If your husband, son or boyfriend is spending several hours a night locked away with his computer, at least you know he’s probably not looking at porn.
If he were, you see, he’d be finished a lot sooner.
A recent survey conducted by MSNBC.com found the average Internet sex hound spends no more than three hours a week on his or her habit. That figure is surprisingly low, particularly since it takes nearly that long just to delete porn-related spam from my e-mail in box. When you consider the bulk of those three hours are likely spent waiting for dirty pictures to creep across dial-up connections, the time spent actually looking at them seems small indeed.
Don’t get me wrong: Three hours a week of porn is surely three hours too many for parents and others who worry about the influence of sexually explicit material on the Internet.
But if the figures in the survey are anywhere close to accurate and there is reason to doubt them, by the way that influence isn’t quite so dramatic as it might seem.
Controlling urges
Nearly 40,000 visitors to MSNBC responded to the survey designed and conducted by Alvin Cooper of the San Jose Marital and Sexuality Centre. About 38,000 of those responses were deemed usable, leading Cooper to describe it as “one of the largest surveys of human sexuality ever,” Reuters reported. Apparently, size does matter in sex surveys.
Cooper told Reuters the study confirmed earlier research that has shown most Net users are capable of controlling their urges to visit the Net’s seedier side. “For the vast majority of people, sexuality online is not going to be a problem,” he said. “But for some people, it is going to be a big problem.”
About 9 percent of survey participants who visited sexually explicit sites indicated they did so compulsively. The rest indicated that cybersex hadn’t caused them any problems, including a full third who claimed online porn and other sexually explicit sites had complemented or improved their real-life relationships. While it’s possible some respondents didn’t have many of those relationships to begin with, these are the sort of glowing numbers you might expect to find on promotional material for those Pam and Tommy Lee videos.
So can we believe them? The unscientific survey can’t really claim to represent the attitudes of Net users at large since it invited volunteers to respond. Valid scientific polls require researchers to find a random sample of representative people rather than relying on visitors to a particular site who have some spare time on their hands.
Access, not interest
But Cooper told Reuters he believes such anonymous online surveys elicit more honest answers about sex than traditional polling methods. He may have a point there. If I was spending my nights visiting those sites I get spam about something about “Hot Teen Sex Now!” springs to mind I doubt I’d tell some nice lady on the phone exactly how much hot teen sex I’d been having. But I might type an accurate response into a Web form, if only because I couldn’t see a good reason for doing otherwise.
If the survey is accurate, perhaps online porn doesn’t have quite the hold on people that some frightening media reports would suggest. The Internet has made pornography infinitely more accessible, but it hasn’t made it any more interesting to the majority of people who aren’t predisposed to compulsive behavior.
I don’t doubt that some relationships have been damaged by pornography more, perhaps, than the survey’s respondents realize. But I also suspect most Net users can control their urge to visit the seedy URLs that pile up in their e-mail trash bin.
In short, it seems the threat of Internet porn shouldn’t keep people up at night at least, no later than three hours past their bedtime.
To contact syndicated columnist Joe Salkowski, you can e-mail him at [email protected] or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services, Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.
