Jamie would meticulously schedule his days around finding time alone to watch porn and masturbate—often up to five times a day.
The 32-year-old Michigan engineer, who did not want to use his real name due to privacy concerns, first watched porn at the impressionable age of 12, but never realized he had a problem until just after his father’s funeral three years ago.
“I didn’t shed a single tear,” he says. “I didn’t know how to react happily or sadly to anything.” That’s when his porn consumption spiraled—combined with stress, anxiety, and depression—and he locked himself in his room “all day.” The only thing that seemed palpable, he recalls, “was that rush of dopamine” delivered by an intense session of hardcore porn viewing. But for Jamie, who is Christian, those fleeting moments of porn-fueled transcendance were followed by far deeper lows, including suicidal ideations.
This past March, Jamie says his partner angrily confronted him over his compulsive porn consumption, accusing him of lying and committing adultery.
Jamie’s “entire world came down.” He admitted he felt that he was addicted, begged for her forgiveness, temporarily moved back in with his mother, and renounced porn. That’s when he found Relay, an app created by a pair of Mormon college students that claims it can help people “take back control from porn, one day at a time.” Jamie promised his partner he would never watch porn again—and she gave him one chance.
The app provides a comprehensive plan to stop watching porn, with videos by therapists, daily journal prompts, live group sharing sessions, and a function to address serious urges. Users even keep track of each other’s porn-free streaks, with a “Live Milestone” ticker. This is all in an effort to help customers, who pay $149 per year for full access, unpack their underlying issues like loneliness and trauma to help prevent relapse. The app has been downloaded over 110,000 times, with company data showing that 89 percent of its users are male.
This month, Relay has partnered with anti-porn advocacy nonprofit Fight the New Drug for “the November Project”—a new initiative to encourage people to abstain from porn—with 28,000 sign-ups so far.
The scale of pornography use represents “a modern epidemic,” claims Relay’s CEO, Chandler Rogers. The 27-year-old was inspired to cofound the app in August 2021 to provide his Gen Z peers a path to stop watching porn. It followed his own self-described yearslong addiction to explicit content. Rogers, who attended Brigham Young University in Utah where he met both his cofounder and chief of staff, says he tried to stop “at least 100 times, and could never go more than a week without turning back to pornography.”
In June 2025, the top five porn websites in the US—Pornhub, XVideos, XNXX, XHamster and Chaturbate—attracted almost 2.2 billion views in the US alone, according to website performance analytics company Semrush. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of people are having romantic relationships with their AI companions, and ChatGPT will next month permit erotic chat sessions. In an email, Relay chief of staff Nels Schulzke says the company is “standing up to Sam Altman’s erotica announcement.” (In October, Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which operates ChatGPT, said that his service was allowing erotica to “treat adult users like adults” and not act as “the elected moral police of the world.”)
Other chatbots already enable the creation of tailormade explicit videos, and with AI-powered sex toys and VR headsets set to make both porn and trysts with AI lovers ever more immersive, Rogers warns that the porn industry will soon be able to “prey on psychological weaknesses” like never before.
“A whole generation of men are growing up with their confidence eroded, feeling increasingly isolated and robbed of real intimacy,” Rogers says. The normalization of relationships with AI companions, he claims, “is programming people to falsely believe that their innermost needs can be met not by another human being but by a machine.”
Another popular movement, “No Nut November,” born out of the NoFap community on Reddit and more focused on ejaculation abstention, is being capitalized on as a marketing gimmick by some porn stars who are encouraging their followers to break their fasts. “My annual No Nut November challenge has begun,” performer Angela White says in a video on X on November 1, offering patrons who sign up “new content” daily. “I can’t wait to challenge you all month long.”
Rogers, meanwhile, has appeared on Christian podcasts spreading his anti-porn gospel, including one started by Relay members called Beyond Sexual Brokenness. The app gives users the option of making their plan faith-based and is available as part of a bundle of “Tithely tools.” One post on Relay’s website refers to “sexual purity,” “immorality,” “spiritual vitality,” and even self-hatred among Christians who view porn. “I grew up with the understanding that viewing porn was a sin,” says Rogers. “Faith definitely played a role early on in my desire to overcome the addiction—I wanted to follow God more diligently and be worthy.”
The handwringing over the potential of porn addiction to represent a generational issue for men across the world comes at a time when the adult entertainment industry is being heavily scrutinized by lawmakers. At least 24 US states, as well as the UK, have passed measures to require some form of ID verification to access porn sites, sending traffic to Pornhub plummeting. Sixteen states have declared porn a public health crisis, echoing a 2016 Republican Party communique which said it was “destroying the lives of millions.” Project 2025, the policy wish list for President Donald Trump’s second term produced by right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, denounced porn as a product “as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime.”
Experts, however, are unsettled on whether anyone can be clinically addicted to porn, and it is not categorized as an addiction by the American Psychiatric Association. “Compulsive sexual behaviors are considered as an impulse control disorder,” says addiction psychiatrist Marc Potenza, director of Yale University’s Program for Research on Impulsivity and Impulse Control Disorders. He proposes that problematic pornography use shares multiple features—behavioral, clinical, and biological—with addictive disorders. But he cautions against “overly pathologizing” pornography use, noting that although much of the adult population watches porn, only a small subset appear to meet the criteria for problematic use. A 2020 analysis paper he helped produce, published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, said that high-frequency pornography use may not always be problematic.
But nothing quite illustrates the integration of regular porn consumption as an essential and long-standing part of many people’s lives as an internet subculture centered around the practice of “gooning.”
Some people imprecisely use the word gooning simply to refer to masturbating. But it ultimately pertains to marathon self-pleasure sessions in which the gooner may surf the edge of climax for a couple of hours, often with multiple screens displaying porn in their “goon cave.” All while potentially fraternizing, or livestreaming, with other gooners on Discord channels, hectic spaces which offer every genre of porn imaginable. Some ask their fellow goons for moral support in resisting ejaculatory orgasm prior to reaching a hallowed “goon state” of blissed-out numbness. Eventually, however, gooners may request someone to watch them climax.
“At a certain point, you enter what I can really only describe as a trance state,” says Josh, a gooner from Arizona who is in his early twenties and did not want to provide his surname for privacy reasons. “Your sense of self dissolves and you’d do anything to keep the edging going. All that matters is your body, your pleasure, and your porn of choice. Obviously it’s very enjoyable physically.” Gooning has encouraged him to treat masturbation as a form of therapy, he says. “I plan a session for when I have no responsibilities and devote that time to my own enjoyment,” Josh adds, noting he sometimes uses a couple of screens simultaneously with a variety of porn. “Alcohol, cannabis, and sometimes nicotine, all enhance my experience, and I know lots of people enjoy poppers too.”
Relay’s mission includes helping men to stop gooning. “I believe few people would consider themselves integral or whole were they to regularly masturbate and work at perfecting their ability to edge to multiple concurrent third-party sexual acts for hours on end,” Schulzke says.
Historically, masturbation itself has been seen in a religious sense as inherently wrong, says porn star Kazumi, whose videos on Pornhub have been viewed 188 million times. Behind this she sees an agenda to suppress natural human desires. “It’s a sense of self expression that, for a long time, a lot of people have wanted to demonize,” adds Kazumi, who keeps her real name private due to the nature of her work. “We’re up against this constant war of the prosecution of pleasure.”
For her, state porn controls are yet more signs of authoritarian governance. She says that porn is an “eternal scapegoat” for people to blame their issues on, rather than examining what is at the root of their lack of self-control. “If there’s people out there who have an impulsive, uncontrollable need for pleasure, it doesn’t stop here [with porn]. It stops with the mind.”
As of this writing, Jamie is 240 days free from porn, which he credits to being on the Relay app. “It’s been life-changing,” he says. “I’m not gonna say it’s been easy. I’m breaking an addiction I’ve had for two-thirds of my life. But I didn’t have a choice: I had to.”
He repaired his relationship with his partner but it was conditional upon his abstention from porn. His only regret is not joining Relay’s live group sessions earlier. “Hearing the stories of other people who have been struggling, I’ve realized for the first time ever that I’m not alone in this.”
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