This Is Not a Marginal Problem
There is a quiet assumption that this is a small problem. A niche one. Something that happens to a few men with weak willpower, off in a corner of the internet, not worth serious attention.
The numbers do not support that assumption.
Start with children, because that is where it starts. In the US, Common Sense Media found that 73% of teens aged 13 to 17 had seen online pornography, and more than half had seen it by the age of 13. In the UK, the Children's Commissioner for England reported that 70% of young people had seen it before turning 18 — the average age of first exposure was 13, more than a quarter had seen it by 11, and some said they were as young as six.
Ofcom, the UK's regulator, found that 8% of children aged 8 to 14 visited a porn site or app in a single month — including around 3% of eight- and nine-year-olds.
Read those ages again.
And most of them are not going looking. In the UK research, more people came across it by accident than deliberately sought it out. It arrives through a social media feed, a search result, a link. It does not wait to be invited.
We say this not to moralize, and not to frighten anyone. Plenty of people see pornography and are fine. But something that reaches almost every teenager, most of them before they are ready, is not a marginal thing. It is the water everyone is now swimming in.
And the water has changed. This is not a magazine hidden under a mattress. What exists now is effectively infinite, free, anonymous, and engineered — built by the same attention economy that optimizes everything else you scroll, tuned to novelty and escalation, sitting in your pocket at 2am when you feel worst.
Accessible.
Affordable.
Anonymous.
The three things that make anything harder to put down.
There is a part of this almost no one talks about. While you watch, you are being watched. A study of more than 22,000 pornography sites found that 93% leaked data to third parties — advertisers, trackers, analytics companies — often with no clear notice. In many cases the web address alone was enough to suggest what someone was looking at. Your most private browsing is quietly someone else's data.
And the tools built to help have not always been better. Some of the most popular "recovery" apps have leaked exactly the kind of intimate data their users trusted them with — including data belonging to minors. This is one of the reasons Meridin is built the way it is: what you tell it is designed to stay on your device, not on our servers. There should be no database anywhere that can say what you struggle with.
Then there are the people for whom this has stopped being a choice. In early 2026, the Guardian reported on a survey in which more than half of UK therapists said they had seen a rise in clients whose pornography use had become out of control — people neglecting responsibilities and damaging relationships, unable to stop even when they wanted to. These are not statistics. They are the men who sit up at night, promise themselves tomorrow will be different, and open the same sites again.
Here is the part we will not exaggerate.
Being exposed to porn does not mean you are harmed by it. Most people who watch it never lose control. Even the word "addiction" is still debated by researchers, and the honest estimate is that roughly one in ten develops a genuinely compulsive pattern.
But one in ten of something nearly universal is not marginal.
That is the real shape of it:
Exposure is near-total, and it starts young.
For a real and sizeable minority, it becomes compulsive.
And an entire industry profits from keeping it that way — including some of the people claiming to help.
The question was never whether porn is "an addiction." The question is simpler, and it is personal:
Is this still serving you?
Can you control it?
Is it moving you toward the life you want, or away from it?
If the honest answer is that it is pulling you away from your life, then it is worth working on — and you do not have to do it with shame, or with a streak you are terrified to break, or with an app that treats your private struggle as a product.
That is what Meridin is for. To help you understand the loop instead of hating yourself for it. To get you through the moment when the urge is loudest. To help you build, from the smallest possible step, a life you do not need to escape from. Privately. Without judgment. And built, from the start, to let you go when you no longer need it.
This is not a marginal problem.
But it is a workable one.
And you are not the only one working on it.
Sources
- Common Sense Media, Teens and Pornography (2023)
- Children's Commissioner for England, "A lot of it is actually just abuse" — young people and pornography (2025 update)
- Ofcom, research on children's access to online pornography (2025)
- Maris, Libert & Henrichsen, Tracking Sex: sexual data leakage and tracking on porn websites, New Media & Society (2019)
- The Guardian, More than half of UK therapists report rise in out-of-control porn use (January 2026)