The internet is abuzz with the latest scandal centered on Russell Brand. I’ve already written about this, but the 12-step sober community has taken a few sucker punches this week. While that hurts, I wonder if this might be a potential step forward in understanding sex addiction. If it’s not, it’s certainly an opportunity.

There has been much talk about the naughties and lad mag culture, two topics I have firsthand experience with. I also have the ability to reflect honestly on some of the things people might not feel comfortable saying or even linking together.

I read an interesting article this week about a former editor of Loaded magazine and his changed feelings. He talks about the escalation that came from the saturation and normalization of the content of these magazines.

The lad’s magazines were the softcore content I could flick through in the workplace or in front of mates. The titles varied, and my GCSE artwork was full of sketches of models from the magazine shoots. A few years ago, I found a favorite retro issue of Maxim magazine online and paid the best part of 20 quid for an out-of-date mag.

I recall my mates clubbed together and got me an annual subscription to a magazine. It was the same pile of magazines that I ended up ditching before moving in with my partner of nearly a decade. I also moaned about how the end of the lad mag era was an attack on masculinity.

In one regard, as toxic as those magazines were, fast-forward to 2023, and young girls are sold the idea of OnlyFans as an entrepreneurial step. The age of the influencer has just taken that culture, and instead of glamour models, it’s the neighbor, the work colleague, and in one extreme story I heard about the other day, a stepdaughter. OnlyFans blends amateur porn with stalker-like behavior.

For all the talk of toxic masculinity that lad mags peddled, the novelty was limited to pages. They say if a picture paints a thousand words, then a video paints a billion.

I am of an age that started with print and evolved over a couple of decades. In years to come, more and more people will come forward with problems with sexual compulsivity that have only known limitless online porn in a culture that normalizes the production of porn.

Here are some things that didn’t happen in my day which suggest the baseline is starting from a much higher point of novelty and severity of content than those of us a little longer in the tooth:

• Pornstars now use Twitch as “gamer girls” and recruit young lads to consume their content.
• Instagram girls have accounts that are landing pages for new subscribers to OnlyFans.
• Viral trends of reaction videos to extreme and often illegal porn.
• Online revenge porn wasn’t a thing in our days.
• Algorithms funnel more and more content which saturates timelines on social media.

Where society fails to safeguard young males is shaming sexuality and objectifying in one breath and harnessing it in another. Whether society is a patriarchy or swings to a matriarchy, its attitude towards porn will always result in negative outcomes. Objectification is objectification whoever makes a few bucks.

The shares of the folks of my generation talk about magazines, VHS, and the lingerie sections of catalogs. Lad mag culture was toxic, and we haven’t finished seeing how much these pioneers have been affected. It’s very easy to look back at the culture of the naughties and shudder, failing to see just how hypocritical we are today.

The sex and porn addiction time bomb ticks on.