Attention 'Porn Addicts': You Aren't

LOS ANGELES—Over the past few years, it's become a staple of anti-porn rhetoric that Some People spend so much time looking at two (or more) people having sex that they are unable to stop, and hence are "porn addicts." Whole clinics and practices are devoted to helping wean the "addict" off of his (and they're predominantly male) overuse of the material, and plenty of conservative religious organizations solicit funds to "help" the afflicted and/or sell filtering software so that they either can't see the stuff, or if they go to a hardcore (or sometimes even softcore) site, it's reported to some organization like Covenant Eyes, which can use the material to shame the user into stopping. Except that "porn addiction" doesn't exist; they made it up. Although the study that put the stake in the heart of the porn addiction profiteers—"Modulation of late positive potentials by sexual images in problem users and controls inconsistent with 'porn addiction,'" mainly authored by neuroscientists Nicole Prause and Vaughn Steele—is fairly impenetrable to lay readers, the results are fairly clear. The study, which consisted of 83 men and 39 women, was made up of two groups: those who self-reported having problems looking at too much porn (visual sexual stimuli) and those who didn't (the latter group had to agree that they did look at porn and didn't have a problem with it themselves, though they might have had a boy- or girlfriend  or family member who did). Both groups were then shown about 150 different images, which according to a report published on The Daily Beast website, consisted of "pleasant ones like skydiving photos, neutral ones like portraits, unpleasant ones like mutilated bodies, and, of course, sexual images—while hooked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG), a device that measures electrical activity in the brain." The result? When the researchers examined each subject's emotional response to the sexual images on the EEG, their brain scans did not display the same types of responses to porn as actual addicts do when exposed to the chemicals/substances to which they are actually addicted. Whereas actual addicts show increased EEG changes when provided with the substances to which they're addicted, so-called "porn addicts" show exactly the opposite: decreased brain activity when viewing sexual images. The researchers are quick to point out that people who obsessively view a lot of porn may indeed have legitimate problems as a result of such viewing, but according to the Daily Beast article, "neurologically speaking, they do not appear to have the same relationship to porn as a substance addict has to their drug of choice. In other words, porn and sex addictions are probably not addictions and treating them as such could prove counter-productive." This research, of course, flies in the face of all the so-called "porn experts" on the right (and even some on the left), who claim that "we now have the neuroscience evidence to show that pornography is just as addictive as alcohol or narcotics," and that "[b]rain scans show how the brain of a porn addict is no different than the brain of a drug addict." The Prause/Steele study puts the lie to such claims. Similarly, the statements made by Dr. Judith Reisman (whose Ph.D. is in communications, not medicine or neurology) before a 2004 U.S. Senate Science, Technology, and Space Subcommittee hearing on "porn addiction," where she claimed that, “Thanks to the latest advances in neuroscience, we now know that pornographic visual images imprint and alter the brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory trail, arguably, subverting the First Amendment by overriding the cognitive speech process,” is now also shown to be false. Reisman even invented a word to describe that "biochemical memory trail": Erototoxins. They don't exist either. But still, the bogus claims continue. "Some treatment providers claim to treat sex or porn addiction, but do not actually have any evidence that their treatments are effective," Prause noted. "I believe that many patients are paying for very expensive treatments that are unlikely to be helpful—and may be harmful. .. we should require healthcare workers to provide treatments supported by research." It will be remembered that in the run-up to the release of the fifth version of the psychiatry industry's universally consulted Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM5), the physicians rejected proposed listings for "sex addiction" and "hypersexual disorder" as recognized disorders, refusing even to consider them for Section 3, "requiring further research." So anyone who feels he (or she) is watching so much porn that the quality of his (or her) life has been negatively affected should feel free to seek treatment for that condition, which many consider a sympton of obsessive-compulsive disorder—but stay away from anyone offering a cure for "porn addiction." That doesn't exist.