Given how much porn exists in our environment, it is not surprising that ease of access, especially to things that often seem to have little or no financial cost and can be looked at privately, is one of the most significant factors in whether or not someone develops an adult porn relationship. Not that long ago, in order to use porn you had to go out, pay for it, come home, and hope to get lucky enough to find something that would turn you on. With the Internet, you can sit in your office or home and easily access categories of porn that you find exciting. In addition, whether you go looking for it or not, chances are you’ll be exposed to porn through teasers, pop-ups, and ads on other sites. You may find yourself in this situation almost every time you turn on your computer, constantly having to choose whether to tune porn in or tune it out.
The cultural shift into high-tech porn appears to be changing porn use patterns for many people. According to a recent survey in Men’s Health magazine, 71 percent of men say they looked at porn more since the advent of the Internet, and one in two men wonder if they interact with porn too frequently or for too long.
Easy access is one of the major factors that led to Corey’s porn relationship. He said, “Cybersex pulled me in. The convenience and ease of narrowing a search to the kind of image I wanted to see were powerful attractions. I could indulge my interest in pictures of feet and young girls. Knowing there were other people on the Internet looking at the same things made me feel more ‘normal’ about what I liked. The difficulty of finding the kinds of porn I wanted in a store, the amount of time it took, and the cost of buying magazines and videos had served to limit me in the past.”
Victor, a fifty-one-year-old social worker now into his fourth year of abstinence from porn, noticed a dramatic increase in his porn involvement when he discovered what he could get over the Internet. “From time to time during my marriage I would get a hold of some printed pornography,” he told us. “Although I found it compelling, I was uncomfortable keeping it around, so I would destroy it. This happened several times over twenty years. Then in 1998 I became exposed to pornography on the Internet and my fascination with porn very rapidly progressed to a full-blown pornography addiction. Until then, I had been able to keep my porn use under control. I never used cocaine, but I identify with the observation that Internet pornography is the ‘crack cocaine of sexual addiction.’ It certainly was for me.”
For Todd, a thirty-five-year-old deliveryman, the inexpensive nature of Internet porn is what opened the floodgates on his use of porn. Prior to the Internet, cost issues with porn had kept his use in check. “I’ve never had a lot of disposable income. I could justify spending $16 on porn magazines on one visit or $20 in a strip club now and again, but I didn’t have the money to be able to do that every day. Well, I could have got the money, but my wife would have cut me off pretty quickly. That kind of compulsive behavior was not sustainable. But it is sustainable with the Internet. I used to do those activities maybe ten times a year at the most. Now, I can be looking at pornography over the Internet for two to three hours a day. So that barrier of ‘I better not or I’m gonna have to explain where this money went,’ has disappeared.”
For Brad, the ease of accessing pay-per-view porn movies on the road is what recharged his sexual involvement with porn. “Before my wife and I were married, fantasies of having sex with her took the place of porn,” he says. “But about six months into the marriage I took a job in sales that involved a lot of travel. I was out of town, driving around the state. Every hotel I stayed in had pay-per-view movies. And of course, pornography is the number-one-selling cable movie channel on pay-per-view. I started accessing porn as often as possible when I was out of town. My porn habit cropped up again, even worse than it had been before.”
Pastor Jim Thomas, who directs a program to help men with porn problems at the Faith Center in Eugene, Oregon, believes accessibility to both the Internet and cable porn stations has been one of the biggest contributors to relationship problems for members of his congregation. “It’s one thing to drive to an adult bookstore or porn shop and risk somebody seeing your car parked there. But if you can click on and off of an adult Web site, it’s easy to get involved. Some guys are on the edge, and if they had not been faced with the temptation of porn, may not have succumbed. In private where nobody knows and it’s secret, that is the hook. That is where these guys are vulnerable.”
Ben, a twenty-two-year-old college student, developed a serious problem with porn during one weekend of marathon surfing on the Internet when his dorm roommate was out of town. “I didn’t even set out to look for pornography. But I got on the Net and it was everywhere. Something tweaked my curiosity and wham—I just clicked it open. I never had to think what I was doing because it all happened so fast. Internet porn just sucked me in.”
Exposure to porn can increase desire for it in much the same way seeing the candy bars at the checkout stand at the grocery store can make us want to buy one even if we’re not hungry. Easy, unrestricted access feeds into our desire for immediate gratification and cuts down the opportunity for critical decision-making. When porn becomes easier to get to in our environment, it is harder for us to “just say no” to it. Like the candy bar you didn’t really need or want, porn can slip into your life before you even realize what has happened. In his booklet, A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction, writer David Mura writes, “The greater the frequency of [sexual] images, the greater the likelihood they will overwhelm people’s resistance.”