In comparison with a decade ago, counsellors are reporting a significantly higher number of clients with internet pornography concerns. There’s a slew of studies providing evidence associating increased porn exposure with unhealthy expectations of sexual relationships, body image and in some instances sexual violence.
While more prevalent among the young, increased exposure to porn is no respecter of economic, social or religious status, and is generally a male phenomenon.
For clients whose behaviour is more compulsive, pornography is regarded as an addiction. Addictions were previously viewed as a moral failing best addressed by social disapprobation and, for more extreme cases, social exclusion.
However with increased social acceptance and ease of access – the idea that you can view explicit real life porn electronically in the privacy of your bedroom – this approach no longer works. Increasingly various addictions – including pornography, drugs, alcohol and gambling – are viewed as illness that pathologically activates the neurophysiological reward centres.
Cambridge University research assessed the brain activity of 19 addictive pornography users against a control group of people who said they were not compulsive users. MRI scans of test subjects who admitted to compulsive pornography use showed that the reward centres of the brain reacted to seeing explicit material in the same way as a person with alcoholism might on seeing an advertisement for alcohol.
Here the treatments for addiction ‘illness’ sit on a continuum between harm minimisation and total abstinence. For alcoholism, for instance, harm minimisation comes under the rubric of ‘the responsible use of alcohol’, and ‘total abstinence’ is the stance of Alcoholics Anonymous.
However British writer Johann Hari invites us to view, and consequently treat, addictions very differently. He argues that the most influential cause of addiction is not the pathological activation of an individual's reward centres but society’s absence of social connectedness and bonding.
One of the many studies he cites comes from Portugal, where Greens leader Richard Di Natale is now studying first hand the handling of drug addiction without recourse to the criminal justice system. Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe with one per cent of the population addicted to heroin.
While the Portuguese Government waged a war on drugs, the problem kept getting worse. So they resolved to decriminalise all drugs and transfer the money used for containing and isolating drug addicts to reconnecting them to themselves, to each other and the wider society.
The most crucial step was to get