Every prevalence figure you have seen for this comes from a questionnaire, and the number moves with the questionnaire, not with reality.
In the largest standardised study, across 42 countries, the share of people screening positive ranged from 3.2% on a strict six-component scale to 16.6% on a short screen. The often-quoted Australian figures of 4% of men and 1% of women are narrower still: they measure agreement with the single statement "you feel you are addicted to pornography", asked only of people who had ever looked at porn, which works out at roughly 3% of all men and 0.5% of all women.
So when a website tells you porn addiction affects one in ten, or one in three, ask which instrument and which cut-off. The honest answer is a range, and the range is wide.
The finding that survives every instrument is the shape of the population. Studies that sort users statistically, rather than asking them to self-diagnose, consistently place around three-quarters in a recreational group with no meaningful distress. The remaining quarter divides between people who are distressed but can stop when they choose, and people whose control is genuinely impaired. Which group someone is in is not read off how often they use.
Where this comes from
Read the full lesson: The disagreement at the centre of all this →
Sources and how strong they are (3)
- Mixed evidencePrevalence of problematic use has no single defensible number: it depends almost entirely on the instrument, the cut-off and the sample. In the largest standardised cross-national study the overall figure ranges from 3.2% (PPCS) to 16.6% (Brief Pornography Screen) across 42 countries. The Australian ASHR2 figure often quoted here — men 4%, women 1% — is something narrower: it is agreement with the single item "You feel you are addicted to pornography", asked only of respondents who had ever looked at pornography, which works out at roughly 3% of all men and 0.5% of all women.
- Rissel et al. 2017, J Sex Res 54(2):227-240, doi:10.1080/00224499.2016.1191597
- Bőthe et al. 2024, Addiction 119:928-950, doi:10.1111/add.16431
- Well establishedMost people who use pornography do not have a problem with it. Profile studies place most users in a non-problematic group, but how many depends on how the profiling is done: cluster analysis of 830 adults in Vaillancourt-Morel et al. 2017 put 75.5% in a "recreational" profile, while latent profile analysis across three samples in Bőthe et al. 2020 put 68-73% in non-problematic low-frequency use and 19-29% in non-problematic high-frequency use, leaving 3-8% in problematic high-frequency use.
- Vaillancourt-Morel MP, Blais-Lecours S, Labadie C, Bergeron S, Sabourin S, Godbout N 2017, J Sex Med 14(1):78-85, doi:10.1016/j.jsxm.2016.10.016, PMID 28011208
- Bőthe B, Tóth-Király I, Potenza MN, Orosz G, Demetrovics Z 2020, J Sex Med 17(4):793-811, doi:10.1016/j.jsxm.2020.01.007
- Well establishedIn a US nationally representative sample of adult internet users (N = 2,075), around 11% of men and 3% of women reported some level of perceived addiction.
- Grubbs JB, Kraus SW, Perry SL 2019, J Behav Addict 8(1):88-93, doi:10.1556/2006.7.2018.134, PMID 30632378, PMC7044607
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