Professionals are starting to doubt that it’s real, which begs the question: is it more of a trouble or a trend?

Like sex addiction, porn addiction is heavily fashionable right now. We see mentions of it all over the media — but now, a new crop of doctors and porn professionals are doubting its very existence. Is it just an excuse to rationalize socially unacceptable behavior, or is it a meat-beat addiction?

In a new book “Sex Addiction: A Critical History,” New Zealand academics Barry Reay, Nina Attwood and Claire Gooder claim that porn addiction is nothing more than the fabled product of “social opportunism, diagnostic amorphism, therapeutic self-interest and popular cultural endorsement.” Ooh, burn.

Yet while they postulate that porn isn’t a real addiction, they do acknowledge that our sex-negative culture, click-bait media, and flourishing therapy industry have combined to create fanciful and frightening images of it as such. From that point of view, porn addiction is nothing more than a social construct.

However, thousands of men (and a few women) claim to suffer from real porn addiction, something that’s evidenced by incredibly high user numbers on porn addiction help sites like Kick Start Recovery Program. For them, their habits fall under the four criteria of what constitutes addictive behavior: the behavior is out of control; it’s hard to stop; they continue the behavior despite harmful consequences; and the behavior has an anesthetizing function.

Thing is, one man’s guilt-free masturbation marathon is another man’s medical problem, because addiction is subjective. The only person who can really tell if you’re a porn addict is you and the Backdoor Farm Girls you see oh, 14 or 15 times per day.

Because of societal shame and the likely disapproval of a partner, people are likely to believe they are porn addicts when in reality, they are not, hence the crux of the issue.

Culture and shame play such a big role in people’s own comprehension of their habits, in fact, that a recent study by Case Western Reserve University found that religious people are more likely to believe they’re addicted to porn.

At the end of the day, who’s to say what constitutes too much porn consumption? Instead, it might be more adaptive to view porn addiction as a cultural product that exists as an easy explanation for bizarre sexual behavior … unless of course you like shelling out enough therapy money to your shrink for them to add a third story to their vacation house. Good talk!