In 2023, Joshua Haskell, then a senior at the University of Notre Dame, wrote an unusually vulnerable letter to the editor that was published in the college newspaper. “I first watched porn when I was 15 years old,” was the first sentence.
Haskell went on to describe how a one-time experience turned into a habit that stretched into one, two, then three years. He tried to stop watching, but each failed attempt brought on “gut-wrenching” and “humiliating” feelings. “As time passed, I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I wanted to stop,” he wrote in the letter.
Haskell, who is now 23, described himself as “the most pure-hearted kid,” a person you might think would be an unlikely candidate for pornography use. In a recent interview, he told me that he grew up in a Catholic family, went to a Catholic school, led retreats and and showed up for services early. But after he first downloaded Instagram at 15 years old, resisting his natural curiosities became almost impossible.
Sharing his deeply personal struggle with the entire campus was uncomfortable, but Haskell believed his honest revelation could help others. In the letter to the editor, he invited men to fill out a form if they wanted to join a small accountability group. “Accountability was crucial for me in finding any freedom,” Haskell told me. He thought no one would come to the first meeting, but 35 men showed up. “The room was just filled with hope,” he said. Working with another Notre Dame student, Nadim Khouzam, Haskell started a series of small peer-led accountability groups on campus to help men battle pornography addiction.
Since then, the initiative has grown to 150 men in 30 small groups, and it’s now expanded to become Ethos National, a network of small groups “to guide men to freedom.” The curriculum is focused on the “how” and not the “why.”
“Many, many guys know that porn is bad, and they don’t need to be told that again,” Haskell said.
“It’s just kind of a crazy thing that you have virtually every man struggling with the same thing, and it’s still taboo to get help for it. That needs to change in our society.”
Pervasive problem
Pornography has become one of the most widely consumed forms of media worldwide.
Sixty-one percent of adults — that’s three in five — view pornography regularly and 84% report that no one in their life helped them avoid pornographic material, according to a 2024 report from Pure Desire Ministries. The same study showed that 44% of adults believe that watching pornography “has little impact on the other aspects of an individual’s life.” In another 2020 study, 91.5% of men and 60.2% of women reported having viewed pornography in the previous month.
One in three children has been exposed to pornography by the age of 12.
And it’s hardly their fault. The pornography industry has exploded into a multibillion-dollar global enterprise, estimated at $97 billion, surpassing the combined annual revenue of Netflix, the NFL, and Hollywood’s top studios. The U.S. market alone accounts for more than $12 billion in industry revenue. The accessibility of pornography has increased dramatically with the rise of smartphones — over 30% of internet traffic is attributed to adult content. More recently, AI-generated content has made explicit material more accessible than ever. Haskell wrote in his column: “If you’re hooked on porn, you probably don’t deserve all of the blame for how it started. If you’re like most people, you were young and naive the first time you saw it.”
Research shows that a significant portion of pornography contains violent or aggressive content, often reinforcing harmful stereotypes and behaviors. A 2020 study found that among the analyzed pornographic videos, 35% contained physical aggression and 48% contained verbal aggression. Gail Dines, an anti-pornography scholar and founder of the educational nonprofit Culture Reframed, has argued in her work that all pornography is exploitative and degrading in nature. “Your sexual template is formed through pornography, the way you think about gender, the way you think about yourself, the way you think about women, the way you think about violence, all of those are shifted because what you’re doing is you’re sexualizing violence,” Dines told me in an interview last year. “And when you sexualize violence, you render violence invisible.”
‘A gateway drug’
While trying to get help, one moment in particular compelled Haskell to turn his life around. During a Zoom meeting for an accountability group he was part of, an older man — “the biggest, roughest-looking”— began crying as he opened up about his struggle to break free from his pornography addiction. Haskell knew he couldn’t allow himself to get to that point. “Through this man, I saw my future self,” Haskell wrote. So he asked a friend to be available for regular check-ins, he opened up to his parents, and also asked his brother to keep him accountable. He wrote in his column: “It was terrifying, but necessary.”
As Haskell talked to more young men, he discovered how pervasive the problem was. “It’s very rare to meet someone who’s not actively struggling,” he said. “And if they’re not actively struggling, they very likely struggled in the past.” And for many, addiction started the same way — looking at photos of women on Instagram, then more sexualized images, then porn. “I would say if there is one gateway drug to pornography that almost every guy in my group goes through is Instagram,” Haskell told me.
To help with his recovery, Haskell traded his smartphone for a flip phone. He handed his laptop to a friend and began using public computers at the library. “It was really key for me in finding freedom,” Haskell said. He now has an iPhone, but most apps on it are locked with restrictions installed.
After he published his story, students — both men and women — came up to Haskell and wanted to talk. Some said they’d never opened up to anyone about their addiction.
Haskell said he “felt called” to start peer-led small groups to help men find accountability in a setting where other men going through similar challenges. He learned that another student, Nadim Khouzam, had a similar idea for an accountability group and had already begun working with the campus ministry. The two merged their efforts to create a campus program.
“It’s truly a darkness — when guys do it, it’s late at night, they’re alone,” Khouzam told me. “And the way to combat darkness is to bring it to the light.”
From accountability toward freedom
The Ethos curriculum asks men — students on college campuses — to commit to a weekly in-person meeting. Each person in the group gets an accountability partner that they call every day. Haskell told me that he has found that people that call someone to check in five or more times a week do 45% better in kicking the pornography addiction. “It’s a really key component — daily vulnerability and healthy intimacy with another person,” he said.
For Khouzam, too, accountability has been crucial to recovery. “If guys can go to bars and have a good time and call that a relationship, why can’t we do something a little less superficial and try to improve ourselves,” said Khouzam, who eventually stepped away from the project to focus on academics.
Ethos encourages people to take a break from social media, although the group doesn’t require them to stop using a phone. But unlike clearing your house of cigarettes or alcohol, the “detox” from social media can be even more challenging. “The drug is in their pocket,” he said.
The program has a spiritual dimension: It involves prayer and a deepening spiritual life.
Haskell, who graduated from Notre Dame with a degree in accounting in 2024, is hoping to raise funds to expand the program to other universities across the country. Ethos groups now gather at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio and Hillsdale College in Michigan.
Haskell’s No. 1 advice to parents is keeping their children off social media as long as possible — even if it comes with a social cost. “Even if they’re left out because they don’t have Instagram and their friends have Instagram, and are upset about these things — I would choose those in a heartbeat over porn addiction,” he said.
Social media algorithms are designed to feed users more of what captures their attention, reinforcing their interests and keeping them engaged for as long as possible. This means that even a brief interaction with explicit content can lead to an endless stream of similar material, making it difficult to escape. “Even for a man that’s trying to be pure and quickly brush past things that are sexualized — if he lingers just a little bit, the app will sense that and feed him more content,” he said.
Strict boundaries and protective measures are key in creating a safe environment for children, Haskell emphasized. “Keep them away from any kind of private internet use,” Haskell advised, which includes TVs and gaming systems because of their access to the internet. That may mean keeping electronics out of kids’ bedrooms. “It sounds extreme, but we’re dealing with something extreme,” Haskell said.
And breaking free from addiction requires more than a single solution, he added. Detoxing from devices, installing filters, getting enough sleep and exercising are all crucial steps, but true healing comes from a combination of these strategies working together. “It’s not just one thing — it’s more like a puzzle,” he said.
Today’s children are up against a relentless, multibillion dollar industry designed to hook users and maximize profits regardless of the destruction and harm it causes. “It doesn’t matter how innocent your child is,” Haskell told me. “They’re going to be assaulted with something they’re not prepared to fight.”
And while escaping the culture that exploits vulnerability and curiosity may seem impossible, men do have a choice. As Haskell said in the letter that started the initiative: “Asking for help is not weak, it’s heroic.”