Porn addiction

One of the topics that comes up with incredible regularity in discussions of Christian marital sexual issues is "porn-addiction". You frequently hear people argue back and fourth whether various teaching lead to porn addiction or properly address porn addiction; which presents a problem since it is like asking whether certain teachings increase or decrease the likelihood of being attacked by leprechauns. Of course making a case that porn-addiction, or anything else doesn't exist is rather difficult. In this case it is really bad. People have heard a lot about it. They can point to dozens of websites which address porn-addiction, and while it is rarely mentioned there is a very official sounding "Society for the advancement of Sexual Health" which has conducted a study showing that 3-5% of the American population have a sex addiction. There are even books on treating porn addiction.

So am I some flat earther denying the obvious? With this crisis continues to spread why am I writing a blog post that there is no crisis? Well let me first point out I'm not alone in this opinion. There are some who agree like the: American Psychiatric Association (Diagnostic Service Manual), The National institute of Health, the World Health Organization (the International Classification of Diseases), National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. In fact there are a total of exactly zero reputable health organizations that believe that pornography addiction exists.

OK but that is just an appeal to stodgy secular authority. Obviously they are behind the times and they never heard of this widespread disorder. Well actually no, its come up in the literature the best arguments were made and the mental health community found them lacking. In 1985 then Attorney General Meese held a commission on pornography and produced a report on the addictive effects. Not one reputable group would endorse the report or the existence of this addiction. The National Institute of Health wanted to distance itself from the "science" in this report and released an official report (Byrne and Kelley 1986, available online) which indicated that there was no evidence of any correlation between pornography usage and long term changes in sexual preferences of behavior ever documented in over 100 years of study. And not only that what evidence that did exist tended to show correlations the opposite of what the Attorney General had claimed.

At the same time Weston did a study of pornography users and found 3 reasons they used pornography:

1. to aid masturbation,
2. to see their fantasies acted out,
3. to avoid intimacy in a relationship,

#2 is the reason people use most forms of video entertainment. There was evidence that people who had feelings of shame associated with masturbation associated this with pornography but the underlying desires were no more common in heavy pornography users than light or non users. In other words it tested out like a masturbatory aid not a cause of "sex addiction", people wanted to masturbate just as much and those who felt shame about masturbation blamed it on the porn. For most of the conservative this is likely to be where they are getting their view from. Ideologically they or their husbands may believe because of their saved condition their desire to masturbate would be lower than that of the unsaved, and statistically there is simply no difference. Since the reason they still have these urges couldn't be that their religious view of sexuality is wrong the obvious culprit is pornography even though has been demonstrated to have no effect.

#3 is interesting, essentially it involves people that have sexual desires they themselves disapprove of and/or don't want to share with their partner. From a Christian perspective these could be seen as a way of diminishing the potency of temptations. In general experiments show that this usage is pornography as a coping mechanism, the alternative to pornography for those sorts of desires is to stroke them in other ways. Examples of what this would look like would be a man who considers himself heterosexual, using gay porn; if he were liberal he's just consider himself bi-curious but since he is conservative he might associate the desire with porn since it couldn't be coming from inside him. Another example might be a woman attracted to sex scenes involving anonymous sex / blindfolded sex who morally strongly believes in monogamy.

At the core of the mental health community rejection has been the distinction between a compulsion and a desire, and an unwillingness to see pornograhy as a paraphilia. In particular for something to be a compulsion and not a desire fulfillment shouldn't bring pleasure, which is simply not the case with masturbation. A desire given into gives pleasure: for example eating chocolate on a diet is innately pleasurable or laying around in bed and not doing chores is innately pleasurable. In both cases the person doing these things may feel guilty, but the activities themselves are intrinsically pleasurable. A compulsion conversely the activity itself is not intrinsically pleasurable, but not doing it causes psychological distress. For example someone compelled to open and shut every door three times.

In terms of paraphilias the definition used is “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors generally involving (1) nonhuman objects, (2) the suffering or humiliation of oneself or one’s partner, or (3) children or other nonconsenting persons. That is to say non-normative stimulation, since most pornography is stimulating to most people it is by definition normative.

The most definitive academic article on this topic is Martin Levine and Richard Troiden's The Myth of Sexual Compulsivity in the Journal of Sex Research (v25, n3, p347-63). They had 8 major findings:

1. The original belief in sexual compulsions comes from the patient's belief that they should be able to stop masturbating or having a variety of sexual partners. That is the diagnosis arouse from patients not from the medical community. Essentially there is an assumption that frequent non relational sex is uniformly abnormal.
2. They demonstrated that feelings of being out of control were generated by sexual behavior outside cultural norms, that is violators took cues from their culture as to what is normative sex. The prevalence of behaviors however is only loosely correlated with culture, however. They examined debates contrasting the 70s with its sex positive attitudes to the 80s and determined that even with very slight shifts in values certain types of diagnosis became much more common. Carnes (1983) one of the first researchers to use the term "sex addict" confirmed that his coining of the term was cultural.
3. Typical withdrawal symptoms involving physiological distress (example: diarrhea, delirium, convulsion and death) are not present.
4. Sex addict councilors do not recommend abstinence as the desired outcome, which is atypical for addictions counseling. The patient is "cured" when they only engage in relational sex, which in the authors opinion is essentially medicalizing morality.
5. They cite the debate and research done into "hyperactive sexual desire disorder" (1980) and the complete lack of any evidence that this exists. "Sex addict" seemed to be coming from the A.A. culture and just a rephrase of a disease whose existence had already been refuted.
6. Quadland did behavioral analysis of "sex addicts" vs. a control group and found that the only distinction they had was that the control group experienced sensations of relation and love/affinity when engaged in the same acts. In other words "sex addicts" are not acting differently than the normal population they just feel very guilty about doing the same things.
7. The Carne model (common model from the 1980's of identifying sexual addiction, similar to models in use today) tests for sexual addiction label couples who see themselves as engaging fully consensually as sex addicts. In particular partners who engage in non-procreative sex practices they themselves don't enjoy but consider to be important to maintaining the relationship.
8. They do acknowledge the existence of sex as an emotional coping mechanism. It seems to operate in a similar fashion to: excess work, prayer, parenting and intimate friendships.

What Levine and Troiden deomonstrated was the purpose of the campaign to create this diagnosis is not medical but rather to "use psychologists as a billy club for driving the erotically unconventionally into the traditional sexual fold".

In Flanigan's Enterprises, Inc. v. Fulton County, Georgia the evidence regarding pornography addiction was examined by a court. They examined ten studies which claimed to show a connection between pornography and criminal behavior. In nine of the ten studies which were presented to confirm secondary effects there was no statistical methodology at all, nothing but case studies and claims. In one of the ten studies the methodology was so flawed the court excluded the findings and concluded that there was not a single piece of evidence for the claimed secondary effects (see Kernes article below for details).

Hecker,L.L.; Wetchler,J.L.; & Fontaine,K.L. (1995) found that the religiosity of the therapist was the single biggest determining factor in whether a male patient was diagnosed as sexually addicted. That is to say religious therapists saw normal male behavior as outside the norm. The same year Sexual compulsivity among heterosexual college students examined the causes of risky sexual behavior (unprotected sex with multiple sexual partners). Of interest to this article is that frequency of masturbatory behavior correlated strongly with sexual desire and not with much else.

The next 13 years of research are the same. People cheat on their diets even though "they really don't want to". I waste far too much time on internet religion discussion, even though I really don't want to. And by exactly the same mechanism people use porn who wish they didn't. Food is not intrinsically addictive, nor is blogging nor is porn.

People respond to porn the same way they do to any other class of entertainment. Most people have seen kid style entertainment documentaries that like you would see on animal planet. Some people really like those and move onto the harder stuff on the history channel or discovery channel and if they get really out of hand they start reading books by the people in those documentaries intended for a general audience. At this point the kid level documentaries are completely unsatisfying. In children this cycle can lead to them becoming scientists or historians, and in adults can lead to adults taking community college courses or rigorous self education. If we had an ideology that Genesis 2:17 should be applied liberally then there would be Christian anti-documentary sites by those book buyers about having suffered the long term effects, how animal planet and PBS are gateways trapping hundreds of thousands each year into this cycle of destruction. And there would be debates about which preachers were addressing this in the most biblical way.

Individually:

You can not pray really hard to stop breathing
You can not pray really hard to stop urinating
You can not pray really hard to stop defecating
You can not pray really hard for your hair and nails to stop growing
You can not pray really hard to stop ejaculating

It is all the same.
The fact that you can hold your breath for a minute or two doesn't mean you can hold it for an hour
The fact that you can hold your pee in for a hour or two doesn't mean you can do it for a day
The fact that you can not defecate for several hours doesn't mean you can go a week without
The fact that you can be chaste for a few days or maybe a week doesn't mean you get to 25 as a virgin, or go a month without ejaculating.

__________

See Also:

• Carnes assements, assessments which are balanced in terms of sex addiction
• The Science Behind Pornography Addiction, Dan Lintz (before US Senate)
• The Myth Of Secondary Effects, Mark Kernes Free Speech coalition
• Why There's No Such Thing as Sexual Addiction -- And Why It Really Matters Marty Klein (psychologist, coauthor of Treating Sexual Disorders).
• Does Sex Addiction Have Any Basis in Science Cristian Bodo (neuroscientist), American Sexuality Magazine.
• Porn Prohibitionists Miss Point, Wired magazine
• Wikipedia article, also Sexual addiction, and Social Effects of Pornography
• The Porn myth, a famous Naomi Wolf article arguing that porn diminishes sexual appetite in men
• Review of Sexual Addiction: An Integrated Approach, by Aviel Goodman. This argues that the word "addiction" applied outside of drugs just really means compulsive like behaviors related to emotional dissatisfaction.
• List of no article from CSUN
• Covenant Eyes Blog, short articles and links to other sites (anti-porn)
• Christian Nymphos A sex positive information and discussion site for Christians
• NoPorn.com discussion
• Is sex addiction real, salon article covering the basics