Are you spending more time looking at naked bodies than textbooks? Duke Cheston of the Carolina Review has some advice for you.

Mind if I check your browser history?

If you’re a male college student and you’re reading this, I can say with near certainty that you have seen pornography before. In fact, chances are pretty high that you’re addicted to it: about 70 percent of American men between the ages of 18 and 24 visit porn sites in an average month. And men aren’t alone: about one in three porn viewers are women.

Why does it matter? Well, if you use pornography on a regular basis, you may have noticed it starting to affect your life, causing all kinds of social, mental, and even sexual problems. If you haven’t noticed any effects, you probably will—and sooner than you might expect.

If you’re addicted to porn, you probably fall into one of two categories. The first type of porn addict doesn’t yet realize that there’s a problem, thinking, “It’s just pictures. How could looking at pictures be harmful?” If this is you, the side effects of your porn habit—relational problems, lost time, difficulty focusing, and problems being intimate with a real woman—will eventually clue you in on the reality of the destructiveness of pornography. You will want to quit eventually, and you might as well quit now before things get worse.

The second type of porn addict realizes there is a problem and would like to quit but so far has not been able to break free from it. Like the dog that returns to its vomit in Kipling’s poem (and in the book of Proverbs), you haven’t been able to shake the habit. If that’s you, part of the problem may be that you don’t yet realize how serious it is. You may even be a bit self-righteous, if your parents taught you to wait until marriage for sex but treated porn as if it weren’t that bad (and, full confession, that was me).