Internet porn feeds X-rated addiction

SCOTTSDALE — At the age of 5, Mark entered a phase of male initiation that many men are familiar with: He saw his first Playboy magazine and the experience piqued his interest.

By the age of 10, he was looking at lingerie catalogs and masturbating, sometimes as much as four times a week.

And by the time he was in high school at the age of 14, he realized he had a problem to deal with. Masturbation had gone from a youthful curiosity to a compulsive habit.

“I knew I liked to do it but I also knew I wasn’t supposed to be doing it. I also knew I couldn’t stop,” says Mark, whose full name is being withheld by TZR.

But, as Mark says, his masturbation habit really became a problem when, in 1994, he discovered Internet pornography around the age of 23 while still living at home.

“When I got a computer and Internet access, it went crazy,” Mark says of his pornography and masturbation use.

“After everyone would go to bed, I’d stay up late to surf for pornography and masturbate,” Mark says. “I’d do that for 2-3 hours, 4-5 nights a week.”

His pornography use was taking its toll on his personal life too.

Mark was always tired from his all-night porn sessions. He would fall asleep in his college classes, his grades suffered, and his social interactions became messed up. His view on reality became distorted.

When he graduated from college and moved out, he was computer-less for a year and a half. But instead of ending his pornography habit, not having a computer only caused him to use other outlets to get his fix. Adult bookstores became the new replacement.

He got his next computer in 1998 and, true to form, learned that old habits die hard.

“The first thing I did was I hooked it up and looked for porn,” Mark says.

By now, things had gone from a controlled burn to a full-blown wildfire.

“If I wasn’t at work or involved in something outside my home, I basically spent every free moment I had looking at porn,” Mark says. “When I was really bad, I’d come home from church, shut my door and be on the computer looking at porn for the rest of the day.”

While Mark’s story may sound extreme, it is not unusual. He is dealing with what some therapists call a sexual addiction and others call hyper-sexual behavior. And if you think he’s an isolated incident, think again.

National and local experts say the rate of sexual addiction is increasing, that if closely follows the increase of Internet pornography, and that tech-savvy teenagers are increasingly at risk of becoming its latest victims.

“Absolutely,” says Dr. Jill Manning, a Denver-based marriage and family specialist whose 10 years of sexual addiction studies led to a Heritage Foundation fellowship and Congressional testimony on the subject. “There are a lot of experts who readily agree with that. We’ve had problems with pornography for years and years and years but it was a lot harder to develop a problem with pornography because it was very costly.”

Local experts like Stacy Hall, a licensed therapist in Scottsdale, agrees. “At a staggering and stunning pace it is increasing.”

And it strikes close to home. In 2006, the city of Chandler ranked in the top 10 of U.S. cities who had the most search requests for the words “sex”, “porn” and “xxx,” according to Internet-filter-review.com.

IN PSYCH CIRCLES, A SEXUAL DEBATE

The term “sex addiction” was first coined in 1983 by Dr. Patrick Carnes, widely considered to be a pioneering clinician in the sexual addiction movement.

But more than 25 years later, there are still those in the mental health community that question whether or not sex addiction should really be classified as an addiction.

For example, it is not included in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM is to the field of psychology what the Bible is to the field of theology.

“There is still considerable debate within the mental health community as to how we define and how we even acknowledge these problems,” Manning says.

“There is a whole camp in the mental health community that doesn’t believe sexual addictions exist,” Manning says. “They believe that people can have obsessive-compulsive disorders and impulse-control disorders with this type of material but do not believe that sexual addiction, as a category, is unique unto itself.”

Hall also acknowledged that there is some opposition in the mental health community but added that it is becoming less prevalent.

“Most of the people I know and work with accept it as an addiction but, of course, there’s always going to be some controversy in the field,” Hall says. “I’ve read articles from people who oppose it but for the most part I think most clinicians accept it as an addiction.”

Manning also added that some think that using a label like sex addiction sends the wrong signal about human sexuality.

“The other piece is there are people in the mental health community that believe to call something a sexual addiction is just one way to pathologize sexuality and ask ‘What’s wrong with pornography and masturbation?’ There are a lot of people that see nothing wrong with that,” Manning says.

Whether or not sexual addiction will ever be classified officially remains to be seen. Pornography enjoys the protection of the First Amendment, and some may argue that the temptation for sex addicts to partake may be the safest form of sex.

But regardless of which camp observers fall into, one thing is for certain: Pornography use is growing, thanks largely to the Internet, and it is feeding the habit of sexual addiction.

A $13 BILLION INDUSTRY GROWS

About 10 percent of adults admit to having an Internet sexual addiction, according to Internet-filter-review.com. Of those, about 28 percent are women.

Although Manning and Hall both say that they believe the 10 percent figure is a good estimate, some believe it isn’t quite that high. In an article posted on SexualHealthConnection.com on Sept.13, writer Jerry Kennard says that “the Mayo clinic estimates up to 6 percent of adults in the United States are affected.”

Celebrities have been affected by this. In recent years David Duchovny and Michael Douglas have sought treatment for sexual addiction. Eric Benet, ex-husband of actress Halle Berry, and Peter Cook, ex-husband of supermodel Christie Brinkley, also struggled.

In 2006, in the United States alone, there were over 244 million pornographic web pages on the Internet, according to Internet-filter-review.com. In 2006, there were 68 million pornographic search engine requests on average per day. That accounted for 25 percent of the total search engine requests each day.

That same year, total revenue for the porn industry was $13.33 billion, and experts say there is a direct correlation to sexual addiction.

“When Internet pornography went public in 1993, we saw a pretty immediate explosion of compulsive sexual behavior and addictions,” Manning says.

The reason for the increase in the rate of addiction was due to mass amounts of pornography being made available free of charge, in the privacy of homes, without ever having to order anything or put an identity on the line, Manning says.

Manning is speaking of a principle that has been instrumental in the Internet’s ability to foster a sexual addiction. Therapists call it The Three A’s.

This idea was developed by the late Dr. Al Cooper. Like Carnes, Cooper was one of the sex addiction community’s earliest research pioneers while running Stanford University’s Counseling and Psychological Services program.

The Three A’s stand for accessibility, affordability and anonymity. Pornography on the Internet is just a click away, it is cheap and oftentimes free, and no one has to know who’s consuming it.

“Before pornography was so accessible on the Internet, you might have to go into a bookstore in a seedy area of town and sort of be undercover,” Hall says. But now, he adds, “you can just sit in your own house and create fantasies online.”

Hall explained that the Internet has also brought addiction into the lives of many that were not susceptible to it before. Before the Internet, sex addiction almost always included an element of some sort of trauma, like abuse. But now, men are more susceptible because of The Three A’s.

“Because of the ease of accessibility, we’re finding more middle-aged men recognizing that they have an addiction when they’ve never suffered from an addiction in the past,” Hall says. “Those who would not be considered vulnerable to an addiction are now much more susceptible.”

But not all people who view pornography are addicts, Manning says.

“It’s really important to make a distinction between pornography consumption and compulsive or addictive pornography consumption,” Manning says. “These terms get meshed too much because the reality is that not everyone who looks at pornography is addicted to it.”

But while some of these statistics might be alarming, Manning points out that more research on this subject is still needed.

“We don’t have exact statistical information of how much the population is struggling with this but we have good information about how many people are using the Internet for sexual purposes,” Manning says.

“We need more research,” she adds. “There’s a lot we don’t know about this. This is a new area of mental health.”

THE DEFINITION OF ADDICTION

Obviously, not everyone becomes addicted to sex or pornography. Work is getting done. Bills are being paid. Vacations are being booked.

But consider alcohol as an example, Manning says. Not everyone who drinks becomes alcoholics, but the risk always exists that that could happen.

Pornography is the same way, she say. It’s a substance with the potential to become addicted, and it’s more easily available than ever.

Three of the most common signs of sexual addiction are a life that has become unmanageable, an increased tolerance for harder materials to achieve the same level of arousal and pleasure, and an escalation in the frequency of use, Manning and Hall say.

There is also a biological component to sexual addiction. As Manning mentions in her book What’s the Big Deal about Pornography?, the brain contains natural chemicals that get released during a sexual experience. One of those chemicals is oxytocin, and it plays a powerful role in the establishment of addiction.

Some refer to oxytocin as the “cuddle hormone.” When a mother breast-feeds her child, this chemical is released and serves the purpose of helping the mother bond with the child.

The same chemical is released during sex. So when a person looks at pornography and masturbates, oxytocin is activated and “sears” the image in a person’s brain. In a sense, the person bonds with the pornographic image the way a mother bonds to a child or a man to a woman.

This is partly what makes the addiction so difficult to kick, Manning says.

“Unlike a substance you ingest, pornography activates chemicals within the body that we all have,” Manning says. “There has been some research that has shown that pornography can start to activate those neurochemicals and hormones within three-tenths of a second.”

Manning also worries about this effect this has for teenagers.

“One thing that is frightening to me is that for teenagers who are going through their sexual development, when they start getting hooked on this stuff and they start rehearsing their body to being hyper-aroused so regularly, they’re training their body and their mind in a very concerning way,” Manning says. “Those young people may reach a point where normal, healthy sexual relations become so boring to them because they’re used to such an intense rush that is linked to very distorting images.”

And Manning also points out that pornography consumption is not without its consequences.

“Really serious compulsive sexual behavior does do harm,” Manning says. “There is economic loss to businesses. It’s one of the leading causes of divorce right now. We know that that violence and child pornography do considerable harm, so my view is that when this gets to a certain level, this is not just a benign from of sexual expression.”

With all the information that has become available about the effects of pornography, Manning has been amazed by how little the public, especially youth, actually know about it.

“It seems so wrong to me that our youth today have such easy access to hardcore materials but little to no education about the risks of viewing that material,” Manning says. “I have great concerns, especially for our youth, because there are a lot of people being sucked into this that simply are ignorant to the risks and harms.”

For someone battling a sexual addiction, Manning and Hall remind people that there is help. But potential sex addicts must ask for it, “go sober,” and then maintain sobriety like more traditional addictions, such as alcoholism.

As for Mark, he’s in treatment for his sexual addiction and is trying to put his life back together. He’s been sober for four months but explained that his addiction has had its consequences.

“I had no life,” Mark says. “I gave everything up. Hobbies, sports, everything…. It’s put a real burden on my wife. She’s lost a lot of trust in me and it’s a hard thing to earn back.”

Despite the setbacks, Mark has continued forward in spite of his adversity.

“Every day I make progress and learn from the day before,” he says. “Some days it feels like I’m pulling the nails off my fingers and some days I’m just plucking a hair out.”

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.