The Dredge Tank

one day we're going to go beyond the model of addiction which unfortunately has been poisoned by both religion and the entire addiction-industrial complex (what i call Forever Recovery)

it's going to end up being far more complex and rooted in material conditions then most mainstream realize

I'm talking completely out of my ass here, but I feel like excessive masturbation — whatever we might define "excess" to be in practice — is often related to alienation and just terminal boredom. Which is to say, if you feel like you have no control over your own life, and no impact on anything around yourself, then you still have control over your own body, and your own impact on yourself, right? You crave stimulation, and you can give that to yourself — lo, how independent you are!

The pathology would then arise when, essentially, the signifier is conflated for the signified: when the frequent masturbation being a result of lack of control over one's own life, is reinterpreted as frequent masturbation being in itself lack of control over one's own life. This, I'd reckon, would generally occur when someone on some level does not wish to acknowledge that thon lacks control over sy own life, and therefore chooses to hate whatever represents that lack of control rather than confront the fact head-on. Alternatively, someone could've just internalized those ridiculous ideas of any amount of masturbation being harmful. In many cases, well, both.

In any case, when you believe yourself to not be in control of your own masturbation, and masturbation happens to be your coping mechanism for your lack of life control, then these will obviously only feed into each other in a very unproductive way. Badabing badaboom, you have a "porn addiction".

Now as I'm saying, I'm just talking out of my ass here, but I do feel like this would explain the general leanings of supposed "porn addiction" with regard to gender and political ideology. Because if you're the gender who's raised to feel like you're owed the world, that you should be on top and in control, then you're more likely to have a pathological reaction to not being that; and if you're the type who would project your hatred of the contradictions of capitalism onto its pool of imported labor, then you're more likely to project your hatred of your life being kinda shit, onto your own genitals. Yet the actual mechanism of "porn addiction" would be, strictly speaking, neutral in terms of gender and ideology — it would find itself anywhere profound boredom would cross paths with a lack of life control that a person for any reason just could not face...

...Except, what about ideas like supernormality and the hedonic treadmill? Why do some people meet their "porn addiction" with shame while others "embrace it"? I can't account for any of that, so I don't think I have all the answers.

In so far as I understand it has been studied, or rather attempts have been made to study it, and they have uniformly failed because the phenomena as described by masturbation-fearers does not exist in any meaningful way. It really is just mormons, catholics, and other weird little freaks trying to pathologize normal sexual behavior. It has legs because so many people have absolutely no concept of what normal sexual behavior is, and because everyone's so damn isolated and porn is stimulating enough to consistent help cope with the social and cultural wasteland of 21st century life. People think they're jerking it too much because they've been conditioned to feel intense shame for jerking it at all, and they think they're addicted because they think about sex a normal amount of the time. There's a pretty strict physical limit on "jerking it too much" because no matter what you use for lube chafing will make itself known eventually.

Depression, anxiety, and malaise also factor in - Masturbation is a very basic form of self-soothing available to almost everyone. People who are already in bad headspace and beset by religious brainworms masturbate because it makes them feel better, then once the anxiety and self loathing comes back htey ascribe it to masturbation and decide they're weak, pathetic, sinners, addicted, whatever bullshit because otherwise they wouldn't masturbate to feel better or distract themselves from the depression. And then they go a step further saying that masturbation and thinking about sex is a source of depression.

It's really just weird Christians convinced that if you eat enough bran flakes you won't think about sex, updated for the 21st century.

Just like how it's nearly impossible to criticize Disney Star Wars movies without being associated with "PURPLE HAIR FEEEMALE BAD" shit, it's hard to talk about habit-forming behaviors (or addictions but Reddit pedantics would split hairs about that word) without being associated with NoFap cultists or religious dogma.

There was a dude at the rehab I went to who claimed to be working on, among other things, porn addiction. The first time I saw him he was wearing a shirt that said "GOONER" in big letters.