Internet porn addiction
It’s not official, but it’s painfully real

By Stephanie Ramage

On Thursday, Aug. 4, Michael Leahy, who lives in Roswell, will appear on ABC’s “The View” to talk about how Internet porn destroyed his 15-year marriage.

Leahy worked in the software industry and brought home a six-figure salary. He lived with his wife and two sons in a swim-and-tennis community in west Cobb County. He spent hours on porn sites searching out a woman with “just the right look” to fantasize about. He finally met someone who embodied his every fantasy. She was sexy, engaging and her body was impossibly perfect. She liked to hang out at the Pharr Road restaurant Bones to cruise wealthy older men. She told him she lived in Alabama with her family. She drove a Mercedes 450 SL, but Leahy never knew what she did for a living. She was 28 years old. He was 40.

The whole thing seems like the standard mid-life crisis. Why does he think that Internet porn was to blame for his infidelity?

“Because I was already committing adultery every day in my mind with women on the Internet with whom real women like my wife could never compete,” he says. “When I met this woman, she was another fantasy.”

Two months into the affair he confessed to his wife, Patty. He promised to end the affair over and over again, but couldn’t. Patty, he says, was so devastated she almost took her life. She ended up leaving him instead—taking the children with her. Leahy, having already lost his home and a lot of money in the divorce, turned to counseling for help. Today he and his ex-wife, who married someone else a couple of years after the divorce, appear together on shows and at conferences to talk about the dangers of Internet porn.

Leahy’s tale is pretty dramatic and maybe, in his case, Internet porn just hastened the inevitable. But his story doesn’t stand out among the dozen sites devoted to Internet porn addiction support groups.

Looking for online porn addicts in the Atlanta area turned up Chris who is 37 years old and married for three years. He logs onto a porn-and-sex addiction help site every few days. “I am sitting here wondering how I will make it through another day at work on just three hours sleep,” he writes.

Then there’s William, as he calls himself. He is 52 years old and has been looking for a support group in the Tucker/Lilburn area. He lost his job several months ago because he got caught downloading porn (according to several tech groups, 70 percent of all porn site traffic occurs between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.). William subsequently lost his house and, according to his most recent post, has most recently lost his wife, who, once again, took the kids with her. There’s also Christy, who hooked up with a married man via a porn site and now can’t leave him alone, although he wants her to. She’s trying to move on, but she wants someone badly enough that she’s hooked up a few times since, in much the same way. It makes her feel powerful and yet humiliated as well.

These people are just the tip of a fog-shrouded iceberg. Therapists know that it’s out there, but the medical community and the insurance industry do not recognize any disorder called “sex addiction” so naturally they don’t recognize Internet porn addiction. But while you won’t find it in the DSM-IV, the catalogue of mental illness used by psychologists, psychiatrists and insurance companies, it’s not just Christians like Leahy and his ex-wife who are saying it exists.

Check out www.pointlesswasteoftime.com, where comedian David Wong, who’s obviously not a man-of-the-cloth, goes full circle from ridiculing the idea of porn addiction to testing it out, and finally to announcing that out of 94 volunteer subjects culled from his own site’s visitors, 52 failed to go just one week without porn. Wong points out that included online and offline porn, but adds that online was much more common.

None of this surprises Gene Abel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Emory University who specializes in the study and treatment of sexual dysfunction.

“If you look up ‘porn addiction’ in the DSM-IV, there’s nothing there,” says Abel. “But in real life, 60 percent of everyone we see, we see because of this preoccupation with sexual matters courtesy of the Internet.”

Most of his patients are men and one of those dysfunctions is an inability to function sexually with a real woman.

“People who view it on a regular basis need more and more graphic stuff and eventually they dig a hole for themselves,” says Abel. “They need more and more to get aroused.”

Internet porn is more insidious than other types of porn because it’s cheap—plenty of images are free—it’s anonymous and it’s easily accessible. The Sunday Paper clicked through several dozen explicit porn sites without ever using a credit card, for example, just continuously clicking on icons that read “I’m over 18”—something that an 8 year-old could just as easily have done.

Dr. David Greenfield, a clinical psychologist and founder of the Center for Internet Studies, conducted one of the largest surveys on the topic to date: a study of 18,000 Internet users who logged onto the ABC News Web site. He found that 5.7 percent of his sample met the criteria for compulsive Internet use. Of those participants, 75 percent said they had gained "feelings of intimacy" for someone they'd met online; 62 percent said they regularly logged on to pornography sites, spending an average of four hours a week viewing the material; 37.5 percent of that group masturbated while online. And that was in 1998.

For his part, Abel says that spending four to six hours a night on porn sites is par for the course for people he counsels. Abel says a user with a problem may spend as much as $400 to $600 per week on porn sites.

“Sexually broken”

Troy Haas is a minister, which immediately makes him suspect, considering that a 2002 survey on www.pastors.com showed that 30 percent of the more than 1300 pastors participating had viewed Internet pornography within the last 30 days. But Haas not only acknowledges the problem, he points out that the church he leads, First Baptist Church in Woodstock, offers a special counseling program just for such pastors—and there are about 60 enrolled right now. He also runs “Walking Free,” a nondenominational program launched five years ago with treatment for sexual addiction in mind. As it turns out, about 80 percent of the 140 people currently enrolled in the program are there for Internet porn addiction.

“I started the program because of my own need for a group,” he says simply. “I needed to talk about it and as I approached the subject, I found out that I was far from alone.”

Those who usually have problems with Internet porn also have problems relating socially to others, period. Haas refers to them as “sexually broken.” Men usually seek help when they have been caught a few times at the keyboard by their wives or girlfriends. It’s usually their partners who first suspect that more is going on than just “a man being a man.”

“All your relationships are impacted,” says Haas. “You don’t have the emotional energy to connect with people in your real life because you’ve been giving that energy to fantasies.”

Ironically, says Haas, it’s not actually sex these men want—it’s something much harder to find, something that takes more time and energy and personal risk: real intimacy, the feeling of being known, loved and respected as an interesting individual, not just the guy who pays the bills or holds down the couch. Virtual sex is an easily available counterfeit. Leahy explains it like this: “What you feed grows and what you starve dies. I was feeding my fantasies and starving my marriage. My fantasies cost me my marriage to a beautiful woman.”