Hooked on the net - a virtual dependency upon Internet erotica

© Icqurimage 2006

The scale and reach of the adult Internet industry persists in raising the eyebrows of even the most cynical and world-weary. In any given week, some 70 million people worldwide will visit at least one of an estimated million adult Internet sites. Around 100,000 of these are supported by U.S. businesses within an industry that generates revenues in the region of $12 billion dollars a year.
Addiction and dependency are essentially difficult to define - ask anyone who has been involved in law suits relating to the tobacco industry. As challenging as it was to define nicotine as a drug of addiction, it is accordingly much harder to gain broad acceptance for the concept of Internet addiction. Although a relatively new ‘idea’, the advent of affordable high speed broadband and streaming video is also relatively recent, and it becomes hard to distinguish widespread use based upon novelty, utility or fashion, from that use which is due to dependency or addiction. However, obsessive or compulsive behaviours in of themselves do not necessarily signify addiction, at least from a medical standpoint.
During the 1990s the only place that most workers had online access to adult materials was in the work place, whether adult surfing was a social preoccupation or a private activity reserved for after hours or disgruntled employees. As affordable broadband has become as mainstream a domestic commodity as the television, social patterns of behaviour have inevitably changed given the relative privacy and freedoms of the home environment. Whether undertaken socially or privately, adult surfing has certainly become the new phenomenon of mass entertainment in all its forms, from youths racking up their mobile phone bills by downloading adult video clips to young women flirting on their web cams. However, there is a more serious side to this new social phenomenon. Far from being a transient social craze in the work place, much as sending faxes or text messages were in their day, the incidence of downloading pornography at work is on the rise.
A survey of some 400 of the UK's public service organisations, including the NHS and police, found that cases of staff accessing pornography at work was increasing by 16% a year. Pornography now amounts to almost half of all cases of computer misuse and fraud in the public sector workplace. Rather then preferring the solitude of the home environment, over 70% of Internet pornography is actually accessed during traditional working hours. One UK company surveyed the computer use of 2,000 of its office workers and found that their average employee spent over twelve hours a week engaged in inappropriate computer use, the equivalent of 75 days of lost productivity per person per year, amounting to several £billions in paid hours. Naturally home-based employees will feel even less inhibited. This problem is not restricted to the professional environment. Many students have run up substantial debts and whittled away their study time building socio-sexual networks on MySpace, Adult Friend Finder or Instant Messenger. Indeed, as many as 87% of university students claim to have used Instant Messenger, a web cam, or online telephone services to participate in ‘Cyber sex’. Whilst this may well afford them more employment contacts, they may not achieve the actual qualifications needed to cement their networking opportunities.

A Hard Core Addiction

This social phenomenon may not be a purely economic issue. As many as 10% of Internet users, at least according to a recent article in ‘Perspectives in Psychiatric Care’, are perceived to be ‘addicted’ to the Internet, displaying a range of symptoms from a lack of concern for their physical health and appearance, to sleep deprivation and social withdrawal. Researchers listed several major areas of concern for evaluation, including Internet sexual addiction, ‘cyber-relationship’ addiction, and Internet compulsion. The study found that men tended towards sexual addiction, while women often developed addictions to cyber-relationships.
The world’s most profitable industries rely upon dependency, and Internet addiction certainly provides a lucrative opportunity for those looking to generate revenues from pornography. Given that almost 40% of all Internet users viewed an adult site in August 2005 (corresponding to some 72 million visitors), the reach of the adult Internet is comparable to that of the automobile industry, with far higher potential margins.

The rise and rise of the adult Internet

Despite the well publicised ‘dot.com’ crash at the turn of the Millennium, the majority of the surviving profit-making Internet businesses were directly or indirectly associated with the adult industry. Presently some twenty US-based companies account for around 70% of the estimated 300 million Internet links to pornography that feed through to some 420 million pages of adult content, the majority of which are owned by fewer than 50 companies. These statistics make for interesting reading, to say the least, and the corporate nature of the industry is self-evident. Globally the pornographic industry is valued in excess of $57bn annually, of which some $12bn in generated within the US market. By market sector, adult videos generate $20bn, magazines $7.5bn, and the Internet over $2.5bn. In fact the adult industry generates more revenue within the US than the combined worth of all the professional football, baseball and basketball franchises put together. Given that more than 200 million Americans have personal Internet access, the medium represents the primary route to market for the adult industry, especially given that many consumers will research or order such products online.
By the turn of the Millennium some 200,000 Internet users were thought to be addicted to Internet pornography, a number which has since risen to an estimated 10% of the adult population. A staggering 10 million of the 40 million Americans who regularly visit Internet pornography web sites are believed to be addicted to the medium, if indeed addiction is so readily defined or determined. Almost three-quarters of visitors to adult sites (71%) were male, viewing the content of ever more diverse and abundant adult pages, whose number has increased by a phenomenal 4,000% over the last seven years alone. As many as 20% of men actually admit to having accessed pornography at work, although this is undoubtedly the tip of a social iceberg which is easily tracked using online software.
However the adult pornographic audience is far from being exclusively male, given that in 2004 an estimated 32 million women visited at least one adult web site a month, and 41% of women have admitted to viewing or downloading pornographic pictures or movies. Indeed some 9 million American women are now believed to access adult web sites every month, 13% of whom do so at work. This may have significant social repercussions, as women are far more likely to act out their erotic fantasies than men, suggesting that real life does imitate pornography, from sexual fashions to behaviours. However, some 70% of women keep their Internet activities a secret, and 17% of all women admit to struggling with an addiction to pornography. The two sexes are not always equal, and women visit sex chat rooms at least twice as frequently as their male counterparts and are far more likely to enact creative fantasies from their erotic Internet encounters.

Repercussions of the Age of Adult Internet Addiction

In a sense then, the adult Internet is truly ‘art imitating life, imitating art’. Adult models and performers such as Jenna Jameson, Ron Jeremy and Danni Ashe have become cult social icons, projecting an attractive lifestyle of fast sex, fast cars and international travel. Young adult film actresses buy up vineyards, start their own successful companies, and appear on billboards in Times Square. If they shave their genitals, wear tattoos and participate in group sex within cars and apartments, then their young teenage and adult followers do likewise, and those who can't pay to watch. The advent of such social phenomena as ‘dogging’, and FKK, Bukkake, and ‘Eyes Wide Shut’-themed parties, and the new social acceptability of promiscuity are the result. What starts on the adult Internet, whether it be the latest video streaming technology or body jewellery, soon finds widespread acceptance within mainstream industry and youth culture. This may be the clearest evidence of a growing social addiction to Internet pornography, as most STD clinics will attest.
Annually companies lose billions in revenues and productivity through sleepy employees, online porn surfing, and a host of viruses and software programs needed to cope with them. Female co-workers present law suits for sexual harassment against companies for the behaviour of their male colleagues, who often appear to believe that attractive women should ‘put out’ or behave like porn stars, and consider that office trips to strip clubs represent the new social norm. Young female employees often feel pressurised, excluded or turned into objects of desire by the changing sexual expectations of their male co-workers. Whether the new sexual liberalisation is any more or less dysfunctional than the Victorian or Reagan eras of sexual repression is a matter for sociologists and clerics to debate, but there is little doubt that the adult Internet has led to the premature ‘sexualisation’ of children and teenagers. This may, or may not result in a hastened onset of puberty, but perhaps more concerning is the increasing trend towards the presentation of young teenagers, especially girls, as being sexually available and attractive within the adult and mainstream media. It is unclear whether adults are sexually grooming children, or whether it is the adults themselves who are being groomed to find younger teenagers sexually attractive, but there may be a growing inability for children and adults alike to draw a clear line of distinction in terms of their sexual availability.
The adult Internet represents a productive marketing channel for other adult products including sex films, escort services and strip clubs, and this has produced an even greater transformation in terms of social behaviour than the arrival of adult video in the 1970s. That said, all of this is in fact nothing new. The Rome of Nero, ancient Athens and Sumeria were all intensely sexualised, with explicit mosaics adorning public walls, pornae (street prostitutes who gave their name to the industry) occupying red light districts, and a thriving industry retailing erotic art and paraphernalia. Perhaps the citizens of classical Pompeii and Athens would feel quite at home in Amsterdam or Soho, but then again their civilisations had already entered into terminal economic and social decline...