Joe's wife spends four hours a night watching television, and one hour during the day watching her favorite soap opera. Joe spends two hours a night looking at porn on the Internet.
Joe's wife is normal, while Joe is addicted to porn on the Internet. Or that's what Joe's wife's therapist tells her about any man who spends two hours a day looking at porn on the world wide web. And heaven help the poor pervert who spends three hours on Sunday afternoon looking at porn on the Internet as opposed to his upstanding co-worker who comes home from church and spends the rest of the afternoon screaming in front of the television while the Browns get clobbered by the Bears. If the football-watching maniac masturbates later that night, he's normal. But if the porn-watching web guy jerks off to what's online, he's got OSA—Online Sexual Addiction.
Interestingly, when researchers have tried to validate some of the claims that mental health experts have made about how the Internet "is a powerful medium for OSA," the claims have proven to be invalid. Yet scientific refutations of OSA don't make for good media play. After all, we've got an excellent hysteria going here, and we all know there was no porn before the Internet.
It was a sleepy little fringe business: Hustler, Penthouse, Playboy, Deep Throat.
Fears about new technologies aren't new. In the 1800s, when printing technologies improved, there was concern that people would stay at home reading newspapers and books instead of gathering in town for their news and gossip. In 1922, the New York American reported that "the pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music of jazz orchestras led to the fall of 1,000 girls in the last two years."
In the 1930s, there was concern that teenagers were imitating the sex they were seeing in the movies. Girls were adopting the flirtatious personas of actresses, and after seeing certain movies, women felt compelled to find men for sex. Boys were learning how to kiss and make love from the movies, and men claimed that the movies of the 1930s had driven them to commit rape.
In the 1950s, it was reported that the new medium of television was leading young offenders to commit sex crimes. Blame Lassie, The Three Stooges, and I Love Lucy.
So we shouldn't be surprised when today's psychologists warn about the "isolation," "alienation" and "depersonalization" that results from Internet addiction. Of course, none of that happens if you are sitting in front of your television watching crime-show reruns and American Idol.
When it comes to psychologists pushing panic buttons, one of the nation's mental-health experts, who almost single-handedly created the term "online sexual compulsivity," committed suicide last year. Good luck finding a group of people with more personal sadness and personality problems than those of us who enter the helping professions. Rather than dealing with our own problems, we have an amazing propensity for slapping labels on others.
New technology has always had a way of bringing fear. So has sex. But neither sex nor technology have made us any more alienated, isolated, sad, happy, loving or lonely. These are the things we bring to technology, not things that technology creates within us. The Internet does not give people psychological problems, nor is the ability to sit quietly and anonymously in front of it a lightening rod for instability. People bring their problems with them whether they are on the Internet or on the phone. And in the same way that the phone made it possible for people who have never met in person to engage with each other in rich and productive ways, so has the Internet.
The anonymous nature of the Internet allows us to look at sexual content that we wouldn't if other people were looking over our shoulders. But is this content any more damaging than the early silent films which experts claimed were causing the ruin of young women and men, or any more ruinous than the early television shows that we now call classics?
Granted, we never saw Lassie humping June Lockhart, and Ricky and Lucy never had group sex with Fred and Ethel, but would our country be any worse off today if our grandparents had seen those things? Mind you, there would be no protest from here if you did something better with your time than jerking off in front of a computer, but we'd say the same to all of the people who sit like rotting potatoes in front of the television each night.
Thanks to Steven Stern and Alysia Handel for their excellent paper "Sexuality and Mass Media: the Historical Context of Psychology's Reaction to Sexuality on the Internet," Journal of Sex Research, 38, 283-291 (2001).
