Addictive

When I was growing up in small towns, porn (at least of the variety offered to heterosexual men) wasn’t
that hard to find. There was always an X-rated theater not far away, Playboy and Penthouse were in most
of the convenience stores, and so on. The selection was limited though, and acquiring or viewing it
usually involved some degree of embarrassment or inconvenience, perhaps even a trip to a drive-in or
an aging urban theater whose manager hoped to find fiscal solvency by swapping “Mary Poppins” for
“Debbie Does Dallas.”

That’s all changed, of course, in this wired digital age. Online offerings cover the gamut: hardcore porn
sites, underwear models, sites that cater to specific fetishes, romance novels and role plays. The variety
on the electronic buffet takes us a long way from the days of watching a midnight showing of a skin flick
at the Bijou on Main Street.

What about the notion that some people become ensnared in an out of control online porn spiral? A
Swedish study (Ross et al, 2012) found that 5% of women and 13% of men report some type of sexual
problems related to online use, including the frequency and amount of time spent looking at
pornographic imagery.