New Arabic Scale Reveals How Pornography Problems Differ Between Men and Women

In a region where pornography is legally banned and socially taboo, researchers have now produced the first scientifically validated Arabic-language tool for measuring when pornography use turns problematic. The study, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, translated and tested the Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale (PPCS) among nearly a thousand Egyptian university students and uncovered striking gender differences in how the symptoms of problematic use organize themselves in the mind. The work fills a long-standing gap: despite widespread evidence that people across the Arab world access pornographic content, no culturally validated instrument existed to assess when such use becomes clinically concerning.

The research team, led by Abdulrhman Helal of Benha University with collaborators including Samantha N. Sallie of the University of Cambridge, recruited 959 Egyptian university students who reported watching pornography at least once per week. That frequency threshold was deliberate. By restricting the sample to regular users, the researchers aimed to distinguish sustained behavioral patterns from occasional exposure, and to reduce the risk of misclassifying distress driven primarily by moral or religious conflict rather than by genuine behavioral dysregulation. From an initial pool of 3,135 screened students, the team excluded those with diagnosed psychiatric or neurological disorders, inattentive responders, and incomplete submissions, producing a final sample of 624 men and 335 women with a mean age of 21 years.

Translating a sensitive psychological instrument into Arabic demanded rigorous methodology. The team followed the International Test Commission guidelines, using a forward-backward translation procedure in which two independent bilingual translators produced Arabic versions that were synthesized into one, and a third translator, blinded to the original English scale, translated it back. An expert committee of specialists in psychology, psychiatry, and psychometrics then resolved discrepancies to ensure conceptual and cultural equivalence. A pilot study with 25 students refined wording before the main survey, conducted anonymously online between April and May 2024 to reduce the social desirability bias that plagues research on stigmatized behaviors.

The psychometric results were emphatic. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the original six-factor structure of the scale, corresponding to the components of Griffiths’ behavioral addiction model: salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse. The model showed good fit, with a Comparative Fit Index of 0.950 and a standardized root mean square residual of just 0.031. Internal consistency was excellent, with Cronbach’s alpha reaching 0.95, and every item contributed meaningfully to the total score. Crucially, measurement invariance testing confirmed that the scale functioned equivalently for men and women at the configural, metric, and scalar levels, meaning that any gender differences in scores reflect genuine differences in the underlying construct rather than artifacts of how the items are interpreted.

Construct validity held up as well. PPCS scores correlated positively with depression (r = 0.42), anxiety (r = 0.37), perceived stress (r = 0.37), and, most strongly, problematic internet use (r = 0.46), all statistically significant even after controlling for social desirability, gender, field of study, housing area, family psychiatric history, sleep duration, and chronic illness. The particularly strong link with problematic internet use suggests that problematic pornography use may sit within a broader constellation of dysregulated online behaviors sharing overlapping psychological mechanisms, consistent with theoretical models in which negative emotional states act both as vulnerability factors and as proximal triggers for excessive engagement.

Perhaps the headline finding is the prevalence figure: 21.8 percent of these regular users met the threshold for possible problematic pornography use, a rate comparable to the 15 to 28 percent reported in Western samples. Risk was significantly higher among men, at 25.5 percent, than among women, at 14.6 percent, and higher among those who responded in a less socially desirable manner, hinting at underreporting in a context where roughly 27 percent of the sample showed elevated socially desirable responding. Among those at risk, the burden of comorbid distress was heavy: 46.6 percent reported severe anxiety symptoms, 40.4 percent severe depressive symptoms, and 95.6 percent moderate-to-severe stress.

The study’s most novel contribution came from network analysis, a statistical approach that treats psychological problems not as reflections of a single latent disease but as systems of interacting symptoms. Using a regularized graphical modeling technique called EBICglasso, the researchers mapped the connections among the six PPCS components and found that the strongest link in the overall network was between withdrawal and salience. But when the networks were estimated separately by gender, the architecture diverged in revealing ways. In men, tolerance, the need for increasingly intense or frequent use to achieve the same effect, emerged as the most central symptom across every centrality measure, suggesting that escalation dynamics and reward-driven processes dominate male problematic use.

In women, the picture was different. Withdrawal, the negative emotional state experienced during abstinence, exerted the strongest influence, and the female network was fully connected, with conflict showing stronger ties to all other symptom domains, including a unique connection with salience that was absent in men. The researchers interpret this as consistent with negative-reinforcement and emotion-regulation processes playing a larger role among women, and possibly with moral incongruence, the clash between behavior and personal or religious values, being more tightly interwoven with problematic use in a cultural context where pornography is especially stigmatized for women. Even the relationship between salience and relapse flipped: absent in men, it was negative in women, perhaps because anticipatory thoughts about pornography become psychologically incompatible with guilt-laden relapse among those attempting abstinence for reasons of conscience.

These findings carry weight beyond psychometrics. They bear on an ongoing scientific debate about whether compulsive sexual behavior disorder, classified in the ICD-11 as an impulse control disorder and excluded from DSM-5, should be understood through addiction frameworks at all, given inconsistent evidence for features like tolerance and withdrawal. The robust replication of the six-factor structure in an Arabic-speaking sample, with tolerance and withdrawal emerging as central nodes, suggests these components capture something real about symptom organization, even as the gender-stratified networks show that similar profiles can arise through different psychological pathways, escalation in men and affect regulation in women.

The clinical implications are equally concrete. Treatments targeting central symptoms such as tolerance and withdrawal may outperform approaches focused merely on viewing frequency. For men, cognitive-behavioral techniques emphasizing cue exposure, attentional-bias modification, and urge regulation may fit the escalation-driven profile; for women, interventions centered on emotional regulation and psychological flexibility, such as acceptance and commitment therapy, may be more apt. In conservative settings like Egypt, the authors suggest that culturally adapted approaches, framing therapy around self-regulation and personal values, optionally incorporating religiously congruent coping practices, and delivered via telehealth to reduce stigma, could improve engagement, particularly for women. The team cautions that the cross-sectional design precludes causal conclusions, the university sample limits generalizability, and the weekly-use criterion biases prevalence estimates. Still, with the Arabic PPCS now validated and openly documented, researchers across the Arabic-speaking world finally have a rigorous instrument to study a behavior that persists, quietly and widely, behind virtual private networks and closed doors.

Subject of Research: Arabic-language validation of a problematic pornography use assessment scale and gender-specific symptom network analysis in Egyptian university students

Article Title: Arabic Validation of the Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale: Psychometric Properties, Measurement Invariance, and Gender-Specific Network Analysis

Article References: Arabic Validation of the Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale: Psychometric Properties, Measurement Invariance, and Gender-Specific Network Analysis. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03532-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03532-z

Keywords: problematic pornography use, psychometrics, Arabic validation, measurement invariance, network analysis, behavioral addiction, gender differences, Egypt, mental health, compulsive sexual behavior, scale translation, university students