Why Natural Family Planning (NFP) is a non answer

The problem with NFP is the results in practice.  It is the case among people with years of experience who practice in a disciplined way that NFP has a pregnancy rate of .6-1.8% which is in line with chemical methods (study). But actually doing this is rather difficult, for example in the study cited above 13% of the women who had originally expressed interested in NFP refused to continue to use NFP in practice, even with extensive support services made available to them.  Support far beyond what can be given in a widespread way.

When NFP is used by people who take it semi-seriously they have 7.5% chance of getting pregnant per cycle, to put that in perspective couples having frequent sex with no contraception of any type have 28% chance of pregnancy per cycle.

Because differences like this, though generally not this large, are common, when measuring birth control effectiveness: means are evaluated using a "typical use" scale not a "perfect use scale".  So for example condoms when used every time and with a spermicidal gel have a 98% effectiveness rate (i.e. with perfect use a sexually active woman will get pregnant only 2% of the time).    When used by actual people mistakes happen and the actual actual effectiveness rate is measured at 85%.   Where NFP methods are heavily used unintentional pregnancy rates among sexually active women are about 24%. Considering we are talking several decades of sexually active fertility even a 10% failure rate would mean 2-3 extra children over the course of a woman's lifetime.

Western women seem to be heading towards a fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman, and even in America non immigrant woman are at 2.1 children per woman; NFP simple doesn't seem effective enough in the absence of heavy use of abortion.

Moreover, there is a bit of irony.  If one adopts the currently fashionable definition that life begins at conception NFP greatly increases the incidence of implantation failure, which would be miscarriage under this definition, by encouraging sexual activity during the period when women still conceive but the fetus tends to fail to implant successfully. NFP, the Catholic church's recommended practice causes vast vast numbers of natural abortions over the course of a couple's life. So I would strongly disagree with the church, that it is not the intentional killing of children, if one defines life to begin at conception, and one defines "intent" in any consistent way.

The church is simply aiming for an irreconcilable situation:

1. They have over the last 200 years redefined abortion to apply much earlier than quickening, i.e. when the woman first feels fetal movement. This eliminates the sorts of birth control methods that were popular in previous centuries, which we would today call "abortion inducing drugs". It also introduces the moral issues with NFP I cited above.
 
2. They have redefined marriage to be primary about sex rather than primary about property and legitimate heirs. Thus there is no longer any distinction made between non-marital and marital pregnancy, as well as making much distinction between adultery and fornication. This to some extent is compounded in our society that has moved towards late marriage.
 
3. They dismiss artificial contraception of virtually any type as immoral. Thus eliminating the only means humans have discovered that in a widespread and reliable way is capable of keeping a woman's fertility down to 1-3 children per lifetime without heavy use of abortion (in the modern sense of the word).
 
4. They do aim for their standards to be adopted in a widespread way, and not seen as just theoretical goals that no one in practice actually follows.

When people talk about supporting birth control what they mean is keeping the fertility numbers down at the 1-3 children per woman over the course of their life. Standards of living correlate very strongly with per capita energy consumption. Energy production is not substantially boosted by population, it should be thought of as a limited resource growing slowly. High energy demand, effectively high energy prices, have been "a" if not "the" primary cause of global economic growth being constrained for the last 2 generations.  That is, what is primarily preventing 3rd and 4th world people from having a good standard of living are these high energy prices. While technology is allowing us to boost energy production somewhat every percentage point of population growth is a percentage point of growth not available to raise the living standards of the poor.  This tradeoff translates into millions of lives lost every year, not even discussing quality of life. Quite simply, overwhelming number of people, even people who care deeply about the sanctity of life, on this planet would prefer less children being born to everyone being subjecting to grinding poverty.

If the church wants Humane Vitae to be taken seriously they either need to indicate:

i) What is the unknown secret for massive energy production to allow for a growing population?

ii) How to maintain fertility at the rate of around 1-2.25 children per woman over the course of their life in practice using NFP?

-----
See also

• Time of Implantation of the Conceptus and Loss of Pregnancy

Covenant Eyes and consent

Luke Gilkerson responded to my has been posting here to my porn addiction thread which got me interested in his Covenant Eyes product. This seems to be the best regarded "accountability" software on the market. The basic idea of Covenant Eyes is that "porn addiction" works based on 3 factors:

• Accessibility
• Affordability
• Anonymity

While CE works on removing "Anonymity". The idea being that people who want to kick a porn habit pick an accountability partner and Covenant Eyes sends creates an easy to read report of the internet web sites (and other internet applications). Now while I happen to think that porn addiction is a non existent disease I'm all for applications that help people empower themselves to accomplish their goals. And that is how Covenant Eyes is being primarily marketed. And that is one of the reasons the internet security groups with one exception seem to be not telling people how to bypass Covenant Eyes.

1. That this software is voluntary, both in installation and continuing use.
2. They offer a simple uninstall process (it does notify the accountability partner)
3. They offer tech support in case the system causes trouble
4. The system doesn't capture information like passwords and bank accounts

Which is to say it doesn't seem to a noxious spyware but rather a self help program. And that's good their model does involve consent. I consider consent to be key in the morality of any of these products as in general I think it is with most things: consent is the difference between

• an employee and a thief
• boxing and assault
• sex and rape

So I love the fact that Covenant Eyes is targeted using a consensual model. The idea of Covenant Eyes is to stop people from being tempted. This plays into Covenant Eyes' mechanics, Covenant Eyes claims "Covenant Eyes is designed to be extremely difficult to disable or bypass." I've heard other people claim impossible, which felt to me like a dare. I'm really tempted to post 4 lines of "do this" instructions but I do approve of creating a solution for people who want to control a behavior. So I'm going to keep this discussion on a high level, which doesn't translate into instructions while hopefully making it clear enough for purposes of discussion that it really is about 4 fairly obvious steps. For those of you computer knowledgeable, Covenant Eyes works on windows by inserting itself into the Winsock LSP . LSP was created by Microsoft to allow administrations / applications to alter networking behavior without having to write their own networking stack; which is to say this is a fairly obvious place to do what Covenant Eyes is doing. Covenant Eyes is one of hundreds of programs that interfaces at the LSP level (though most are adware). There is a lot of documentation out there about how to alter LSP behavior; there are hundreds of thousands of people on the planet who understand the LSP subsystem and tens of millions that can read about it, so I don't see what is particular "difficult" about that. On a Mac it is daemon (/usr/libexec/CvntDaemon) that works in a somewhat similar way.

I've architected systems designed to be extremely difficult to bypass. With:

• No specialized hardware (example TPM chip)
• No hard drive encryption and a standard boot sequence
• An operating system that has to be able to run mainstream applications

nothing with an x86 processor is difficult to bypass. This thing runs purely in software (and in user not kernel space) it can't even tell whether it is running on a computer or a VM. So we have a software app running without a trusted environment on a completely vanilla box with an insecure and well documented OS. What this thing is at best is mildly annoying to bypass / uninstall / cripple. When I've written these sorts of systems I had all those hardware and operating system advantages, and I was just trying to stop people from doing things like rerouting checks or attacking telephone switches not stripping them of their sex lives. So at least on the surface I'd assume my targets were less motivated.

Luke might retort by saying my targets were 100% unwilling, they genuinely wanted to steal; while his customers were completely willing, in theory at least, to be porn free and just experiencing a moment of weakness, a craving. They will be ineffectual in their attack because deep down they don't want succeed. Having done things like quit smoking, I get that. You are never more than 10 minutes away from a pack of cigarettes but that ten minutes gives you time to change your mind that trying to quit with cigarettes in your pocket wouldn't. If someone genuinely wanted to smoke / didn't want to quit, a 3 hour drive wouldn't be enough to stop them.

And that brings us back to consent. Covenant Eye's system works on the assumption that people are low motivation attackers, for example they are unwilling to get help to bypass the system as I mentioned above. To give another example, which is on Covenant Eyes' website (so I figure harmless to mention), Covenant Eye's wouldn't catch a tunnel processing misidentifying itself, that is to say another of the sort of thing a person who is genuinely not consenting to Covenant Eye's being on their system who needs to generates reports full of innocuous websites would setup. And that's assuming you work within the OS and don't just reboot to a different OS and reconfigure externally. The web is full of the "boot with a Linux CD" suggestion which would work.

However, as I researched this product there seemed to be a lot of places where it wasn't really consensual.

• Parents installing it on college age children's computers
• Wives installing it on their husband's computers
• Employers installing it on employee's computers

Which bring us to controversy at Moore College (see note at bottom). In 2007 there was an announcement that Covenant Eyes was going to become a community standard and certain people felt that they were going to be compelled to use the product (newspaper article). This led to an interesting debate between Covenant Eyes and a Professor at Moore. The Covenant Eyes blog had 3 articles on this topic part1 part2 part3. The professor part1 part2 part3 through out some zingers I agreed with like:

I’ve also had pretty much all I can take of people reducing Christian morality to sexual abstinence, meanwhile ignoring the things that Jesus mentioned quite explicitly (sorry if that word causes anyone to stumble ;-) - judgementalism, bigotry, religious hypocrisy, materialism… why isn’t there the same market for some kind of software that can filter these out of our churches?

or another comment where he attacks accountability to spouses in general:

The problem is finding a way forward. Any pattern of thinking learned over time is not easily reshaped, particularly if deeply ingrained and etched with connotations of guilt and damnation – and even more so if it involves something as primal as sex. For those of us who want to define ourselves as “Christian” this poses a special challenge – what of our thinking about the subject is ours, as opposed to merely the manipulative accretions of both our churches, and those parts of society in opposition to the churches. Clearly much of the current dogma produces only hypocrisy, guilt and depression (among other problems) – the struggle is to find new and more empowering understandings.

I also have grave concerns about any relationship based upon one partner receiving a daily report of the other’s online activities. If it works for them….. ok (I guess), but to me it seems a less than optimal basis for and enduring and trusting relationship. As for having her watch it with him – I’m quite sure many men wished their partner shared their interest (and if she did I suspect the husband’s obsession would quite often fade as it ceased to be a captivating “secret” relationship) – but many women raised within conservative Christianity (and elsewhere) find the concept of porn as abhorrent as their partners find it fascinating. Forcing her to participate would be tantamount to abuse, and observing her partner’s interest in something she finds so distasteful would be extremely distressing. It’s this broader lack of communication that makes developing a response from within the religious context that many of us come from so difficult. As I think I said to you before – a lot of us from a religious background have very poor listening skills

Other than those objections, the professor's main concern was that it wouldn't be meaningfully consensual, people would be pressured into doing this. Certainly the professor writing these articles felt that he was essentially going to be forced to submit to this monitoring, I'd like to emphasize this never happened. Others in the thread expressed concerns that Covenant Eyes would be used to Moore primarily to catch seminary students looking at liberal theologians, that is not being used to track porn but rather for political control, and again there is no evidence this occurred. However it is the case that the software supports would support this usage . Jay Aguda mentioned he was evidentially fired from his church because of Covenant Eyes ( 28 July 2008 5:31 PM ).

There are hints of non consensual usage within families. here are discussions all over the internet of wives who put this on their husband's computers. In this thread Roark Janis talked about how he installed Covenant Eyes to send reports back from his college aid children's computers every three days, "However, as my children got older and went off to college and needed a little more independence and ability to make their own decisions, I found that http://www.covenanteyes.com is the perfect solution as it doesn’t block anything but logs all activity and sends me reports to review with them every three days."

So at least some of the usage is non consensual. And for me, if this were to expand that would changes things morally. If Covenant Eyes were primarily being used this non-consensual way, a social virus, I wouldn't be dancing so much in this thread, I'd have no problem typing those few lines of instructions -- do ABC to get this app to send out false reports, the same way you would for someone in China (they use a similar idea, but much harder to defeat and their accountability partner is a government official). But those non-consensual situations are not the primary usage, and this is one of the few situations where knowledge isn't power, but likely the opposite. But it does raise the issue for the people who are subjected to non consensual use, is it ethical for them to trick the system? For example lets say a missionary where a condition of funding is using this with the reports going back to the funding church? Or the college kid? What is the ethics in these situations?

For the consensual users a decrease in pornography consumption will lead to a decrease in masturbatory orgasm and this appears to be their objectives; Covenant Eyes is likely to help them achieve that. This IMHO will lead to an increase in lust, the same way that if you hold your breath you will start thinking about oxygen a lot more then if you don't. Which is to say, I think the objective in most cases will induce the opposite of the intended effect in a broader sense making the approach both stupid and sinful. To quote the old "the best way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it speech" (which while perhaps a bit over the top does address the problem with the addictions model):

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream--I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal--to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. (Lord Henry from The Picture of Dorian Gray)

People are entitled to disagree with me and do what they want, I don't want to restrict anyone's freedom. In my mind compulsory usage of this sort of software is engaging in a form of sexual harassment. A secular workplace has no right to control its employee's sexual behaviors. It is no more the right of a boss to sleep with his secretary then to demand she remain chaste outside the workplace. A religious employer may be given more latitude in terms of profession. But the use of Covenant Eyes (or similar software) in this way seems to be directed at forced religious compliance, that is holding persons to standards they themselves never accepted; and moreover specifically aiming to force sexual behaviors on threat of punishment. The same morality seems case with the wives and also the case with the controlling parents of adult children.

So I'm honestly torn. This LSP model seems hard enough that the average person is not going to be able to bypass it unassisted. Teaching people to lie to employers sexually harassing them would be disempowering for the vast majority that want this crutch, and would also be inducing people into sins of hypocrisy. Covenant Eye's itself doesn't seem to be trying to be unethical, they don't seem to desire that their product be used to force sexual behaviors and unlike the filter companies don't seem to be targeting control freaks with their advertising or User's Guides, except for parents where they fully embrace inappropriate levels of control. But Covenant Eyes doesn't have firm policies against this sort of usage.

What are people's thoughts?

• Do you think institutions forcing people to use monitoring software is acceptable? What about churches towards employees?
• What about the father towards children or wives towards husbands?
• Is there some suggestion about a workaround?

Note on Moore:

The original version of this article used Moore college as an example. My notification policy paid off this time. John Woodhouse (principle) of Moore college wrote me back informing me the administration is not tracking usage and that the uptake rate is moderate. Lots of people aren't using Covenant Eyes. The actually accountability partners seem genuinely freely chosen. The original controversy seems to have come from a not so charitable reading of some statements where buoyant expectations were being intermixed with policy.

What this appears to have been was an internet discussion about fears that didn't pan out which were never corrected once the policies went into effect. This is simply a service Moore provides to its students, consequently I've refocused the article and dropped the references to Moore. The other examples of compulsory usage I could find were workplace computers where the legal status of circumvention becomes more questionable.

The usage is described here: short proposal, full proposal,newspaper article. There was a bit of a debate between Covenant Eyes and a Professor at Moore when it wasn't clear if this would be consensual. The Covenant Eyes blog had 3 articles on this topic part1 part2 part3. The professor's articles are: part1 part2 part3.

See Also:

• How Kosher Was Khomeini?: The Case Against Religious Coercion
• Entry on McAfee
• A 411-spyware discussion on removal (still vague)
• No porn support community
• Net responsibility, an open source accountability package using a daemon approach written in Ruby, if you want to understand how one of these works.

Is it a sin to see someone naked?

So I'm having a debate, well maybe not a debate. More like swatting of off the wall comments regarding the whole porn thing on compegal. We were making some progress but it was very slow going.

The last post was by some woman who goes by TL where she quotes a mistranslation of the Hebrew to prove a point, even though the mistranslation doesn't actually say what she needs it to say. I would have responded there but the moderators decided to close down discussion, because after all we shouldn't actually do what the bible says.

Now normally I hear bad arguments all the time. But what I was shocked to discover how lousy the commentary is on Gen 9:22 in most Christian bibles including my favorite bad translation the ESV. In fact the Reformation Study Bible even uses the mistranslation in the ESV to teach the moral lesson that nakedness is bad.

So this issue is actually worth responding to since I suspect the mistake is probably common, and there should be some sort of easily available refutation. I'll quote TL not because of anything unusual, she seems to be reasoning from the English but because she deserves the credit for making me aware of this issue. So to make sure it is clear, I don't think she is being dishonest she just uses bad tools. In this case she choose the NKJV, which preserves as many of the mistranslations in the KJV as possible, and for all practical purposes uses 400 year old dictionaries and underlying texts. Here is her translation and conclusion:

Gen. 9:20 (NKJV) And Noah began to be a farmer, and he planted a vineyard. 21 Then he drank of the wine and was drunk, and became uncovered in his tent. 22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and went backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. 24 So Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him. 25 Then he said: “ Cursed be Canaan; A servant of servants He shall be to his brethren.” 26 And he said: “ Blessed be the LORD, The God of Shem, And may Canaan be his servant.

I think that there is a moral principal here that is related to the subject of porn and other people’s nakedness (outside of medical reasons). It is not morally acceptable to view other people completely naked as a recreational exercise, especially in the act of sex. (link to original)

Well it is an interesting analysis I'd say a huge jump from a single incident involving nakedness to an entire doctrine. Can I pick any historical story in the bible where someone says something bad to someone else and derive a moral law from it? Just think of the fun! The real problem that exposing nakedness of his father (וַיַּרְא חָם אֲבִי כְנַעַן אֵת עֶרְוַת אָבִיו ) is an expression, it has nothing to do with "nakedness" in a literal sense. The tradition of the overly literal translation goes back to the KJV. Which is odd because the bible itself defines the term in Lev 20:11 (NKJV) "The man who lies with his father’s wife has uncovered his father’s nakedness; both of them shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them." That is uncovering your father's nakedness is having sex with his wife, its not seeing his wang.

The NET has a nice commentary on Lev 18:7 where the same expression is used (I'll also quote the NKJV):

Lev 18:7 (NKJV): The nakedness of your father or the nakedness of your mother you shall not uncover. She is your mother; you shall not uncover her nakedness.

Lev 18:7 (NET): You must not expose your father’s nakedness by having sexual intercourse with your mother. She is your mother; you must not have intercourse with her.

Commentators suggest that the point of referring to the father’s nakedness is that the mother’s sexuality belongs to the father and is forbidden to the son on that account (see B. A. Levine, Leviticus [JPSTC], 120, and J. E. Hartley, Leviticus [WBC], 294). The expression may, however, derive from the shame of nakedness when exposed. If one exposes his mother’s nakedness to himself it is like openly exposing the father’s nakedness (cf. Gen 9:22-23 with the background of Gen 2:25 and Gen 3:7, 21). The same essential construction is used in v. 10 where the latter explanation makes more sense than the former.

And if you read Lev 18 you see a long stream of "uncovering nakedness referring to sex". Note the reversal here where uncovering the nakedness of someone is sleeping with their spouse which is called in the NKJV "their nakedness" (I guess to make the passage unintelligible if you don't reverse translate) (all from the NKJV):

6'None of you shall approach any blood relative of his to uncover nakedness; I am the LORD.

7'(F)You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, that is, the nakedness of your mother. She is your mother; you are not to uncover her nakedness.

8'(G)You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife; it is your father's nakedness.

9'(H)The nakedness of your sister, either your father's daughter or your mother's daughter, whether born at home or born outside, their nakedness you shall not uncover.

10'The nakedness of your son's daughter or your daughter's daughter, their nakedness you shall not uncover; for their nakedness is yours.

11'The nakedness of your father's wife's daughter, born to your father, she is your sister, you shall not uncover her nakedness.

12'(I)You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's sister; she is your father's blood relative.

13'You shall not uncover the nakedness of your mother's sister, for she is your mother's blood relative.

14'(J)You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's brother; you shall not approach his wife, she is your aunt.

15'(K)You shall not uncover the nakedness of your daughter-in-law; she is your son's wife, you shall not uncover her nakedness.

16'(L)You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife; it is your brother's nakedness.

17'(M)You shall not uncover the nakedness of a woman and of her daughter, nor shall you take her son's daughter or her daughter's daughter, to uncover her nakedness; they are blood relatives. It is lewdness.

This use of uncovering nakedness as sexual humiliation is the reason that the Talmud (Sanhedron 70a\b23\b0) translates 9:22 as Ham having either castrated or sodomizing Noah (see Rashi on Genesis 9). My personal take is that Canaan is the product of Ham and Noah's wife, which makes the mention of Canaan in Leviticus 18 very explicit. The author of Genesis 9 is presenting a myth about the origins of the sexual wickedness of Canaan. The castration of Noah (either literally or by sleeping with his mother) prevents Noah from having a fourth son so Ham's fourth son "Canaan" is cursed to do as Ham did (sexually) and be enslaved by the two righteous brothers for it.

And just as Leviticus 18 opens with

Lev 18:3 (NKJV) According to the doings of the land of Egypt, where you dwelt, you shall not do; and according to the doings of the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you, you shall not do; nor shall you walk in their ordinances.

As an aside, my recommend bibles for the OT the NJPS and the NISB both covered this well, and the NET which is my recommended evangelical translation did a nice job.

OK so what is the lesson to be learned:

1) Uncovering nakedness shows up a lot in the bible. Hopefully this little discussion is worthwhile.

2) There is a good reason 0% of the bible bloggers recommend the NKJV.

3) Fundamentalists, as usual, are full of malarky if you check all their facts.

4) There is no prohibition against nakedness in the bible.

5) The arguments against porn are really shoddy.

6) There is no way to have an intelligent conversation about sex on a christian board, and I need to get around to more posts on my sex and fundamentalism series.

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

Am I still a virgin if I've had anal/oral sex?

Dan Savage is trying to define the word "saddleback" in a way that embarrass Rick Warren (Chief pastor of Saddleback church). The definition that seems to be sticking is:

'Saddlebacking' should be the term for the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities. 'After attending the Purity Ball, Heather and Bill saddlebacked all night because she's saving herself for marriage.' Please, please adopt this definition!"(dedicated site)

Of course the problem is the kids are right. The people who think they are wrong are confusing chastity (purity of soul) with virginity (purity of body). Augustine (De Virgin. viii) "virginity is continence whereby integrity of the flesh is vowed, consecrated and observed in honor of the Creator of both soul and flesh." In other words as long as the integrity of the flesh is maintained virginity is maintained. The church has a notion of "virgins in the flesh but not in the spirit" which is a violation of chastity, not a violation of virginity. (example Jerome's letters to Eustochium) and that IMHO is the correct status for kids that engage in non vaginal sex acts but have never engaged in vaginal penetration. They lack chastity but not virginity.

Now what's interesting is this is a rising phenomenon. While at some point I'll do my upcoming series "Sex and Fundamentalism" which discusses virginity pledges, it does appear these sorts of pledges cuts the age for first anal sex by several years (to below the level of first vaginal sex for kids whose parents are liberal about sex). So this is a big issue.

On a related topic some kids think they are virgins if they have had vaginal sex but not ejaculated. And again loss of virginity is loss of integrity of the flesh. Once penetration happens virginity is lost.