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Are You A Porn Junky

Too Much Time on My Hand

Easy access to vast amounts of Internet porn has some men devoting hours a day to their obsession—or is it addiction?

Brad does not fit my preconceptions about Internet sex addicts—if there is such a thing. He’s a good-looking, personable, married, well-educated, upper middle class professional in his mid-30s. Yet he spends several hours every day surfing the net for pornographic images and video clips, many of which he admits to compulsively compiling and categorizing on a zip drive and several disks. He is a little wary about this writer to whom he’s entrusted his anonymity (Brad is not his real name) during our short conversation—not too wary, however, to briefly demonstrate for me on his home computer in his study just how much “free shit” is out there.

He pulls up one of his favorite sites, and in less than a minute has downloaded a movie clip—not a 15-to-30-second snippet, but a three-to-four-minute segment of a porn movie. “I didn’t necessarily get Road Runner because I wanted faster access,” he says. “I was married and I wanted to watch movies.” When asked if his wife has ever caught him, he points down to the power strip-surge protector on the floor: “Hot key,” he says with military seriousness, indicating the glowing red switch inches from his foot. “But I always worry she might read in Vogue or Cosmo ‘how to find out if your man is looking at porn.’ I’m always dumping Internet files and cleaning up my history [of sites visited].”

Back in the mid-’90s, when I was in graduate school—and shortly before I became acquainted with the World Wide Web—I encountered another, more prototypical guy (let’s call him Adam) who was quite forthright about his Internet porn obsession. He spent days sequestered in his apartment in an old sweatsuit, smoking, chomping junk food and tapping out commands for porn on a grimy keyboard. (Grad school seems to abet, if not aid, this kind of lifestyle.)

But this was part of a larger sexual fixation that included piles of videotapes. On one tape, he claimed, he had carefully compiled all of the nude scenes of major Hollywood actresses. (His knowledge of such lore was impeccable, though he scoffed at the suggestion that he include Kathy Bates’ buff moments for the sake of completeness. No patsy, he had certain criteria that could not to be breached.) Adam fit the picture of the porn addict for me—he fascinated me and, more to the point, creeped me out.

Nevertheless, numerous journal and newspaper articles point to a rising pornography obsession among middle- to upper-middle-class professional men because of the Internet. Easy cyber access has eliminated the social stigma of renting a film, buying a magazine or receiving materials in the mail. Before the Internet, Brad claims he would purchase the odd Playboy, but he says he had never seen or sought out a pornographic video. He also had no idea about the range of things (fetishes, acts, images) that was out there. “Stuff that would have dropped my jaw 10 years ago is, like, nothing now.”

Whether Brad is an “addict” is a thorny issue. There has always been some resistance among academics about behavioral (i.e. nonchemical) addictions in general (gambling, computer-game playing, etc). Nevertheless, a November 2001 article in The Journal of Sexual Research points to numerous technological addictions that are emerging in cyberspace, in particular Internet sex addictions (which can range from involvement in “cybersex” to viewing online pornography). The lengthy piece argues and thoroughly supports the claim that “although the amount of empirical data is small, Internet sex addiction exists.” (It also notes a 1998 study that found sex to be the most frequently searched subject on the Net.)

Journalists—who rarely wait for empirical clearance to bang the drum on such an enticingly marketable term—have been quick to legitimize the affliction in all corners of the English-speaking world. A 2002 article in Scotland’s Sunday Mail declared Internet sex addiction “the curse of the 21st century. It is destroying the lives of seemingly respectable fathers and husbands.” (True to U.K. bombast, it also called it the “crack cocaine of the 21st century.”) Stateside, the York Sunday News in Pennsylvania detailed the firing of a county commissioner over his Internet sex addiction in a 2003 article, noting that area counselors were dealing with more and more Internet addictions. A cursory research stroll through Lexis-Nexis will rouse up a jackpot of similar themes (even “How Internet porn landed me in the hospital”).

But Brad isn’t buying into the notion that he’s an addict; he simply considers it a part of his daily schedule. “It’s gotten to be so much a part of my routine: take dog out, make coffee. . . . Everybody’s got a hobby, [like] fantasy baseball. Everybody’s a collector. I guess I’ve compartmentalized it.” Brad, who makes his own work hours, says he usually checks out porn for about an hour in the morning—often longer at night and on weekends (when the private opportunity arises). There does seem to be something vaguely obsessive-compulsive about his surfing, though: He notes that a bulk of his time is not spent masturbating, but finding the “right” image or video to suit his masturbatory fantasies. The vastness of material available and the amount of options has him constantly searching, wondering if there’s something even more stimulating around the corner.

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However, he claims that Internet pornography hasn’t conflicted with his interpersonal relationships and job or become one of the most important things in his life—the hallmarks of addiction. “If I was an addict, I’d be looking at work,” he shrugs. But doesn’t the sheer time cut into his professional life? “I’m a procrastinator,” he says. “I’d probably find something else.”

Erik Hage

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