“Quit porn. Watch your lust. Work on talking to girls. Hit the gym. Start building your life. Start building your character.” Connor McLaren, the cofounder of the porn addiction recovery app Quittr, sipped on a matcha latte while rattling off his app’s unofficial mission statement. Every other beat, he would glance quickly to his right and to his left, cognizant of how often he was saying the word porn.
“I’m in public,” said McLaren, 23. “I’m being very conspicuous.”
It might still be taboo in polite society, but online, porn is ubiquitous. Ninety-one percent of men consumed it in the last month. PornHub received an astounding 11.4 billion visits in one month in 2024. The site only launched in 2007, meaning Gen Z are the first Americans to grow up in its long shadow—and by all accounts, it has degraded us.
Many young adults report encountering porn from an average age of 12. Jonathan Haidt, in his bestseller The Anxious Generation, explains the consequences: The more you watch porn in your formative years, the more likely you are to avoid pursuing real-life romantic relationships. Asking a human being out feels riskier, at least emotionally. Porn can’t reject you, or humiliate you, or expect any kind of commitment in return for sexual gratification. And so young people—particularly boys—get hooked on it, and slowly their expectations of beauty, intimacy, partnership, and pleasure are warped, perhaps forever.
