How to De-Addict Gen Z from Porn

Porn has degraded a generation. Two tech bros have come up with an app to save young men from its ‘pit of shame and self-hatred.’

“Quit porn. Watch your lust. Work on talking to girls. Hit the gym. Start building your life. Start building your character.” Connor McLaren, the cofounder of the porn addiction recovery app Quittr, sipped on a matcha latte while rattling off his app’s unofficial mission statement. Every other beat, he would glance quickly to his right and to his left, cognizant of how often he was saying the word porn.

“I’m in public,” said McLaren, 23. “I’m being very conspicuous.”

It might still be taboo in polite society, but online, porn is ubiquitous. Ninety-one percent of men consumed it in the last month. PornHub received an astounding 11.4 billion visits in one month in 2024. The site only launched in 2007, meaning Gen Z are the first Americans to grow up in its long shadow—and by all accounts, it has degraded us.

Many young adults report encountering porn from an average age of 12. Jonathan Haidt, in his bestseller The Anxious Generation, explains the consequences: The more you watch porn in your formative years, the more likely you are to avoid pursuing real-life romantic relationships. Asking a human being out feels riskier, at least emotionally. Porn can’t reject you, or humiliate you, or expect any kind of commitment in return for sexual gratification. And so young people—particularly boys—get hooked on it, and slowly their expectations of beauty, intimacy, partnership, and pleasure are warped, perhaps forever.

Young Americans seem increasingly aware of porn’s impact on them—and are turning against it. Almost two-thirds of men under the age of 25 said they favored making it more difficult to access online pornography in a survey from this July, compared to only half of young men in 2013. But fighting against the sway of online porn isn’t easy. Gen Z spend hours a day on their smartphones—a recentish study found that students are set to spend 25 years of their lives glued to their miniature screens. And porn sites use the same strategy as so many apps to ensure they remain addictive: As Gen Z commentator Freya India explained in these pages, most use tactics like infinite scrolling and autoplay to lock viewers in. Nobody seems quite sure how to loosen porn’s stranglehold.

Nobody, that is, except McLaren, and his cofounder Alex Slater.

“The porn industry is just so destructive,” said McLaren. “Their only motive is profit. They don’t give a shit about anything else.” The aim of Quittr is to free men—all men, not just those with porn addictions—from its grasp.