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Email article Main page content: Not tonight darling, I'm online By Adrian Turpin Published: March 31 2006 15:19 | Last updated: March 31 2006 15:19 On a winter afternoon in Trafalgar Square, Michael ("Please don't use my second name") is trying to explain how the internet has changed his life and the lives of thousands like him. he asks, standing on the steps of St Martin in the Fields church. He surveys the tableau of anonymous office workers muffled against the cold. How many will go home tonight and, with or without the knowledge of their partners, look at porn on the internet? Timothy Leary said about Sixties drug culture, tune in and drop out'. He draws a line in the air between Nelson's Column and the National Gallery. Well, I don't look the sort - but I've spent whole weekends with the curtains drawn, sitting in the dark apart from the blue light of the screen. The question is all the more unsettling for being rhetorical. Can it be true that a great swathe of the UK population is spending its spare moments surfing for naked flesh and, if so, what effect might that have on the nation's collective psyche? You don't have to look far to find evidence that Michael's "everyone's at it" contains more than a kernel of truth. Dr Marios Pierides is a consultant psychiatrist with the Capio Nightingale hospitals in London, who specialises in treating patients with addictions. "The man who tells you he hasn't looked at pornography on the web is the man who tells you he hasn't masturbated," he says. According to the internet filter company N2H2, its database of pages identified as pornography grew from 14 million in 1998 to 260 million in 2003, a 1,800 per cent increase. "One of my colleagues calls internet porn the crack cocaine of the internet," Pierides says. In the past 12 months, I've seen an explosion in the number of people referred to me with issues about it. "I've had many wives complaining about it and simply going along with it, and the number of people in offices is startling. It's now not at all uncommon for me to be consulted by high-flying professionals who fear their addiction will lead to them losing their jobs." According to Mark Schwartz, the clinical director of the Masters and Johnson Clinic in St Louis, "Pornography is having a dramatic effect on relationships at many different levels and in many different ways - and nobody outside the sexual behaviour field and the psychiatric community is talking about it." Statistics about internet usage are often sketchy and raise as many questions as they answer. In 2001, the internet tracking company Netvalue made headlines when it reported that more than a quarter of Britons who had access to the net from home had looked at adult websites over the course of a month. Of those, students (23 per cent), manual workers (15 per cent) and professionals (almost 13 per cent) were the most frequent visitors. Now consider the near exponential increase in internet access in the past decade. The Office for National Statistics recorded that just 9 per cent of UK households were online in 1998; The amount of time spent online seems to be expanding too. Last month, Google claimed that the average Briton now spends more time trawling the web (164 minutes a day) than watching television (148 minutes). It seems fair to assume that not all this time was spent innocently shopping on eBay or doing homework. Given such growth, talk of pornography flooding into Britain's homes as never before is neither hyperbolic nor judgmental; now it is accessible and affordable for the majority of the population, anonymity guaranteed at the click of a mouse. In 2004, the American internet tracking service ComScore revealed that more than 70 per cent of men aged 18-34 visit a pornographic site in a typical month. "It's a high number," one of the company's analysts told The New York Times, "but it won't shock anyone who's worked in the industry." But nor is he entirely comfortable with his own situation. "When I talk to you about this for the first time, I feel queasy. I'm not talking about the ethics of pornography or the exploitation of women. Whatever I ought to feel about that, that's the easiest bit for me to rationalise. What am I lacking in my life and my marriage that I need this? I'm 32 and sometimes I think I'm getting more confused, lost in cyberspace. But the most baffling thing is that I can say all this to you, but when I go home tonight I'll probably boot up my machine and start all over again." I had found Michael through a friend of a friend, and e-mailed him a couple of weeks before our London meeting. I told him I was writing about how the internet had affected people's relationships - more specifically about how the online revolution had brought the guilty secrets of pornography into men's erotic lives. For someone who spent so much time on line, he seemed awkward, cool to the point of terseness. It took a while before he told me his background: a happy childhood; two degrees - a bachelor's from a red brick university and an Oxbridge PhD; a relatively high-flying job in academia that he liked rather than loved. The really personal stuff was left until we met face to face - a face that seemed the antithesis of the pasty-faced onanist: shaven head, broad smile, good-looking in a slightly ruddy way with a self-deflating sense of humour. Had he ever had problems establishing relationships with women? "Eight or ten relationships, flings, whatever, since I left university." It's something I'd dabbled in occasionally for a long time. When I lived in London I would occasionally get magazines from a news stand outside Victoria station, always at night. But it was only really when I got the internet that I got serious." In the days before broadband, downloading pictures was painfully slow. He instead turned to MSN's chat rooms, which have since closed down after the internet service provider became nervous about their ability to police paedophile activities. There was a sort of tingle of expectation - adrenaline - perhaps as the modem started to whine. I once read that some people get turned on just by hearing that sound. "I'd be seeing a girlfriend but I'd choose to spend time getting aroused online rather than with her. A couple of hours a night for a week, if I got a chance." By the time he was married the sessions sometimes lasted until three or four o'clock in the morning, after his wife had gone to bed. "Was it a sign that something was wrong with my relationship or that something was wrong with me?" These days, Michael spends little time in chat rooms and more downloading pornographic pictures and videos from websites (he says that he prefers websites that show more natural, less silicone-enhanced women). His wife's absence on business trips gives him time and opportunity to seek them out. Has his online life changed the way Michael relates to her? I know I love her, although our sex life seems to have tapered off as I watch more. On a bad day, I feel it's gnawing away at some human part of me." Jane Haynes knows all about the vagaries of human behaviour. For almost 20 years, she has practised as a relational psychotherapist, having trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst. Her consulting room at the Group Analytic Practice in London is discreetly tucked away in a mansion block near Marylebone Road. A box of tissues on the arm of the sofa suggests the hidden dramas that take place here, but Haynes radiates a soothing calm. Never judgmental, she expresses wry wonder at the tangles in which people find themselves over sex.
She stresses that she speaks as a clinician rather than an academic, and she tells it as it is rather than as it ought to be: "In the last few years, the issue has come up more and more among the women I see professionally. I'm generally talking about women aged 30 to 40 who are outraged to find out that their husband is looking at some website or other. She is reluctant to take an ideological stance, pro- or anti-porn: "In my line of work I try to get people to understand that there are differences between men and women. And it may be that that, in the sexual arena, those differences are...
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