by Pamela Paul
“It’s Really Scary to Be a Parent These Days”
Married now for eighteen years, Charlie and his wife have three children—two boys, fifteen and thirteen years old, and a nine-year-old girl. “They say kids pretty much always know what a parent is up to, but at the time I didn’t think they knew anything about my pornography,” Charlie says. He now knows his kids knew something was wrong—all those hours at the computer, all those hours spent away from the family—but they didn’t realize it was sexual. Not at first.
Only in recent months has Charlie talked to his kids—just his two sons, for now—about pornography. He wanted them to understand where he’s coming from and to make them aware of the problems pornography poses. His older son says he has never looked at pornography, though Charlie thinks he watches too much WWF wrestling, which he sees as coming close to pornography on occasion. When his younger son asked for an open Internet connection so he could chat with friends on AOL, Charlie was hesitant. “I told him I was concerned because a person doesn’t need to look for pornography, it just pops up.” His son got upset and asked, “Why do I have to suffer because of your addiction?”
Then, one evening in the spring of 2004, Charlie was coming home from work when his younger son called him on his cell phone. His son was clearly upset. He admitted he had sought out pornography online and had been looking at it. He told his father he had mostly looked at naked women, but he was worried nonetheless. It had been about two weeks since Charlie consented to his son’s having unlimited Internet access. To the boy’s shock, Charlie didn’t get angry. Charlie knew it would be wrong to lash out, and in any case, he was upset more than anything. Charlie explained to his son that it’s not that he doesn’t trust him, but that he knows how easily a guy can get sucked in. “You may think pornography is harmless now,” he cautioned. “But you never know where it can take you.” Charlie told his son he was concerned that he might be passing something along.
Badly shaken by what had happened and by his father’s frank words, Charlie’s son asked his dad to disconnect his Internet service so he wouldn’t be tempted again. Elise was distraught, even angry. She wondered if their son was attempting to connect with his father by emulating his behavior. Charlie believes that by telling his sons about what he’s gone through and by being honest with them, they’ll be honest with him in return. He saw his younger son’s coming forward to report his pornography use as a validation of his approach. “It was a humbling experience to admit to my sons my own problems with pornography,” Charlie says. “But I think it’s brought us closer together. It’s added a more transparent aspect to our relationship.” And, of course, Charlie no longer has to contend with the secrecy of his former habit.
Though Charlie’s daughter is only nine, he worries about her. She’s too young to deal with Charlie’s own story, so he hasn’t revealed to her what he’s shared with his sons. “I see pornography portrayed everywhere in our culture, in places where I’m not sure other people even see it,” Charlie says. “Catalogs where girls who are seven, eight, or nine years old wear thong underwear. Older girls shaving their pubic hair…. How else would you learn that style if not through porn? It’s all an effort to look prepubescent.”
“Knowing what I know from my own experience, it’s really scary to be a parent these days,” Charlie says. There is no television in Charlie’s house. The family computer has a special filter that requires a designated administrator to enter each individual URL users can visit. Charlie has access to about a hundred Web sites, most of which are work-related, and he cannot link to anything beyond that. Locking down the Internet is essential, Charlie explains. “Any other type of filter can be broken,” he says. “Ask any member of a twelve-step program and they’ll tell you that. They should know.”
7
Fantasy and Reality:
Pornography Compulsion
Andy couldn’t help it. “I led a complete double life,” says the forty-two-year-old Web site production manager from the Pacific Northwest. Married for sixteen years and the father of twin girls, Andy is recovering from an addiction to pornography that began in childhood and has plagued him since. He kept his habit secret from his wife for years, even after they got married. Even after they had children. “I figured I wouldn’t use pornography once I was a parent,” he says, “but that didn’t fix it.”
Andy was introduced to pornography by a family friend when he was eleven and become immediately interested. He was already running with a fast crowd; soon they were exchanging pornography among themselves. Andy did all this behind the backs of his seemingly model parents: first-generation immigrants, well-to-do professionals, community-oriented citizens. His father led the local Cub Scouts. His mother was president of the PTA.
Despite his parents’ seemly veneer, Andy says his upbringing was far from ideal, full of impossible expectations and emotional abuse. He found himself masturbating compulsively to pornographic magazines throughout grade school, high school, and college. He tried repeatedly to stop, but would always pick up again. One day, shortly after his marriage, Andy’s wife, Jane, found him masturbating to Penthouse. “What is this smut doing around the house?” she yelled, disgusted. “Get rid of it!” Andy threw it out. “I told her I was sorry and it wouldn’t happen again, but I just hid it better the next time,” he admits. “I always came back to it. Pornography was my comfort.”
His wife caught him again, and often. “Jane felt very betrayed each time,” Andy says. “She’s a liberal, stand-up woman. She was angry about the objectification of women. She hated the feeling that her body was being compared to theirs. She worried that my porn problem was her fault. After all, she didn’t look or act anything like a centerfold. She’s blond, green-eyed, very beautiful. But my looking at porn made her feel unattractive.” Jane grew depressed because Andy avoided her. Worst of all, Andy says, “I manipulated her trust.”
Andy now attends a 12-step program for pornography addiction and avoids porn altogether, though the Internet hasn’t made it easy. “It’s everywhere—it’s not just in porn anymore, either. It’s in Victoria’s Secret catalogs and on prime-time TV,” he says. Nonetheless, Andy is determined not to look at pornography ever again. “I made a pact with myself,” he says. “The buck stops here. I will not pass this along to my daughters. I do not want them to be treated the way I treated other women when I was using pornography.” Instead, he and his wife talk openly with their girls about sexuality. They point out when they think a woman in a TV show or commercial is being objectified or treated poorly: “We try to educate them.”
Andy explains, “I don’t think any amount of pornography is okay. Any time you take a human being—a person’s soul—and turn her into an object rather than a person who has thoughts and feelings—you’re not living a whole life. You’re not relating to that person as you would want to be related to yourself. When I was using porn, I treated women like cans of soda pop that I could pick up and drink in. I wouldn’t want to be treated that way. Once I came to this realization, pornography depressed me to no end.”
Compulsive Pornography
• Do you routinely spend significant amounts of times viewing pornography?
• Do you hide your online interactions from your spouse or significant other?
• Do you anticipate your next online session with the expectation that you will find sexual arousal or gratification?
• Do you feel guilt or shame from your online use?
• Did you accidentally become aroused by Internet sex at first, and now find you actively seek it out when you are online?
• Do you masturbate while online?
• Are you less involved with your spouse because of your experience with Internet sex?
Those who answer “yes” to any of the above questions, from the Center for Online Addiction, may be addicted to cybersex, according to experts. Yet estimating the number of men whose usage of pornography becomes a serious problem is difficult. When does the casual glimpse at Playboy be
come subscriptions to multiple magazines, then become a weekly movie, then become a daily online habit? At what point does pornography become a problem? According to Al Cooper, the late pornography researcher and director of the San Jose Marital and Sexuality Center, any man who spends eleven hours or more per week looking at Internet pornography qualifies as a compulsive user. The National Council on Sex Addiction and Compulsivity estimates that between 3 and 8 percent of Americans are sex addicts of some kind. Conservative estimates claim that 200,000 Americans are addicted to online pornography alone, a number that is rapidly rising.1 Other studies on online pornography estimate that between 6 and 13 percent of users exhibit sexually compulsive online behavior.2
Even those who are able to answer all the questions above in the negative may not be immune to pornography addiction. The line between the compulsive pornography user and the so-called recreational user has noticeably blurred. With pornography so readily available, so anonymous, so easy in its myriad formats, men who may have once occasionally glimpsed at a magazine or rented a movie now consume pornography on a daily basis. Why not? It’s right there, just a click of the remote or mouse away. In a pornified world, what once seemed to be a fundamental difference in psychology between users and abusers seems to have shifted into a question of degree.
This shift was borne out repeatedly in interviews, when men who were regular users (of Internet pornography in particular) said they logged on to look at it daily, whereas before the Internet, pornography had been a much more occasional pursuit. Moreover, almost a dozen men—again, self-described “normal” users of pornography—had made efforts to cut down on their consumption, with only limited success, typically hard-won. Almost three-fourths of “normal” users of pornography admitted that they could see themselves become addicted to porn, even if they didn’t think they had particular “addictive” personalities. Such observations are not confined to the research conducted for this book. On one humor Web site, with the strangely appropriate name A Pointless Waste of Time, a writer conducted an admittedly informal study of one hundred online pornography users, in which he challenged them to go without looking at pornography, online or offline, for a two-week period. Of the ninety-four subjects who went through with the experiment (six dropped out), fifty-two were unable to go even a week without pornography, and twenty-four couldn’t last for three days. In the end, only twenty-eight of the subjects were able to get through the two-week period without pornography. The author observed that, if anything, his “study” understated the problem: “Someone might also complain that a call for a survey on porn addiction would automatically draw people who suspect they are porn addicts (thus skewing the results again),” he wrote. “But you could also say the opposite, that people dependent on porn would tend to stay far, far away from a study that requires them to go without it.” He also noted that the study subjects themselves were likely to talk about the test in “addict’s terms.” As he explains:
The participants were not strangers to me and were largely people I “know” in an online sense. And while I had heard lots of jokes over time about [them] being alcoholics or hopelessly fat or hopelessly poor, I had never, ever heard any of them talk about being porn addicts.
Until we did the study.
From the first hours on, lots of these guys were suddenly talking about “withdrawal” and talking about how tomorrow was going to be a “tough day” with time alone and high-speed access. They were using the language recovering addicts use, which I admit both surprised me and creeped me out a little.3
Not only do supposedly “normal” guys talk like pornography addicts, but recovering pornography addicts describe their usage in very similar terms to those who continue using pornography on a purportedly casual basis. The motivations for use are often similar if not the same, the feelings men derive from that use parallel each other, and the steps men go through from interest to satiety, from excitement to boredom, from softcore to hardcore, from fantasy to reality, mirror one another in startling ways.
Today, it’s almost impossible to discuss pornography compulsivity without discussing the Internet, which is frequently referred to as the crack cocaine of pornography. Al Cooper believed the vast majority of people who look at Internet pornography are what he called “recreational users”—they see online sexuality as a form of recreational distraction, like picking up a Victoria’s Secret catalog or watching reality TV programs. They’re not masturbating while looking at it and they look at it for less than an hour a week. Cooper thought this to be the largest category of pornography viewers, yet by this definition, nearly everyone interviewed for this book, including many men who consider themselves casual users, go above and beyond the norm. The second group Cooper called the “sexually compulsive” users, people who had a problem with sex before the Internet and merely transferred it online. The third—and most interesting—category are the “at risk” users: people who would not have a problem were it not for the Internet. “This is an exploding category and very concerning,” Cooper explained before his death. The three A’s of Internet pornography—access, affordability, and anonymity—have turbocharged the Internet in a way unparalleled by any other media. “People now have access to anything they can imagine and to things they never imagined. All you need are three people with a similar interest and a Web site devoted to midget lesbian wrestling. A new person coming along may not have known that that interests him, but now he’s clicking around and it grabs him.”
Dan Gray, clinical director of AddictCARE, a Utah-based group of therapists dedicated to treating sex addiction, constantly sees new addicts created by the Internet. “It’s common for a man in his forties to call up and say, ‘I haven’t looked at any porn since I was in high school and even then it was just Playboy—until last year when I was sitting in my office and received some porn e-mail or came across porn by accident. It piqued my interest. Soon I was looking at other sites. And now it’s been a year and I’m scared I’m addicted. I can’t seem to stop.’” Gray thinks more men are addicted to pornography than may be recognized. If men are logging on every night, if they’re losing time when they could be doing other things, if they’re growing dependent on the endorphins and adrenaline released in the brain when masturbating to pornography, they’re likely creating a dependency on that experience. Many addicts refer to the rush of pornography as a “drug,” saying they feel “high” on endorphins, adrenaline, orgasm. Pornography is like alcohol, explains Robert Weiss, clinical director of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles. Some people don’t have a problem; others become alcoholics. The Internet is increasingly drawing members of the former group into the latter.
Men are not oblivious to Internet pornography’s seductive pull. In the 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com survey, 17 percent of men who had used Internet pornography admitted to having a problem controlling their urge to log on. Eight percent of men who didn’t look at Internet pornography at all said they abstained because they were afraid they would lose control of themselves if they even started.
At one 12-step recovery group in the Northeast, the Internet has emerged as a huge problem. Since Liam, a father of four in his forties, entered recovery for pornography addiction in December 2001, the number of older men—men who had never previously had a serious pornography problem but had succumbed to addiction since getting high-speed Internet access—in the program has increased. For the first time as well, young men in their early twenties have joined the group, having suffered from compulsive use throughout adolescence and into early adulthood. “The majority of folks coming now are coming because either the Internet pushed them over the edge or because the Internet itself started the problem,” Liam says. Members have come from the corporate world and from respected positions in the community, and also include men who suffer from multiple addictions and might be considered more likely candidates for pornography abuse. A lot of men, he explains, come in with the attitude “I’m strong, I’m self-reliant. I should be able to control thi
s.” They think pornography is a normal-guy thing, but that maybe they’ve taken it just a bit too far. “There’s an arrogance,” Liam explains. “They’ve been raised in a very individualistic bootstrap mentality: if you’ve got a problem, deal with it. There’s no reason to seek help from others.” Those men tend not to last long in the program.
Almost nobody who goes from pay-per-view pornography to cyberporn imagines they will become an addict. But according to Victor B. Cline, a psychologist who has studied pornography addiction, highly educated professional men tend to be particularly susceptible to the fantasy world of online pornography. “Many of my most intelligent male patients appeared to be most vulnerable—perhaps because they had a greater capacity to fantasize…. While any male is vulnerable, attorneys, accountants, and media people seemed—in my experience—most vulnerable to these addictions.” Yet when The New Yorker film critic David Denby released a memoir in 2004 in which he confessed to briefly succumbing to an obsession with Internet pornography after his wife left him for a woman, it was a scandal. Dan Gray says myths about the typical pornography addict are laughable: “These are regular guys, the men you see at work, in the store, at church. I see feminist men, religious men, professional men, educated men. With some, pornography goes against their very core beliefs.” Among the approximately two dozen pornography addicts and their wives interviewed for this book were businessmen, clergy members, engineers, lawyers, members of the media, and a disproportionately large number of people who work in technology. Despite stereotypes claiming otherwise, the vast majority of sex addicts interviewed for this book suffered no early child abuse or molestation. Most went to college and came from stable homes. Most started looking at pornography the way all boys in the pre-Internet era did: flipping through the pages of a girlie magazine—borrowed, bought, or passed down.