The Secret Struggle of Gen Z: How Porn Addiction is Reshaping Relationships
Men now in their 20s are the first to grow up with easy access to pornography from childhood, and they say it changed how they see women and how they form and maintain relationships, a Post investigation has found.Six heterosexual men in the age group each admitted they had habitually used pornography to a point where it became part of their daily routine.“Starting in like middle school, it was like, I’d come home and watch porn after school and take a nap, and it became daily pretty quickly,” one man told The Post. “By the time I was 18, it was like two or three times a day.”Half of young men report shame about how much porn they consume. Di Studio – stock.adobe.comThe 26-year-old from DC was only in sixth grade when he first encountered porn — and it transformed the way he saw the world around him.“I started viewing my crushes differently,” he admitted. “I thought more about, like, their body parts than the whole person, the whole woman.”It wasn’t long before he found himself seeking out novelty and tumbling down a rabbit hole, leading him to hardcore porn before he’d even had his first kiss.“Porn kind of told me what to like as opposed to me figuring it out for myself,” he said. “It leaves very little room for what we might call quote-unquote vanilla sex. Things go from 0 to 100 real quick.”When he became sexually active in college, he didn’t know how to apply what he saw in porn to real life.“It actually caused confusion as to what women really want,” he said. “It made me think that women didn’t want any gentleness in sexual interaction, like they all wanted the roughest, most alpha sort of thing, like it had to be hyper-dominant.”He is a member of Gen Z, the first generation to have smartphones as tweens. With unfettered access to the internet in their pocket, many boys inevitably found their way to pornography. Today, the typical child first comes across porn at age 12, according to one survey.“In the ’70s and the ’60s, people had to go to the dingy movie theaters, the red light districts. They had to actively seek good stuff out,” a 28-year-old from Florida said. “Now it’s in your pocket.”Looking around at his generation, the DC resident thinks porn has irreparably damaged their relationship to sex.Chandler Rogers founded Relay, an app that helps people quit watching porn. Courtesy of Chandler Rogers“For a lot of people, it seems like sexuality is more of a quid-pro-quo than a bonding experience,” he observed. “For the average young man, sex has been turned into more of a quick-fix drug, almost like nicotine, than an experience to be had.”Today, three quarters of teen boys have seen porn, and half report shame about how much porn they consume. Pornography consumption is widespread. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Sex collected data from 1,392 US adults between 18 and 73 and reported 91.5% of men and 60.2% of women said they had consumed pornography within the previous month. Chandler Rogers, a 28-year-old father of two, had a bad relationship with pornography, but set out to help other young men kick their porn habit. Growing up in Washington state, he struggled with porn, even while excelling in all other parts of his life.Rogers is now 28 and happily married with two sons. Courtesy of Chandler Rogers“I was an overachiever and generally a perfectionist,” he told The Post. “I was a 4.0 student, captain of the track team, cross country team, I was active in my church community. In any area of my life, I felt like I could do what I wanted to do, but in this other area, it felt totally out of control.”Rogers said sexy content on Instagram sent him looking for porn around age 14: “Being on Instagram, it was kind of the slow and steady drip of sexualized content that kind of found me … No matter where I turned, there was always more and more sexualized content.”His use became increasingly regular, until he realized in his junior year of college that he wasn’t in control of his own habits. So he sought out an online support group led by a therapist.As a high schooler, Rogers developed regular porn habits that he felt unable to control. Courtesy of Chandler Rogers“The harder I tried to quit, the more impossible it seemed to do so,” Rogers said. “It took me a number of years until I felt like my relationship with pornography was substantially healthier.”He imagined many young men were feeling the same way, but that most wouldn’t actually pay for therapy. So he taught himself how to code and created Relay, an app where people trying to kick their porn habit can share tips and keep each other accountable via an anonymous forum.“Shame and isolation are what keeps a lot of people stuck, but they’re just not going to go to an AA-type in-person group,” he said. “They’re tired of trying to fight it alone, and they know that they need accountability.”Now happily married with two sons himself, Rogers’ platform has helped 100,000 people break their corrosive habits — but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Young men of various faiths and backgrounds across the world report problematic relationships with porn.A 25-year-old from northwest England told The Post that he came across “hijab porn,” which depicts women in religious head coverings having sex, at age 17. His strict Muslim upbringing, which teaches that pornography is forbidden, made it especially enticing to him, but it also caused immense guilt.Peter Adair co-founded Quittr, an app with more than 2 million downloads. Courtesy of Peter Adair“I wish I’d never discovered it,” he said. “It was the good girl gone bad, and I think it’s very popular amongst people who grew up in strict religious backgrounds.”He says porn has caused him to see women differently in his day-to-day life: “I think you start to sexualize ordinary women. It becomes harder to be platonic friends with the opposite sex. It causes women to only be seen as sexual.”It also created unrealistic standards for women’s bodies. “Pornstars are in a lot of makeup, they have perfect bodies, and the standards get pushed a lot higher,” he admitted. “It doesn’t translate well into real life.”Religious shame drives many young men to seek out help for pornography, according to Quittr co-founder Peter Adair. His app blocks pornography websites from the phones of users and has been downloaded 2 million times.The 22-year-old from Glasgow, Scotland, said most customers are age 18 to 25, and they fall into one of two groups: Either they’re religious and feel that porn is spiritually degrading, or they are concerned about their relationships.“A lot of men hide this from their partner,” he said. “But a lot of people are also worried that, when the time comes that they find a girlfriend or a future wife, their porn addiction will get in the way of that relationship.”Gen Z men say growing up with porn warped their understanding of sex. JK2507 – stock.adobe.comNicolaas, 27, from the Netherlands, found Quittr through ChatGPT. He wanted to kick his porn habit, which had him returning to the screen three or four times a week, for the sake of his relationship with his fiancée.“I just thought, like, I’m 27. What’s going to make me stop? Like when I’m 30, do I say that’s enough of this? Or when I marry her? Or when I have kids? There’s never a good moment where it’s like, that’s it, that’s enough of that,” he said. With the help of the Quittr community, he was able to wean off porn in a couple of months: “I didn’t even have to go to tell my girlfriend before she noticed. Like, within two days, dark clouds around me were gone.”Nicolaas, 27, from the Netherlands, has been curbing his porn use through the Quittr app.On the flip side, a 21-year-old warehouse worker in Seattle said porn is holding him back from forming relationships in the first place. He first came across porn at age 10, and when the pandemic hit in his sophomore year of high school, his occasional use became habitual.“It got more regular with time, especially through COVID,” he recalled. “It became basically every day because I was home alone not doing anything … Late at night, or early in the morning, you’re already in bed with your phone.”He has never been in a relationship, and he blames pornography for holding him back.“It takes away having to go out and search for somebody that might make you happy,” he admitted. “It ruins your confidence. You worry that, if you date, you’re not gonna be big enough or be able to keep the one you’re with happy, so you don’t date, you kind of avoid it.”The 26-year-old from DC agreed: “If porn was taken out of the equation, young men would go and find a partner tomorrow and have this desire to build a relationship, but porn can meet all of men’s sexual needs.”
