Rachel Hale
speaker
178 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 25 Aug
Rachel Hale’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
As is true when we look at other behavioral or substance issues, there's a lot of stigma associated with this.
It's something that people really don't want to talk about, even though we know that it's impacting so many people's lives.
And when you combine that with what we know about the male loneliness epidemic and that males have less people in their lives who they feel comfortable talking to about their emotional hardships, males have less close friends who they feel comfortable talking to about this type of thing,
it makes sense that these anonymous forums could be a really comfortable first step to seek this out that feel less intimidating than seeking out professional support.
One thing that's really interesting about this is that there's a very wide debate in the medical field about whether or not compulsive porn use should be classified as an addiction or not.
And the DSM-5 does not recognize compulsive porn use as a formal disorder, though these online communities of men who have been impacted say that to them it feels like an addiction.
Medically, that's not something where there's agreement on how it should be classified.
But what these mental health professionals I spoke with do all agree on is that this is a serious problem that is impacting more young men now than before.
And that for a lot of these men, and this lines up with what these young men who I interviewed told me,
Porn is an outlet for something.
It's a way to cope with other issues going on in people's lives and at a point that porn can become something that is a really deep part of someone's mental health struggles.
I think that though there's vast debate in the field on how compulsive porn use should be classified, it's clear that these young men are struggling and that medical professionals are united on trying to figure out the best way to help those young men deal with it.
We also know that from some of the reports that we linked in this article, including a 2022 one from Common Sense Media, 71% of teenagers report intentionally viewing porn in the last week.
And the average respondent in that survey said they first viewed porn at age 12.
Those are strikingly high numbers and a strikingly low one in terms of the age where some teenagers first viewed porn.
What really struck me in this is I'll mention two things.
One of them is how long people have struggled with this.
I spoke with some people who were introduced to porn at, you know, 11 or 12 years old and are now struggling with it as 25 year olds, 35 year olds, you know, addictions that span forever.
15 or 25 years to grapple with that for so much of your life.
Some of these young men told me that they don't know who they are without porn because it was introduced to them at such young age.
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