, porn use shows features of addictive behavior. Whether watching porn gets classified as an addiction, compulsive behavior, or simply a bad habit, quitting it can be a very demanding process.
Because quitting porn can be difficult, we offer help so you don't have to go through it alone. For support, we offer a "30 days without porn" course and the chance to work with an e-coach who will help you through the first thirty days of recovery. This lets you build a solid foundation that a compulsive urge to watch porn won't so easily knock down.
3. Addiction and bad habits can escalate
Research suggests that porn users become desensitized to what they're watching over time. This leads them either to watch porn more often or to seek out more extreme material. Over time, a viewer's tastes can shift, and they start searching for increasingly harder, hardcore porn just to maintain the same level of arousal. This is also confirmed by a 2016 study in which 46.9% of respondents said that, after a while, they started watching porn that had previously not interested them or had even disgusted them.
4. Stop supporting an industry that causes harm
We've written before about the dark side of the porn industry in the article "Sex Trafficking and How to Fight It" and in episode #21 of the NePornu podcast, "Sex Trafficking."
With pornographic content, we can never be sure the material is ethical, legal, and that everyone involved genuinely gave informed consent. The sad truth is that the porn industry has a long history of profiting from illegal content and violence, including ignoring victims' requests to remove violent videos. Practically every major porn site has had problems with non-consensual material, violence, and videos involving child exploitation.
5. Build deeper relationships
As humans, we're "wired" to form relationships. But our relationships with others can be damaged when porn comes between us. Research shows that porn consumption can lead to the normalization of sexual objectification, which then affects how users treat the people around them. The porn industry turns people into objects and sex into a commodity — which can make it harder to build intimate, deep relationships with real people. Disconnect from pornography and connect with real people.
6. Have a healthier body image
Makeup, plastic surgery, filters, and digital editing shape porn into the form we know, offering an extremely unrealistic picture of the human body and sexuality. Research adds that porn consumption can worsen perceptions not only of one's own body but also of a partner's body. Don't believe the unrealistic, filtered fantasies of pornography. You deserve to feel confident in your own skin instead of comparing yourself to unattainable, artificially created standards.
7. Invest in your relationships
As John and Julie Gottman once put it, real closeness comes from partners connecting and communicating with each other, but when one of them turns to masturbating to pornography instead, they are, in effect, turning their back on intimate interaction with their partner. On top of that, during porn use a person has total control over the experience, unlike ordinary sex, where people share control with a partner, leading the Gottmans to conclude that pornography poses a serious threat to a couple's intimacy and to harmony in the relationship.
One study found that people who had never watched pornography reported higher relationship quality than those who had. Staying away from porn is therefore a great way to invest in your relationships.
8. Prevent sexual dysfunction
Paradoxically, the more porn you consume, the less actual sex — and generally satisfying sex — you have. Research consistently shows that compulsive porn use is linked to sexual dysfunction in both men and women, including problems with arousal, reaching orgasm, sexual performance, and lower sexual satisfaction overall.
9. Help cut demand for sex trafficking
Sex trafficking is linked to pornography in many symbiotic ways. Even mainstream porn production can involve the exploitation of trafficking victims — and this happens more often than most people think.
Legally speaking, trafficking is defined as a situation where someone (including a child) is used against their will for sexual acts or for producing pornographic material. Manipulation and coercion are unfortunately common tools within the porn industry.
Once again: a porn consumer has no way to guarantee that the footage they're watching was made entirely voluntarily, without exploitation, violence, or pressure. As long as there's demand for pornography — especially extreme, violent, or degrading content — the porn industry will keep exploiting people in vulnerable situations to meet that demand.
10. Porn glorifies sexual violence
According to one study that focused solely on the titles of pornographic videos, 1 in 8 titles suggested to new users describes sexual violence. Other research suggests that anywhere from a third to as much as nine-tenths of porn scenes contain physical violence or aggression. Even more alarming, in 95% of cases the victims of violence and aggression in these videos react neutrally or with pleasure — signaling to viewers that sexual aggression is normal, even desirable.
11. Porn can fuel sexual aggression
We already know pornography celebrates violence, but research also shows that viewers can absorb that violence themselves. Studies point out that porn users are more likely to objectify and dehumanize others, more often say they could imagine committing rape, are less responsive to situations of sexual assault, and more often blame the victim. They're also more likely to condone violence against women, to share nude photos of others without consent, and to commit sexual violence themselves. By saying "no" to porn and its harmful narratives, we help build a healthier world.
12. Stop contributing to the reinforcement of racism
The porn industry profits from — and reinforces — racist narratives. One example is a 2021 study analyzing content from over 1,700 scenes on two of the world's most popular porn sites. It found that videos featuring Black performers disproportionately emphasized violence and aggression, perpetuated harmful racist stereotypes, and often portrayed Black people as objects. The porn business frequently fetishizes race and reduces people of other skin colors to sexual categories built around harmful stereotypes.
13. Live more honestly with yourself and others
Many users hide from their partners what kind of porn they watch and how often. According to a 2017 study, women tend to underestimate how often their partners watch porn. None of the women surveyed said their partner watched porn daily or almost daily, while nearly 50% of the men surveyed admitted exactly that. It also turned out that hiding porn use can significantly affect a partner's sense of trust and security in the relationship. Healthy relationships are built on honesty and communication, and hiding porn use certainly doesn't help. And a small bonus: if you don't watch porn, you never have to delete your browser history afterward.
14. Gain more time
You may have noticed that watching porn can eat up huge amounts of time. Clicking through pages and jumping from one video to the next makes time literally disappear. Beyond its negative effects, porn also takes time away from healthy hobbies, pursuing goals, or nurturing relationships. It's estimated that the average person spends about three months of their life on the toilet and nine years with a phone in hand. How much of your life are you willing to give to porn? And would it even be worth it?
15. Focus on real relationships
In pornography, everything is fake — how people look, how they have sex, even the reasons they're doing it. Porn users can get so caught up chasing something that doesn't actually exist that they start missing out on real relationships. In fact, research shows that people who regularly watch porn are less likely to get married than those who don't. Researchers suspect this happens because habitual porn users start treating it as a substitute for sexual satisfaction within a relationship.
16. Protect your partner from being hurt
Since NePornu began, we've received countless messages from partners (usually female partners) of people struggling with addiction who were deeply hurt by their partner's behavior and attitude toward pornography. People who find out about their partner's porn habit often internalize shame and confusion, asking themselves why they aren't "enough" for him. Hundreds of studies show that pornography can be toxic for relationships. Porn isn't harmless entertainment — especially when it hurts your partner. It's time to focus again on what's real.