Self abuse

28 June 2003

Sean Thomas confesses that his addiction to Internet porn landed him in hospital

The insatiable nature of male sexuality means that it has to be curtailed. And in the past it was. Women were chaste and/or hard to get; pornography was naff, embarrassing and costly. But then along came the Net, which revolutionised things. To men, the Internet said, 'Hey, lads, this is different, now you can have as much sexual stimulation as you want; now you can see as many naked teenies as you like.' And men, of course, have not attained the ability to resist this kind of temptation. It's like giving beer to Eskimos; we don't have the enzymes to cope. Nor, in the secular 21st century, are we encouraged to resist desire. Women without money are told to give in to their acquisitive urges and buy on credit. Advertising everywhere tempts already obese children to scoff another family-sized bucket of KFC. It is the same with sex: we're taught, through magazines and television, that it is almost unhealthy not to explore every kink in our sexuality for fear of being repressed. And so we get the problem with Net porn: marry the infinite porn resources of the Net to the endlessness of male sexual desire, underpin it with consumer culture, and men can end up practically frigging themselves to death. As I nearly did, until I got so sick and bored that I finally stopped.

Granted, this analysis is not a solution. But the fact is that there are no simple solutions. For the government to set a limit on the sorts of things people are allowed to post or access would be as interfering and wrong as to set a limit on the number of beefburgers we can eat in a week. Men must be free to choose to spend all their waking hours in the Spanking College if they wish, but they should also be aware of the dangers.