The reason a person whose life is being messed up by using porn 'should' stop - is to be a human being, rather than to be 'good' or 'frum'. This is simply because as long as such a person keeps his goal 'to be frum', he is blissfully oblivious the fact that he is not even SANE. He is living a double life, and is being made a total fool of, by his lust...played. And he is worried about not being 'frum'? The level of denial here is the problem. And he is (we are) pretending that Hashem is in the same denial as he is - that "Hashem is just pining for this guy to 'do Teshuvah' and 'finally be a tzaddik'. After all, don't Chaza"l call a guy who is mugdar min ha'arayos a kadosh?" Religiously romantic, yes, but very far from the Emess. Chaza"l do not call a guy who is living a double life 'a kadosh' - even if by coincidence he does not use porn and masturbate. If he is a person who is living a double life, swallowed up by his obsession with to - or not to - use porn/lust/sex-with-self (masturbation), he is just a goofball. It's like eating matzo with all the deep kavonos...in Tamuz. "But I feel so holy eating matzoh with these lofty kavanos for my avodas Hashem!" Puleez. He has the 'Hashem part, but the problem is that it is not even 'avodah' yet. You gotta be a mentch first, Derech Eretz Kodmah laTorah, and there is no other way. But this is not true for normal people, at all.
This is why I say that all this is only true for addicts. For normal people, the derech Eretz and the Avodas Hashem are bo'in k'echad - they grow together in life. That's just normal Life. But addicts step out of this boundary and make the struggle with or against lust, and obsession. They are out of the box already - it does not even matter if they are clean, or not clean - they are obsessed and living the vida loca.
And as hard as it is for the 'zera levatola' crowd to comprehend it, all this is exactly the same for women. For masturbation is EXACTLY as
serious and destructive a problem for them as it is for men. Obsession with lust is poison for an addict, not because it is assur - but because it is their drug. And Hashem of course, knows this full well. Cuz it's just the truth. The addict discovers this - they call that discovery, "hitting rock-bottom".
Porn and sex-with-self is NOT intolerable poison for a regular yid. Most regular yidden can certainly use porn and masturbate...and move
on with life. That is precisely what Teshuvah is for.
But an addict cannot move on with real life until he or she is sober from using his or her drug. Then, life STARTS.
For the 'zera levatola crowd', being clean is a GOAL. For an addict, it is just the ticket into the doorway of real life. It is a completely and totally different perspective on the same exact state. In the same way, the 12 steps START with a sober person and do not alk of nor deal with 'not drinking/lusting/drugging'. They deal with sanity and living according to spiritual principles. Fighting lust is nowhere in any of the 12 steps for this reason.
I hope I was clear here. If someone reads this and thinks that I believe that it is OK to waste our zera, he is mistaken. I am a Jew, I
learn the Torah and believe in it, and know that zera levatola is a horribly damaging thing. But how many of us masturbated hundreds of
times already? Are our lives ruined? No. vHu rachum y'chaper avon v'lo yashchis, as the Messilas Yeshorim points out, means that Hashem waits for us, helps us, and is merciful even when the price is to be paid, R"l. And as I have discovered, there is always a price of some sort
that must be paid for any intentional lusting or acting out. It always changes the playing field inside me and there is never any escape from
having to face it and deal with it.
My point is that this equation works totally differently for addicts than it does for normals, whether they be yidden, or l'havdil, goyim.