I updated and rewrote this. Footnotes are at the end.-JN
It’s tough to be a man today; even
tougher to be a sexual, Christian man. Messages from the church and from
feminism seem to suggest, for different reason, that there is something wrong and
shameful about men’s sexual energies, so men tune them out. Efforts among
Christian writers to support men seem too often simply to support stereotypes
about men, such as that we can’t tolerate introspection or inaction. Meantime,
the secular culture offers constant titillation—scantily glad supermodels on every
newsstand cover and alluring sexualized messages on every advertisement, telling
us that with a bit more libertine approach to our sexuality, men can truly gain
fulfillment and pleasure. Yeah, it’s tough out there. Not the least of the
secular challenges is the easy availability of every flavor of pornography a
man could want. Is porn wrong? Is it okay? Confronted with what feels like the
thought police on one hand (church and feminism) and the international criminal
cartels on the other hand (lurking somewhere in the background of pornography),
many men, even Christian men, throw up their hands. They conclude that “If it’s
not hurting anybody, it’s probably okay” and leave it at that.
I suggest we can do better than that.
Am I going to tell you not to use porn? No, I’m not going to tell you what to
do at all. Am I going to tell you porn is a problem? Yes, it is. And we can
pull some insight from the church, from feminism, and even from the secular
culture to form some considerations to help us arrive at a morality that may be
practical and thoughtful in relation to pornography. I focus on pornography
because I get asked about it a lot, both as a Christian man and as a clinical
psychologist. With unprecedented availability via the internet, pornography is real
problem for many people, especially for men[1]. How
do we form our own conscience around use of pornography? I write from the
perspectives of a male clinical psychologist and practicing Catholic Christian.
I hope these personal reflections will help you take a step forward in formulating
your own morality in relation to porn.
I have to begin by acknowledging that the
dilemma, the lack of adequate moral guidance from our church, is genuine. We
now know a lot about human sexuality that we did not know even a few decades
ago. Church teaching has not caught up, and still relies on centuries-old
formulations of the meaning of sexuality. A disconnect between daily cultural and
psychological experience and church teaching has reached a kind of breaking point
as a result. Church teaching can seem totally non-useful. A reflection on
pornography comes in this difficult context.
What are some basic principles? A first
basic principal is that our priority as Christians and as humans is to know the
Real, more and more, and in so doing, to encounter God (Christ), and in so
doing become more and more human, and ultimately more Divine. So we seek
something more than pleasure or denial; we seek an integrated, noble, way of
life, a way of life that is desirable and attractive. An integrated life by
definition includes integrating our sexuality. Yet Christian religion is
typically seen as suppressing sexuality. Taboos and shame became attached to
sexuality. One challenge then is to sort out misplaced shame from genuine moral
direction, when it comes to pornography, as well as other sexual topics.
A second basic principal assumed here is
that sexuality is a sphere where ethics and morality can apply and that
therefore a relevant principal is the Catholic and Christian core moral principle
of respect for the person—the integrity of each person, each person is sacred,
an “end in themselves and not a means only” because they are created by God,
and because they are endowed with interiority, freedom, and responsibility.
In psychology we promote
mental health. That’s good, but now our psychotherapy-infused culture has come
to almost to equate mental health or “healthy” behavior with moral behavior. Obviously
health cannot be equated with virtue. If it could, everyone who risks his life
for his brother, or stays up late to work for the community, would be sinning.
At the same time, the health of something warrants consideration. God wants us
healthy as well as virtuous.
So what is mental
health? It is the ability to cope flexibly and successfully with reality. It
also entails the ability to engage ones' full self, emotions, ideas,
productively both in competence (e.g., work) and relationally (e.g., in
friendships, families, community). The aims of psychological health converge,
then, at the ultimate level, with the aims of holiness: To become
psychologically whole is to become human, and thus converges with becoming
holy. It implies not only effective functioning but access to our capacity for
wisdom and compassion, for intimacy and mastery/achievement, and for social
participation.
Pornography springs first from fantasy.
From a psychological viewpoint, fantasy is healthy and adaptive. It is how we
practice for new situations, it is how we discover a way to cope with a
difficult problem, it is the root of creativity and of art, and it is a way for
us to enjoy and entertain and discover ourselves. Psychotherapists routinely
inquire into the fantasy life as a way to gain insight into the psyche and the
concerns of a patient. Carl Jung once noted, "without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. the debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable."
But can fantasy go too far? Can it
degrade us our ability to engage reality—our ability to become whole human
beings? Few would doubt that, at the extremes, it can. Where are those
extremes? Today our society is immersed in particularly vivid fantasy
opportunities and stimulation, promoted in particular by internet technology.
These fantasy opportunities include fantasy football, video games, romance
novels, movies, science fiction, and pornography and erotica. A recent Sunday
New York Times cover story[2]
featured massive interest in spectator “e-sports,” that is, crowds gathering to
watch sports interactions between fantasy characters. This
‘overload’ of fantasy material has proven difficult to keep in balance for many
individuals and I sometimes wonder whether it has had the collective effect of
disengaging us from solving the very real problems in our world and in our
communities. These days, most fantasy worlds are far more appealing than the
real one at least as it appears in the media.
Pornography is one of these forms of
available fantasy and escalates in that context. Pornography refers to sexually explicit, arousing, titillating, and
intentionally riveting material available on the internet and other media
(including books) that has as its primary intention evoking sexual arousal in
the viewer, that is to ‘sell the image” rather than primarily to explore
beauty. However, this definition is subjective: What one person considers
pornographic, another may consider beautiful or at least to have artistic merit.[3] Yet
even if some pornography seems defensible as art while other porn is so crude
or degrading that such a defense seems strained, the line between the two is nonetheless
arbitrary.
This brings up a perverse problem with
Catholic moral teaching and secular discussion alike: sexual imagery is pornographic and offensive (and unfit for
children), while violent or dehumanizing
imagery is not, unless is sexual. I consider extremely violent imagery to be
pornographic because, even if not sexual, its purpose is to shock, titillate,
and rivet the viewer with the goal of “selling” the image. Psychologically
there is no meaningful difference between extreme sexual and extreme violent
images; naturally therefore they are often combined in hard core pornography. Both
leave indelible images in the mind and can shape subsequent behavior by virtue
of their emotional intensity. Thus, when it comes to the moral aspect, whatever
can be said about moral problems with sexual pornography also holds for
extremely violent images in movies, television, video games, and on the
internet. Spiritually, they are also virtually indistinguishable: Like certain
kinds of sexual pornography, violent imagery even when it is nonsexual tends to
dehumanize, reduce dignity, confuse the engagement with reality, and interfere
with peace of mind. One important distinction, however, may be that more so than
sexual material, violent material is empirically demonstrated to damage
subsequent behavior in some individuals by making them more aggressive[4]. On
the other hand, sexual material may be more prone to becoming addictive (below).
With the arrival of internet
pornography we can enter an idealized experience of interesting and potentially
extreme images and stories easily and privately. Fantasy material has certainly
been part of human society for eons, but at present it is uniquely available. This new situation allows us in our home, in
private, to access vivid, gripping photos, drawings, movies, videos, and
stories that can titillate and arouse, to immediately change the images, to
explore in a very short time increasingly extreme and unusual images and graphics,
and to be stirred up and aroused in ways we had not expected. Furthermore this
material is readily available to the young, to adolescents, and to those of any
age who may lack the maturity necessary to integrate what they see.
Can there be positive aspects to this
new situation? Perhaps for some individuals at some times, internet fantasy
material can provide a means to relief, to comfort, to self-expression, to
self-awareness, even to shared intimacy if shared together with an equally
interested sexual partner. Human sexual diversity and variation is much greater
than the few categories approved by our social institutions, and this can cause
a sense of oppression and suffocation for some individuals, and erotica or
pornography may be an avenue for self-discovery, even validation, in this way,
because it offers “something for everyone.” For some who are lonely or alone,
who need visual stimulation in order to gain some degree of expression in
private of their sexuality, the use of erotica or pornography may be the best
option available for sexual outlet. It is possible that some, perhaps many,
people use pornography without apparent harm, at least to themselves.
Yet a dark side, a destructive side, accompanies
pornography like a plague. Often, it is out of control and functioning like an
addiction (whether or not it really is an addiction in a formal sense like a
drug). The industry itself is exploiting and harming those who are its
subjects.
The
first issue then is that if I use pornography, I can easily participate in a
denigration of people, most often of women. This occurs at two levels. At one
level, this is a nasty industry: some women (and girls, and men) are exploited
and wounded via participation in pornographic productions[5].
This is a serious moral problem because it sets a social norm that supports exploitation
of some people for the pleasure of others. We see an economic link between
sexual tourism and human trafficking, and between pornography and human
trafficking in that some participants in pornographic material are forced. As a
viewer, I cannot tell if this is the case. Thus, morally and spiritually, I
enter into a potentially dark, perhaps even satanic world if I engage with at
least some kinds of porn products as a consumer.
So two immediate moral considerations
are suggested: Is the material degrading to people? And is it possible that it
involves real people coerced into participating (real human actors, who I may
assume wrongly are voluntary).
But there is a third, a spiritual danger.
As I enter into fantasy with the
pornographic image, I am in fact encountering a darker reality—the reality of the industry that is exploiting, perhaps
even injuring psychologically, even physically, the people I am viewing. So
what is real, here, is not actually
my fantasy but their suffering. Unless I engage that, I am not moving toward
God. Thus, the pornographic fantasy takes me precisely away from God in this
instance. If this is true, I must be as interested in where my porn comes from
as health conscious people are concerned about where their food comes from, or
as sweat shop advocates are concerned about where their clothes and shoes come
from.
Does this mean all pornographic
material with human actors is immoral? This is difficult when we consider that
for second wave feminism (late 20th century) women who participated
in the sex trade (prostitutes, pornography) were inevitably dehumanized, and so
any image that echoed exploitation of women was immoral to use. However, for
third wave feminism, sexuality can be playful and it is argued that women have
the option being sexual entertainers because it may be expressive or empowering
for them, so long as they truly have free choice. However, for men as consumers
of pornography, this distinction may be moot. Lest we use third wave feminism
as an excuse to let pornography become a “morality free zone,” we have to
caution that it is very difficult to know if the women I am viewing in my porn
material are free. Still, efforts to develop criteria for “ethical porn” have
grown out of this type of concern. For example, the Ethical Porn Partnership (http://ethicalporn.org/ accessed 11/1/2014) supports
pornography that protects the rights and choices of the actors and actresses[6].
So this entire first level of concern
is the social context of pornography, and the effects on the women (and the
men) in the pornographic material.
A second level of concern is more
personal. It is the subtle effect vivid, emotionally shocking and intense
images on my mental life, assumptions, and implicit feelings and reactions to
other people. This can have an effect on my character that may be difficult to
track. In turn, particularly but not only for the young, it may shape and
distort sexuality, sexual response, and self-understanding. Now, in the case of
violence, some people prone to violence are a little more willing to be violent,
a little more desensitized to human pain. In the case of sexual pornography,
some people who may be prone to degrade or objectify women may now find they
are a bit more prone, find it a bit easier to do. Thus, the entire human
enterprise is subtly turned to the worse. While the prior social concern may be
at least partly addressed by some sort of ethical porn if it could be found, here,
we have to admit this risk can occur even with true fantasy material (stories,
drawings); for that matter, it can occur even with fantasies I dream up in my
own mind! Thus, the spiritual masters speak of guarding our thoughts as well as
our speech and action.
This brings up addiction. The limited
research is inconclusive as to whether, in a technical or medical sense,
individuals become physically addicted to pornography. Regardless, the idea of
addiction is helpful at a practical level. For some pornography use at least becomes
like an addiction in its brain effects.[7]
Behaviorally, he may find that porn cannot be let go of, it must be used, must
be had, and use is driven by craving and continues or increases even when
obvious ill effects are at hand, so that we may even prefer to use porn even if
it costs our marriage[8].
In this situation, pornography creates a greater and greater demand for more
and more titillation, more and more unusual or novel or extreme images. This
may, in some instances, reach a point where the man can no longer be turned on
by his wife, who is merely a normal person, and cannot match up to the
idealized, perfected fantasy images that are now turning him on. He may find,
even, that he has become impotent, and cannot perform sexually with an actual
woman, and must have the idealized, fantasy image in front of him and can then
only have an orgasm while masturbating and not during sexual intercourse.[9]
Or, perhaps, he can get away with having the fantasy image in his mind while he
has sex with his wife, but now he is not fully present to his wife while having
sex with her, he is present to the image in his mind.
Why this happens can be understood by a
simple analogy to the realm of food. Some people, exposed to sweets, overeat,
while most people, in our society flooded with sweet calories, eat too much and
gain too much weight. The reason for this is that our bodies evolved in
environments in which sweet, calorie rich foods were rare and calories were
precious. Successful adaptation meant that our body evolved to maximize its
intake and use of sweets, and stored the fat, in that environment. This was
very successful because overeating on sweets was not possible; there were not
enough of them. Therefore, our bodies did not evolve able to handle the vast
availability of sweet food now around us. In this analogy, we can speculate
that our sexuality evolved in an environment in which unusual and exotic sexual
opportunity and imagery was very rare; when it appeared, it was adaptive to
engage in it and to remain aroused and seek as much as possible of this
opportunity. This maximized reproduction. Because such opportunity was rare,
our psyche did not develop a means for modulating and handling the unlimited
exotic images that we can now access on the internet. The result is that we
follow the evolutionary response pattern but now it leads to addiction.
Yet another aspect of the problem can
be seen by analogy to a gambling addiction. When casinos (and online gambling) emerge
in a widespread way, many people do not engage at all, or only rarely. Others
engage from time to time without harm. But some, more than we are comfortable
admitting, become addicted and are ruined by their gambling addiction. The
biology of addiction in the brain’s dopaminergic reward anticipation system is
well-known, and in the case of sex it is compounded by the association with
orgasm and associated opioids release, making sexual pornography potentially
more addictive than gambling. However, the analogy is that when we make this
available to our entire society, some, maybe many, are overwhelmed by it.
The analogy to food is
limited because food is not optional, but pornography (but perhaps not sexual
desire) is. Still another analogy is alcohol which, like pornography, can be
fully abstained from if necessary. Thus, alcohol addiction can be managed by
abstinence (recognizing that this is not easy, it is in principle, possible).
Food addictions are more complex because food itself cannot be avoided. In
parallel, we can avoid pornography, but we cannot avoid fantasies—we all have
them. Thus, we may decide we can handle pornography addiction by abstinence,
but then how are we to relate to our fantasies? Are some fantasies to resisted,
like some thoughts? Many old time monks would say yes; thoughts must be
curtailed just as speech and action must be curtailed. Are some fantasies more
healthy than others? A freely roaming interior life is essential to a sense of
freedom, to creativity, and to the ability to know oneself. Yet at some point,
excessive interest in internal fantasy costs a man (or woman) the capacity to
deeply appreciate and respond to the human reality around him.
The upshot of this is that over time,
the man who is using more and more pornography, moving deeper and deeper into
usage of it with more and more extreme images, is actually encountering reality
less, not more. He is not encountering the actual person with whom he is having
sex, he is instead in a less real, fantasy or imaginary world. This may still
be real in a sense, but it is not as real, and instead of taking him closer to
integration, wholeness, encounter, and God, and noble human fulfillment, it is taking
him in the other direction, toward fragmentation, alienation, and ignoble life.
This brings us to the realization that sexuality
is a powerful force, rooted in deep biological instincts that can overwhelm the
person. This is the root, really, of sexual taboos. Those taboos attempt to
channel and contain a force that can sweep us away, the deeply rooted life
force that is also a death force within us. Pornography, therefore, taps into
impulses and drives that are deeply biological—the urge to dominate or be
dominated, to control or to lose and surrender all control, to penetrate
completely and even destructively, to be penetrated completely; these in turn
have been of course modified and shaped and developed by social and cultural
forces, so there may be human universals and cultural particulars in the form
of erotic and pornographic images, the distinctions among which I do not
attempt to explore here. What is clear is there is an enormous variation of
human sexuality and so different people are turned on by rather different
aspects, hence the vast variety and diversity not only of pornographic images
and stories but also of human sexual expression and experience.
For the individual person of faith, the
moral risks of pornography use may in many instances be able to be addressed by
abstaining from pornography. And yet, something more is needed, because for
many people this “solution” feels confining, punishing, leave them with even
fewer avenues for sexual expression and satisfaction and so they will not be
able to follow this prescription alone. So we can ask, at a spiritual level,
what is the balance that enables a journey toward wholeness (and thus,
humanity, and thus holiness), that allows access to our sexuality, to the
playful and exploratory, particularly for those lacking a meaningful sexual
relationship, without succumbing to addiction and loss of freedom, and loss of
capacity for intimacy and sexuality and thus loss of humanity?
How do we as a Church, as Christians
(and Christian men), and as individuals address that? How do we govern our own
behavior, open our communication, provide support, and discover appropriate
norms for this new reality that enable personal expression and exploration
while also keeping relationships healthy, women and girls safe and empowered,
men fulfilled, and marriages safe and
healthy? At a practical level, what are treatment and prevention options?
What is the pastoral response to porn addiction? At the individual level,
what are criteria for formation of conscience around pornography?
To begin with, we recognize that being
human includes the erotic and the sexual (and fantasy about it), and also
includes the capacity to be overwhelmed and addicted—at which point helping
intervention is needed. As a first step, we have to accept both that some
sexual fantasy is normal, but also that some limitation on use of
pornography is a necessary discipline for a man seeking God, seeking wholeness,
and seeking interior freedom. How much limitation? For some, this means fasting
for long periods or abstaining completely. Should we go further? Should we say
that a Christian man should “abstain” from pornography in all cases? Or should
we instead commend, as we do for alcohol and gambling, responsible if sparing
use when it is too difficult to abstain or when use can be deemed essentially
harmless? From the viewpoint of an integrated psychology, spirituality,
theology of the human, where do we locate sexual expression outside of the
narrow and confining confines of the conjugal bed? Can the pornography “issue”
spur us to better answers?
Should church communities refrain from
use of alcohol (including communion wine) for the sake of the one who is
alcoholic? Should they support one another in refraining from use of
pornography for the sake of those among them who would be unable to use in a
minimally harmful way? In terms of pastoral guidance, what is a better
alternative that allows sexual expression that is healthy, integrated, and as
real as possible? How does the value of chastity fit in? (That is, the moral
imperative that we use people not as a means only, but as an end also).
Chastity says that some expressions of sexuality are neither moral nor healthy.
So what does the single person, the person without a partner do? What is the
appropriate channel for them? Finally, what then is pornography? Ultimately, we
are asking, which aids to sexual
experience are “acceptable”? None? Some? All? These are questions
ultimately for resolution within the church community as well as within society.
Here, I provide some three guidelines for that discussion.
First, how violent
and degrading is the content (whether visual or verbal/written)? This pertains
to what kind of industry we are supporting and what kind of mental content we
are nourishing in ourselves and our community.
Second, does it
involve real people or imaginary characters? This also pertains to what kind of
industry we support and also what participation we may have in real violations
of real people—something that cannot be acceptable to a Christian or, frankly,
nearly any ethical or moral system.
Third, how much time
is being spent using or consuming this material and with what individual or
relational consequences? This pertains to whether the use of the material is
interfering with my ability to engage productively with reality.
The accompanying
figure is intended to organize these fundamental three questions. The
figure illustrates my view that it is untenable to suggest that all pornography
is morally neutral or spiritually okay. At the same time, it is untenable to
suggest that all sexual fantasy material (pornography) is morally unacceptable
Thus,
from a psychological point of view, there may be human-affirming images that
enable sexual comfort and expression. As we move into more degrading images
that may involve real people in them, we move into more and more hazardous
moral territory from the viewpoint of the *reality* that we are encountering
(real people, a real industry, that we are participating in). From the point of view of thinking our
fantasy is more real than that reality, we are moving *away* from a humanizing
encounter with the Real and thus away from God.
What makes an image or story degrading?
This could be developed readily with reflection, but I only sketch it here. For
example, we can ask whether there is mutuality, whether there is exploitation,
and so on. Here we are asking, ultimately, what is humanizing—what
enhances the human. This is not to ask what is human (everything humans
do is human!) but what enhances humanity. For instance, it may be human to be
fascinated by degrading images but this does not make the degrading images
humanizing. It may be human to be fascinated by domination or violence but this
does not make those actions humanizing. So we have to distinguish what
fascinates, even normatively, from what is humanizing in the sense of
developing the human capacity for fulfillment, divinity-so develop humanizing
fantasies, ideas, and desires that will help you want to develop positive
relations that support development of others.[10]
The second dimension
is the realness of the material. For example, we can consider unrealistic
cartoons, realistic cartoons, realistic but imaginary stories, on to real
images, photos, movies, or stories about true events. However, the primary
focus here should be not on whether an image or story is realistic, but rather,
whether real people are involved and whether there is potential real harm to
them. The third dimension is amount of use. Here, again, my analogy is
alcohol or gambling. Use for an hour or two a year would seem to have a
different psychological and moral weight than use for an hour or two every day.
In conclusion, I suggest that modern
pornography can overwhelm the basic human instincts for sexuality and fantasy.
It can interfere with our psychological and spiritual quest for fulfillment by
disrupting our journey to encountering ever more the real, and becoming in that
way more human and more divine. At the same time, shame and taboo have made it
difficult to develop a healthy sexuality in Christian churches and shut down
discussion of pornography so that usage has gone underground. Fantasy of many
forms is necessary to human health and happiness, to creativity, and to art,
while complete suppression of all things erotic cuts off that same fundamental
aspect of our human nature and makes us less free. To balance this further, a
reflective approach can consider on one hand the very serious moral problems
with most pornography including its exploitation and dehumanization of women
and men, it connection to serious evil in the form of trafficking, and its
pernicious effects on the psyche if overused. On the other hand, some forms of
erotic material are likely to be unobjectionable, and can be evaluated with
regard to how violent and dehumanizing, how likely to involve people who are
not treated ethically or to support criminal enterprises, and how disruptive to
real relationships and our real life. These reflections are intended not to
provide final prescription, but to stimulate and start discussion toward direct
engaging with and solving the problem that pornography has become for many men
in the community. I hope that these reflections may be of assistance as readers
consider their own formation of conscience within their community, within their
own frame of morality, and that these reflections may spur productive
discussion which can serve to clarify thought and raise our humanity in the
process.
[1]
Examples are easy to find. For example, a recent Newsweek headline (9/24/2014)
noted was titled, “Bill Would Prohibit Federal
Employees from Browsing Porn at Work” due to findings of extensive porn use at work.
[2]
Nick Wingfield, “In
E-Sports, Video Gamers Draw Real Crowds and Big Money.” New York Times, August 30, 2014.
[3]
Writers sometimes distinguish erotica (sexually or sensual material that may be explicit, but
that in addition has artistic merit and the intention as well to portray
beauty) from pornography (sexually
explicit material perceived as having only the intention of selling sex).
However, my remarks are not concerned with this distinction which, in any case,
lacks agreed operationalizing standards. Erotica
in the Oxford English dictionary is “Literature or art intended to arouse
sexual desire;” in Miriam Webster it is “works of art or literature that deal
with sex and are meant to cause sexual feeling”, both implying artistic merit.
Pornography, on the other hand, is not defined as art and is, perhaps more
explicit. Thus, in the Oxford English dictionary, “Printed or visual
material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or
activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional
feelings.” In the Miriam Webster dictionary: “movies, pictures, magazines,
etc., that show or describe naked people or sex in a very open and direct way
in order to cause sexual excitement, 1: the depiction of erotic behavior
(as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement; 2:
material (as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is
intended to cause sexual excitement; 3: the depiction of acts in a
sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction <the pornography
of violence>”. Note the last definition, to which I return in the text when
in mention violence as pornographic.
[4] Anderson CA & Bushman BJ (2001). Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: a meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychological Science, Sep;12(5):353-9.
[5] This is widely documented;
example statistics are available online at http://www.covenanteyes.com/2013/02/19/pornography-statistics/
(accessed 7/14/2014).
[6] Note that from a second-wave
feminist perspective this is not possible in the present historical context.
See one, perhaps unsatisfying, exchange about this at http://newint.org/sections/argument/2014/03/01/argument-can-porn-be-ethical/
(accessed 11/1/2014).
[7] Kühn S, Gallinat J. (2014). JAMA Psychiatry. Brain
structure and functional connectivity associated with pornography consumption: the brain on porn. Jul
1;71(7):827-34.
[8] We can here speak not only of
individual use of pornographic images online, but also “internet sex”
addiction, that is, exchanging sexual material with other people in online chat
rooms and engaging in online sexual fantasy and role play with another person.
See K. S. Young (2008), American Behavioral Scientist; 52(1) pp 21-37.
[9] Medical research on this
allegation is scarce but clinical anecdote suggests it can and does occur. See
commentary by one widely-quoted therapist at http://blogs.psychcentral.com/sex/2012/05/abusing-porn/
(accessed 7/14/2014); and a similar set of case reports in G Cavaglion (2009); Cyberporn dependence: Voices of
distress in an Italian internet self-help community. International journal of mental health and addiction, vol. 7, pp. 295-310.
[10] Another dimension is intensity
and novelty. Intensity and novelty add to addictive potential, because they
increase dopamine release. Therefore, intense or unusual images are more risky
in terms of possible addiction.
