It’s an average day. Slept average, woke up, had an average breakfast. Opened up reddit, scrolled through my favourite feminist sub — average so far. Having exhausted the ‘hot’ posts, I found myself looking up links from the ‘new’ toolbar, one of which was for a video on porn addiction.

Now let me confess something here. I am rather inexperienced when it comes to pornography as well as the feminism debate as it pertains to porn which is not to say that I’m a complete stranger to it either. In any case, this link was intriguing enough to make me click and down the porno-rabbithole I went. And it was far from average from here on out.

Right away, I saw what had made one of my fellow feminist redditors mad enough to upload and this and try to cause a furore. The video started off in a very abusive manner towards women, harsher than pretty much any ‘art’ I’ve seen. I felt sick, repelled, and yet I found myself watching the entire video — all 3-odd minutes of it.

The first question is this: How much offense can be caused by a video 3 minutes long? And how much thought can it provoke?

After my initial angry reaction, I decided that it wasn’t a good idea to ponder upon it and moved on. But for the next couple of days it kept coming back to me, and not the part about how I’m female and so I must be mad at this filthy, disgusting video. I found myself thinking about other things instead.

I thought about how porn addiction is mostly a male thing, and how it is rarely discussed in the media, and how (embarrassingly?) little I knew about it as a woman. How many guys are addicted to porn? Is it a significant portion? Was my ex addicted to porn too? Was it something he struggled with every day but never spoke about?

And if someone was to make a video describing an addiction to something that paints women in possibly the most demeaning ways in all of media, then wouldn’t that seem sexist automatically? So then is this artist sexist or merely revealing something sexist that is much more widespread than their ‘art’ could ever be? (I don’t think I can speak on whether I found it to be art or not — only that it made me think, and lately not many things I find online do. Meanwhile Forbes estimated the revenue of the porn industry to be anywhere between a few hundred million to a possible 4 Billion $.)

I also considered the paradox of female guilt in this situation. The video is sexist (so reddit says), and so I must hate it, decry it, call it horrible things and downvote it. But any video on porn addiction in male youth will suffer the same fate, will it not? And so somehow, this issue cannot be discussed in popular culture by women without us feeling like we’re undermining our own ‘movement’.

And this raises an even larger question — can this issue be talked about at all? Does sympathizing with porn and sex addicts make me unfeminist?

I have no answers. This piece only asks questions, I’m afraid. And my hunger for the answers make me feel no less than an addict.

This is the original video for anyone interested, by the way. Feminists beware.