Rachel Hale

This is a topic that I've wanted to cover for a while since starting this beat, but it was a question of figuring out the right angle and kind of the right way in.

And something positive that I found as I was keeping tabs on different ideas is that on Reddit, I saw a number of forums where people were

speaking about their recovery processes, the highs and lows of it.

And what struck me as really interesting is just how many members were part of these groups and how many of these groups there are specifically on Reddit, some of which have, you know, upwards of a million followers.

And that is what struck me as like making it a really relevant and timely piece is kind of seeing the ways that people are seeking out help for this problem.

Yeah, that's definitely a piece of it.

And I'm glad you said Gen Z because I did really have Gen Z specifically in mind with this piece because I think that that is the age group that was the most impacted because you have

Above them, you know, more age groups where you would have still needed to rely on the very early days of the Internet, still maybe printing out pictures or looking at vintage magazines.

That type of thing is what people would associate with porn or, you know, a DVD player.

It wasn't accessible 24-7 yet.

And then with Gen Z is when we saw a group come of age with this complete and utter access really at all times in their pocket.

And it was before parents know as much as they know now about phones and what we can access on them and the addictive elements of phones.

And so a lot of Gen Z young adults, men specifically, when we're talking about this piece, but we're able to get a cell phone early on and we're able to find products

porn early on because it coincided with the rise of popular social media sites before they had some of these built-in filters and restrictions.

I think these Gen Z men specifically came of age both with the unfettered phone access and accessing these social media sites, other online sites, before some of those built-in filters were there.

So first of all, we know that the brain is not fully developed until 25.

So any sort of, you know, chemical-inducing hit of dopamine that we would get through certain behaviors that trigger rewards in the brain can impact the brain differently at a younger age in combination with a behavior like

porn or substance abuse.

So porn in combination with masturbation, like alcohol or similar substances, can trigger the brain's reward system, which sends a release of dopamine, which can reinforce that behavior and over time create a loop.

And when we look long-term, that means that the brain's reward pathways