We live in a culture that over-sells and over-emphasises addiction--from drugs and alcohol to porn and video games--so much so that from maladjusted adults to kids who can barely spell the word correctly, now call themselves “addicts.”

The danger with that is it does more harm than good for people who really needs help. This is particularly true in the case of sex and porn, where labelling/self-diagnosing someone/oneself
as a porn or sex addict often fails to address the real reasons that lead to such behaviours, in the first place.

That’s why sex addiction is not regarded as a clinical diagnosis by any reputed scientific bodies, including the World Health Organisation (WHO).
According to WHO and DSM-5 (the manual used by American psychiatrists to diagnose mental disorders) three clinical components that define addiction to substances such as drugs and alcohol have never been observed in porn/sex addicts. They are:

1. Tolerance (people don’t need more sex to have the same orgasm)

2. Withdrawal symptoms (people go through terrible side-effects when they stop alcohol and drugs, this doesn’t happen with either sex or porn)

3. Risk of death (no one has ever died of an orgasm overdose, in fact, they are very healthy),

This is not to say that porn/sex/masturbation (which often goes hand-in-hand with watching porn) can't be problematic. In fact, they indeed have the potential to form compulsive behaviour patterns in some, disrupting lives and relationships. But compulsive behaviour is not the same as addiction, though it may look and feel the same, just like the way many can’t tell the difference between a kinnow and an orange.