How to De-Addict Gen Z from Porn (Freepress)

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.’

By Sean Fisher [Read entire article]

Excerpt:

“How do you destroy society?” McLaren asked toward the end of our conversation. “You destroy society by destroying men. If every man is addicted to porn, it ruins their relationships. It ruins their lives”…. “You’re creating weak men with no energy levels. Who can’t talk to women. Can’t do anything. Can’t stand up for themselves.”

“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.

I spoke to the founders over Zoom in late July. McLaren looks like a prototypical bro—tousled hair, pronounced facial stubble, an impressive build—and when we spoke, he frequently slipped into a fratty vocal fry, dropping the occasional “dude.” Slater, a 19-year-old self-taught coder and influencer from London, also likes to put his masculinity front and center. His X feed is filled with photos of exotic muscle cars, soccer jerseys, steak, and jet skis, and it is replete with dictums like “I wasn’t born to be average. I will never settle for less.”

McLaren told me he first met Slater while sourcing partners for a fitness startup that ultimately failed to take off. The two met over lunch at Chipotle in San Francisco in July 2024, where they realized they were working toward the same idea: an app designed to feel like a self-improvement program and dedicated solely to helping guys stop using pornography. They decided to join forces, and just a few weeks later, in August 2024, Quittr was born.

Now, almost a year later, McLaren told me the app has almost a million downloads and around 100,000 paid users. Having bootstrapped the launch of the app with only $3,000 of McLaren’s money—Quittr has no external investors—they’re set to earn almost $3 million in total revenue this year.

How have they managed to scale so quickly?

“We designed the app specifically for the Gen Z man,” said McLaren.

“Let’s start by finding out if you have a problem with porn,” says the first prompt on Quittr, before presenting you with an intake form with questions like “How often do you typically view pornography? Have you noticed a shift toward more extreme or graphic material?” You’re then presented with a list of reasons why you should quit porn—it’s a drug, it destroys relationships, it shatters sex drives—before being asked to input your motivations for downloading the app.

Quittr, which costs $30 a year, then makes you a kind of promise.

“Grow stronger, healthier, and happier,” the screen reads.

The American Psychological Association doesn’t recognize porn addiction or its symptoms as a disorder, but McLaren and Slater pointed to studies and immense anecdotal evidence that show it fits the definition of a behavioral addiction. Quittr claims to be built around “science-backed exercises”—like guided meditation and breathing rituals—that “rewire your brain” and “rebuild your dopamine receptors.” The app features daily checkups, content blockers to prohibit accessing certain websites, an AI chatbot therapist, and a community forum where users can turn for support and encouragement.

Their most-used feature is the “panic button,” meant to be pressed in moments of corporeal weakness. Activating it vibrates your phone and turns the front-facing camera on, holding up a mirror to users right before they relapse.

“The big thing is shame, like, look at how stupid you look,” McLaren said. “That was the thought behind the camera.”

Quittr then displays the reasons you had for downloading the app in the first place.

“A lot of people write, ‘I want a strong relationship with my wife’ or ‘I want to be the right match to my girlfriend,’” Slater told me. “We remind them of this every time they try to relapse again.”

The app also encourages users to recommend it to other men in their life, prompting you to share a discount code: “Every day you wait, your boy sinks deeper into the pit of shame and self-hatred. The choice is on you to save him from this nightmare. Pull him out.”

The pair have big ambitions for their app. McLaren wants Quittr to “take over social media” in what he dubs the “people’s flight” against porn. He told me that a majority of users are between 22 and 30, but acknowledged that a significant chunk are under 18. (He declined to give a specific number, citing competitors who are keen to understand Quittr’s user demographics.) “It’s affecting them enough to be convinced by an ad to download a quitting-porn app at such a young age,” said Slater. “Isn’t that crazy?”

McLaren also noted that a portion of Quittr’s users are devout Christians and Muslims (again declining to provide a specific number). The app itself, he added, “isn’t faith-based at all”—though users have the option to involve a “higher power” in their regimen—but Quittr has begun paying Christian influencers like Caleb Hammet, who has almost two million followers on Instagram, to promote their app.

In one video, Hammet explains that after quitting porn, “I feel so much better, I feel like I have more energy, I feel more confident, I feel better when I’m talking to girls, I feel better just in my skin.”

McLaren told me the idea of Quittr came to him in July 2024 when he began to notice a trend among the kind of guys who love listening to self-improvement podcasts—he cited Chris Williamson, Andrew Huberman, and Jordan Peterson at various points in our conversation.

All these influencers coach men to control their bodily impulses. Eat this, don’t eat that; work this muscle, not that one. According to McLaren, guys he knew who listened to these podcasts had started “talking about how, like, porn’s gay, it’s not good for you. You’re watching other people. It’s just icky.”

“And everyone was like, ‘Quit, dude, it’s going to change your life.’”

In other words, McLaren realized that ditching porn had become the latest creed—alongside waking up at 5 a.m. and eating raw meat—in the testosterone-fueled cottage industry that sells listeners on becoming high-value men.

And so, when they were designing Quittr, McLaren and Slater decided to appeal to this cohort—by using the same no-nonsense, paternally stern rhetoric of the self-improvement podcasters who inspired them. They adopted the neuroscience lingo of Huberman and Williamson while mixing in a healthy dose of hypermasculine humiliation. Calling porn “gay,” referring to viewers as “losers”: The aim was to make porn uncool.

“You’re watching a girl that doesn’t know you exist fuck a guy that doesn’t know you exist,” said Slater. “Instead of going out and finding a partner yourself, you’re sitting alone, jacking off in the fucking dark with no one watching, on your own like a loser. How is that masculine at all?”

You can hear the influence of Peterson in Slater’s stump speech: “Your current position in life isn’t great. Snap out of it. No one’s coming to save you. You’re going to read books, hit the gym, quit porn.”

As if to prove how good a life without porn can be, Slater posts YouTube videos with titles such as “living the dream as a 19 year old ceo making $300K/mo” and wonders aloud on X if buying a Lamborghini is a good idea. He brushed aside my question of whether he’s only building Quittr for the money. “I actually really enjoy helping people,” he said over the phone, while driving through the streets of London in a convertible. McLaren, for his part, reminds his followers that “Being rich isn’t enough. You must be rich, jacked, and popular.”

There’s some overlap, strictly of the aesthetic variety, with Andrew Tate, the stratospherically popular “manosphere” progenitor (and proud misogynist) known for his penchant for fast cars and his tendency to boast about how much money he makes. What they’re going for, McLaren told me, is “the clean version of Andrew Tate.” They have, Slater added, consciously distanced themselves from Tate’s “heinous takes” while trying to appeal to the men who might be seduced by them.

The Quittr founders say that they have anti-porn ambitions far beyond the app. They have said they would “love to” one day buy the porn site OnlyFans (with an asking price of a cool $8 billion) so they can shut it down. Right now, they are simply in the first stage of what they see as a kind of fight for the future of civilization.

“How do you destroy society?” McLaren asked toward the end of our conversation. “You destroy society by destroying men. If every man is addicted to porn, it ruins their relationships. It ruins their lives,” he said, gaining momentum with every word, no longer worried about sounding conspicuous in public. “You’re creating weak men with no energy levels. Who can’t talk to women. Can’t do anything. Can’t stand up for themselves.”