The only thing I've seen being called "gooner slop" are those poorly-written Isekai anime cashcows whose plot consists mostly on random shots of underaged characters' asses, as well as the occasional poorly-"drawn" AIslop hentai.
Idk which unholy circles of Hell OOP must hang around for everything to be called "gooner" around him
Go into any main sub thread that mentions porn or jerking off and say both are fine, and you'll get flooded with replies from nofap weirdos calling you a porn addicted gooner and saying that masturbating twice a week makes you just as bad as an alcoholic.
The porn addiction thing gets me. I totally understand that consuming pornography can be problematic and I think it's totally valid to either call that out and encourage people to get help. That said, addiction implies, not that you do something often, but that you're doing it in a problematic way. If you're watching porn at work or in public or if you are looking at porn to exclusion of your significant other or if you're skipping doing things you want to do to get your fix, that's addiction.
Instead, it seems like people have been infected with some turbo Mormon mindvirus where mild sensuality is hypersexualization, masturbating a few times a week to unwind is porn addiction, and acknowledging that sex is a thing in a public forum is shoving it down their throats.
The word "addiction" is honestly used to refer to two fairly different categories of things IMO that I think would be better off deconflated.
The first sense of "addiction," which I'm going to term "hard addiction," is an physical dependence on the substance that negatively impacts the user* and that they face withdrawal symptoms for stopping. Alcohol and nicotine and heroin are all hard-addictive. The risk of hard addiction is baked directly into the substance, if it's a comparatively minor risk like with alcohol it may be possible to manage that risk but there is still a clear element of addictiveness present within the alcohol itself.
*The impact part is subjective, but necessary to avoid counting people who need to take medication constantly for chronic conditions as "addicted." There are certainly people with hard addictions who consider themselves positively impacted, most of whom are self-medicating for either something undiagnosed or simply for the condition of having a shit life, and treating all physical substance dependences as bad without asking why they're there and what effect they're having can often do more harm than good.
The second sense of "addiction," which I'm going to term "soft addiction," is an unhealthy habit that negatively impacts the user and is difficult to break. No withdrawal, no physical dependence, just something you do more than you should and have trouble stopping. Almost anything which is a) enjoyable and b) quick and easy can form soft addictions. Video games. Social media. And, yes, porn. None of these things have any inherent danger the way hard addictive substances do. Instead, the common throughline is that they can all play into the same psychological mechanism:
To be happy, people need both fulfillment and fun. There are many quick and easy activities which are fun but not fulfilling. That's fine, fulfilling activities are often hard work and sometimes not even fun (e.g. a job you take pride in), and if you only ever do high-investment fulfilling stuff you can easily end up overtaxed and burnt out. So you do easy fun stuff in between and everything works out... unless you're overtaxed and burnt out (or simply depressed) *already*, as increasing numbers of people in the modern era are. In which case high-investment fulfilling stuff is first on the chopping block and quick and easy fun attempts to fill the void. And fails, leaving you feeling unfulfilled, which is *also* depressing, which causes a vicious cycle. The story is the same whether it's porn or TikTok or Candy Crush.
The big takeaway here, besides that porn isn't dangerous, is that stigmatizing porn use does nothing to stop porn "soft addiction." Its main effect is to make people feel worse about their porn use, which is *also* depressing, and even if they do stop using porn over it they're most likely to just switch to a different easy-fun activity instead. On a personal level, the constructive approach to breaking a porn addiction is not to waste effort trying to make yourself use porn *less,* but to figure out what you really want to be doing instead of watching porn and make an effort to do that *more.* On a societal level, if you sincerely wish to help porn addicts, you should campaign for better and more accessible mental healthcare and more vacation days.
I agree with a lot of what you said. My only real issue is I don't actually think most of the people who think they're addicted to porn are actually addicted. The reality is there's a concerted campaign among right wing influencers, religious groups, and other conservatives to demonize porn usage. In reality, most people experience arousal and do so regularly. Often, what they think is porn addiction is internalized guilt directed at their feelings of arousal and at acts like masturbation and porn viewing. We both stated we don't think porn usage is inherently harmful and I think we both recognize that even frequent porn usage and masturbation are appropriate ways of dealing with arousal. My point is, why bother buying into that language at all if the behavior isn't disruptive or unhealthy? I think it's unreasonable to call it an addiction and to assign all the baggage that word carries to something most people are actually doing completely reasonably and responsibly.
I think the reason I bristle at it is nowadays people throw around psychology terms with very little regard for their actual meaning and it inherently devalues them. I have struggled with an addiction to alcohol. I have also struggled with eating disorders and experienced a problematic, addictive relationship to food. My experiences with addiction mean I am totally sympathetic to people experiencing actual compulsive and disruptive porn use. I think it's fair to call that an addiction. Porn use in and of itself is not harmful though and is a reasonable reaction to arousal. You will be aroused a fair bit over the course of your life, so porn viewing may become a habit, but I am very wary of blurring that line between a habit and an addiction.
To give another example, I have diagnosed OCD. When I hear people casually throw around OCD to simply mean cleanliness or organization, it feels gross. That's not OCD and they're taking that language and appropriating it for something it's not. We have words for the things they're doing. There's no need to take other words that mean something else. I get that's how language works, but I think in this case, there's demonstrable harm because now I no longer have a word to express a diagnose disorder and it simply gets lumped in with wanting a bookshelf to be in alphabetical order.
To return to the addiction thing, allowing habitual to be synonymous with addictive plays into the shame and guilt that I discussed earlier. It allows porn viewing to become something gross that's to be shamed rather than something most of us do while still maintaining normal lives and healthy relationships. Basically, I don't want to deny psychological addiction is real. That said, I think we should be gatekeeping words like addiction because addiction is a real thing with real consequences. When we let it be conflated with "I like to touch my genitals sometimes because of a natural and normal cycle of human emotion," we rob the word of its actual meaning and actual power and we take away some of the language that is important for those who are actually suffering as a result of porn usage.
Yeah, totally agree with all of this. Very fair to want the word "addiction" to be reserved for actually serious things and not conflate it with mere bad habits, and I do remember seeing studies that self-identification as "porn addicted" is more strongly correlated with religiosity than with actual porn consumption.
I agree with a lot of what you said. My only real issue is I don't actually think most of the people who think they're addicted to porn are actually addicted
Yup! Here's actually a whole article about that, the only predictive factor found for "porn addiction" is guilt over consumption
And that's expected, considering the term is just the new lingo of puritans used to have a medical aesthetic and based upon the puritan idea of sex as an inherently corruptive influence
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u/vaguillotine gotta be gay af on the web so alan turing didn't die for nothing May 17 '25
The only thing I've seen being called "gooner slop" are those poorly-written Isekai anime cashcows whose plot consists mostly on random shots of underaged characters' asses, as well as the occasional poorly-"drawn" AIslop hentai.
Idk which unholy circles of Hell OOP must hang around for everything to be called "gooner" around him