“Embrace this pause. Reflect before you relapse.” It doesn’t refer to alcohol or drugs, but to porn. With this claim, Quittr is presented, an app for people looking for overcome your porn addiction. Although you can register as a woman, the app is clearly focused on the male audience, So I pretended to be Manuel 28 and made an account. It didn’t take me long to realize that giving up porn is the excuse to sell something else.
As soon as you start, the app asks you a questionnaire about your consumption habits, such as how often you watch porn and what negative symptoms you have noticed in your life (it caught my attention that one of them was “Feeling distant from God”, this already gives clues as to where we are headed). As soon as I finished the questionnaire they already had a personalized plan for Manuel and they also promised me that by June 7 he would have stopped porn. The bad part is that it was going to cost me 31.99 euros per year, 20.99 euros if I accepted the offer. Giving up porn has a price.
I haven’t paid, but I have been researching the features that Quittr offers. The app tracks your progress, which is represented by “the tree of life,” and the longer you go without porn, the more it grows. It also offers motivational exercises, has a “panic button” in case you are about to relapse, and also allows you to chat with other members of the community.
Based on science, but little
Both on the website and in the app itself they say several times that Quittr’s method is based on science, but let’s see if this is the case. As soon as you finish the questionnaire, a message appears that claims that pornography is a drug and that “releases a chemical in the brain called dopamine.”
According to the WHO definitiona drug is “a natural or synthetic compound that acts on the central nervous system and produces alterations in the processes that regulate thoughts, emotions, perception and behavior.” Watching porn can generate pleasure, but nothing is being introduced into the body, it is a natural response.
In this sense, if pornography is a drug because it “releases dopamine”, we should also consider anything that gives us pleasure a drug, from food to keeping the house tidy. What it can do is cause compulsive consumption, which we could describe as addiction, which is very different. The ICD-11 clinical guide includes “compulsive sexual behavior disorder”, but of course, that sells less.
In the app’s description they also state that their method is “based on extensive research into the science of addictions,” but there is no link to any study.
The NoFap movement
Browsing the web, I have found that there are several influencers who promote the app. Well, they are all Christian fitness content creators such as Jeremiah Jones either Caleb Hammett. When I entered the news blog section it was already clear to me what this was about.
Some of the news from Quittr’s blog.
He NoFap movement It was born as a kind of support group for people who want to stop masturbation, either because they perceive it as an addiction or also for religious reasons. This idea began to become popular a few years ago and its scientific basis is a study conducted in 2003 which linked increased testosterone levels to abstinence from masturbation. The study was refuted, but continues to be cited in these circles.
In the beginning, NoFap followers They were looking to increase their testosterone and improve your health, but Nowadays it has become a lifestyle with a strong religious component. In Spain we have the reference of René ZZ, whose content gave a radical turn from tattoos to religion, personal improvement and the abandonment of masturbation.
Applications like Quittr or Relay They are sold as the solution to porn addiction, which is something that many people will see as positive, but they do not highlight the religious part that advocates these rigid and moralistic abstinence models. In slate They tell the story of one of these men who entered NoFap looking to quit porn and ended up trapped in a cycle of relapse and extreme shame that ended up seriously affecting his mental health.
Quittr’s other secret
In addition to the moralistic component that Quittr hides, there is another fact that has recently become known and it is a security problem in its app. They count in 404media that several hackers notified the creators of the app of a serious vulnerability that exposed the data of its users, among whom there are minors.
The failure was no small thing. This was a bug in Google Firebase configuration that allowed anyone to authenticate as an administrator and read the database. User data includes age, how often they watch porn, and even messages about their masturbation habits.
The problem is no longer that vulnerability exists, it is that Those responsible for Quittr did nothing for at least six months. The first researcher who notified the company even spoke with the founder of the app Alex Slater, who responded that he would solve it in a matter of hours, but months later it was still not solved. Finally, they reacted when 404media insisted for the third time.
Image | Franco Alva in Unsplash
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