Pornography Addiction and the Medicalization of Free Speech

Congressional testimony on the “science of pornography addiction” reflects the growing trend to place pornography use within biomedical discourses of addiction in order to draw on the cultural power of existing addiction narratives. The emerging narrative frames pornography use as a biological danger to those who use it in order to maintain traditional moralist fears about the effects of pornography while circumventing more complicated analyses of the role of culture, the importance of free speech, or the limitations of media effects research.