There’s nothing like a good old Pop Sex Study to make a budding cultural sexologist lose it big time before she even gets to her morning coffee (or, in this case, to sleep).

Pop quiz: looking at what on these new-fangled Internets will:

• cause “intense feelings of guilt and excitement when entering this intoxicating universe, far away from the less thrilling one in which they live.”
• lead us to “become utterly dependent on the stimulus, making normal life — especially intimate life — no longer possible.”
• make us prone to “feelings of dissociation, and the way that [it] intrude[s] in their daily lives…Given the range of [it] they are exposed to, their own intimate lives pale in comparison, as partners, spouses and girlfriends recede in importance.
• because “people build up a tolerance, it doesn’t give them the same high that it did before… the process from excitement to resolution is thwarted. They need more to get excited and, for those who are compulsively hooked…the gratification of resolution never occurs.”
• and, most amazingly, are “reeling in people who would otherwise have never engaged in such behavior”?

The truth revealed! — at least, a certain Colbertian sort of truth — thanks to to Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, special to The Los Angeles Times, crying Ensnared: Internet Creates New Group of Sexual Addicts!

Sure, it’s just one more of many huge, sweeping, over-generalizing sex studies, only potentially damning a range of completely healthy human responses to erotic stimuli. Why get so miffed, M.?

Here’s the rub (yeah, I said it — rub!). I am so sure that, were the Internet Archive able to dive back into the bygone-era of the street vended porno pamphlet, we could find similarly inane “research” masquerading as some sort of smutty Cassandra, foretelling the downfall of civilization as evidenced in each new sex media evil — be it plaster, paint, pulp, or pixel — that we dare not ignore.

But it couldn’t be that the living room placement of the PC is for once putting porn consumption front and center in the lives of so-called “normal people”? That the ubiquity of porn online has not created more “porn addicts” but simply given us more porn to get upset about? Could not the “intimate lives” that “pale in comparison” to porn have already been somewhat “paling” prior to porn’s debut? (As if the Web marks its’ debut…)

And what of female porn consumers? Queer porn consumers? Come on — you really think it’s just the straight and marrieds calling in bogus chargebacks for “adult” sites when they get the guilt? (Actually, you know, it might be — but talk about lack of civilized behavior. Who on earth would dare return a used porno mag if it made them feel terribly for having spanked to it so?)

And I wonder, taking all of this into consideration, what are we to do about this growing industry, its proliferation from print into digital media, its staunch advocates and profiteers making their way into the mainstream avenues, all the while dollars roll in as quickly as users sign up via “convenient” recurring billing, able even to cash in on their friends’ weaknesses with affiliate programs? Of course, I am speaking of the fairly flush “porn recovery” industry.

By the way, Ms. Szegedy-Maszak? You did hear there once were people who got actual research contracts to actually research human sexual behavior between actual human beings having actual sex? Why, yes, it’s true! You even at least give them a token mention…

Masters and Johnson, the eminent duo of sex research, divided the human sexual response into four distinct phases: excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution. Though these phases differ for each individual, it is generally understood that most people with both a healthy libido and a satisfying intimate relationship fully experience all of them. Perhaps not reliably, perhaps not all the time, but frequently enough to maintain a certain emotional and sexual equilibrium. These behavioral phases, neuroscientists have learned, are generated by an exquisite interplay between two competing systems in the brain: the excitatory system and the inhibitory system. Experts in the human sexual response, like former Kinsey Institute director John Bancroft, caution that at this point “we can only speculate and conceptualize how the brain functions in an inhibitory way.” Nonetheless, when there is sexual dysfunction, when someone is uninterested in sex — called a sexual anorexic by some clinicians — or obsessively masturbating, it is safe to say that either the inhibitory system or the excitatory system is out of whack (emphasis: ed.).

… if only to then ignore them completely and reposition your own sources’ conjecture as if any it were founded on equally legitimate (dare I say?) facts.

Remember, kids: only you can prevent crap sex research. Really. Do some of your own. Go now! Go quickly. Before all of your “primary sources” are taxed and legislated into invisibility. I dare you: addict yourself to porn. Then dare to answer this: how many of you are just as addicted to blogs?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 at 5:59 am and is filed under Beyond Adult Education, Tight Fitted News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.