The Cybersexplorer: Online Porn Addiction

Cybersexploring is taking its toll. Time for online porn addiction therapy before you get hooked onto the crack cocaine of the next millennium.

Time was, you knew when you were addicted to something. Need a Patiala peg before you can bring yourself to leave the house? Alcoholic. Slumped on a filthy mattress in a squat all day except for when you popped out to take a pizza delivery? Loser.

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But according to 21st century therapy culture, plenty of us could be addicted to porn and not really be aware of it. Stopping work to surf for porn means you’re ‘addicted’ to it. If you feel a bit guilty afterwards, or your girlfriend sneaks a look at your history and goes mental, you’ve definitely got a problem, and need to undergo some form of penance. Look at the roll call of celeb porn and sex addicts – David Duchovny, Stan Collymore, Craig Charles, Steve McFadden and, of course, Tiger Woods. All have had to crawl off to rehab for a spell under the public spotlight of shame.

“Online porn addiction has been described as ‘the crack cocaine of the next millennium’,” says Jason McClean, a therapist who, in his own words, is the poster boy for internet porn addiction. Testifying before the US Senate in 2004, Mary Anne Laden of the University of Pennsylvania claimed porn was “the most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of today”. Psychiatrist Jerry Satinover added: “Unlike other addictions pornography really does biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance; the body’s naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can’t do.” Like extreme sports, you’re addicted not to a foreign substance but to natural feelings of excitement.

There’s another way it’s not ‘addiction’ in the traditional sense: the body doesn’t end up needing porn to function normally. But porn addiction certainly fits into the expanded, modern definition of an ‘addiction’ – which is anything that gets in the way of your career, relationships or social life. (Some thinkers – like a Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield – have pointed out that the definitions of ‘addiction’ and mental ill-health in times that we live ib have suddenly expanded to include anything that gets in the way of a corporate, family-focused, lifestyle but we digress). “I use the term ‘porn addict’ because it’s what people google to find me, but it’s not the ideal term for the condition,” says Jason McClean.

So you don’t have to possess a huge stash arranged around several massive monitor screens, Camden Ripper-style, to be “addicted to porn”. Merely being unsettled by your relationship with pornography – thinking “I wish I hadn’t had such a massive wank that I missed Savita Bhabhi”– is enough to justify a ‘problem’.

“Do you worry that your sexual thoughts and behaviours are more powerful than you are?” says the online quiz ‘Are you addicted to pornography?’ with the smug air of someone who knows the answer already. Well, I’m certainly neurotic about: the furtive adrenaline rush I get that accompanies the sound of a computer booting up; the fact I’m hardly growing out of it and looking for new material all the time, so much so that I have doubled-back and re-discovered softcore lesbo; and that I can waste hours ransacking free sites for fresh porn. Presumably this is something to do with the vast wealth of porn available; never mind stumbling across some muddy mags in the woods, in the internet age you are never more than a few feet from the entire world’s combined stash. I do tend to get settled down into big sessions when I’m feeling down, but I don’t like to admit it to myself.

As Helen Walsh, author of ‘Brass’ once told me, “When I’m feeling shit I don’t consciously think ‘Right, I’m going to a lap-dancing club to almost overdose on cocaine’, but that always seems to be the way it happens.”

In psychology the cliché goes, “it’s not a problem unless it’s a problem,” says McClean. “Porn easily becomes a problem because it’s so associated with awkwardness and guilt. At the other end of the scale, it can provide succour and intimacy – often guys discovered it as part of maturity and becoming ‘cool’, so it’s like a very good old friend. On top of that, the act of masturbating, if you don’t mind me using psychobabble for a moment, forms very strong behavioural pathways in the brain.”

And it’s not just having a wank that could ruin your life. “Meeting other guys on hook-up sites is obviously a bit of a red light,” says McClean. “But it’s not just absorbing the stuff – a big part of addiction is anticipation. Guys leave their computers on all day downloading more porn, and if the cleaner turns it off, they scare themselves by how angry they get. Then they actually watch the full-length porn movie they’ve spent so long downloading and it’s just more of the same. On top of all this, the stereotype of a porn addict is so far away from how you like to picture yourself that you can’t help agreeing with the stigma, and hate yourself for it.”

Medical research has actually concluded that pornography has no actual negative effects on the body or brain whatsoever, unlike violent films. But it’s what others think of the chronic porn fan and how he views himself that’s problematic. Society finds sex troubling, so an active interest is seen as unusual; whereas an obsession with, say, Cricket, that takes up all of your free time, most of your disposable income and certainly your conversational powers, is seen as relatively ‘normal’.

Market-driven, the industry is second-guessing the jaded and demanding palettes of its avid consumer base and coming up with all sorts of compelling new reasons to get your own cock out. If there is one single glimmer of hope, it’s that, of late, porn addiction is no longer a male preserve. “Women tend to be more susceptible to what’s referred to as ‘love addiction’ – chat rooms, flirting and so on – but I have been contacted by plenty of women who’ve been masturbating all night to porn. It’s a myth that it’s just a guy thing.”

If anything, apparently women get it worse – because they never have to stop wanking for a bit.

Jason McClean can be contacted via porngameover.com

From the September 2010 issue of FHM India.