Is porn addiction real?

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Oh, Josh Duggar, you sorry piece of work, you.

If you’ve never heard of this guy (as I hadn’t), he’s a former lobbyist for an American conservative Christian organization who has appeared along with his siblings on the reality show “19 Kids and Counting.” (His parents refused to use birth control, saying they wanted to let God decide how many kids to have.)

Duggar made headlines earlier this year for allegedly molesting some of his sisters years ago. He’s now back in the public eye after being busted in the Ashley Madison leak. The married Independent Baptist apparently had not one but two accounts on the site that’s designed for people looking to have an affair.

After he was exposed, Duggar issued a statement admitting that he had been unfaithful to his wife and claiming that he was remorseful. (Ha! Right. You’re only sorry because you got caught, buddy. No one having an affair is sorry while they’re getting away with it.)

Duggar also claimed that he is addicted to porn.

I don’t have an ounce of sympathy for this guy. But as a mom of two young boys, I do worry about kids growing up in an age where porn is so easily accessible and where many start seeing it—intentionally or not—before they even hit puberty. Don`t take me for a prude; I`m not anti-porn. But I do wonder about the effects of early and ongoing viewing of online porn, especially on developing brains.

And being addicted to it? It’s a scary thought.

But is porn addiction real? Expert opinion is as divided as Duggar’s loyalties.

Vancouver doctor Gabor Maté, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, among other books, and cofounder of Compassion for Addiction, says that addiction is addiction, whether it’s to porn, heroin, cocaine, gambling, food, sex, or anything else.

“Anything in the world can be addictive,” he tells me by phone. “It’s not the activity; it’s your relationship to it. Addiction is any behaviour whatsoever that is associated with craving, temporary release, pleasure, and long-term negative consequences. And you can’t give it up despite those consequences. That’s an addiction, so why would porn not fit that definition? By my definition of addiction, it certainly can be an addiction.”

But what about the argument that, well, most guys are thinking about sex 24/7 anyway and “boys will be boys”?

“That’s not the same as a porn addiction,” Maté says. “Being interested in something is not the same as pursuing a behaviour compulsively to the detriment of your life….It becomes a problem when it’s ruining your daily functioning or ruining your spiritual life or ruining your relationship to yourself with the sense of shame you have, or ruining your relationship to intimate others intimate others in a way that makes you into a liar, and that further separates you from others.”

And when it comes to physiological response, the same brain circuits are activated whether someone is addicted to online pornography or opioid, he says.

ALSO SEE: Playboy’s Chief Content Operator on talking to kids about porn

“For a porn addict, it’s not actually the porn he’s after,” Maté explains. “He’s after the brain change that looking at porn causes for him. Like any addiction, it doesn’t matter what the target is, whether it’s a substance or a behaviour like gambling.”

Several studies back up Maté’s view of the effects on the brain of addiction, including porn.

University of Cambridge addiction neuroscientists, for instance, concluded in a 2014 study that porn addicts’ brains light up in response to porn video clips much as cocaine addicts’ brains light up for powder in contrast with controls. The researchers emphasized that their findings did not prove that porn in itself is inherently addictive, they did find that that the younger the user, the more powerfully his brain responded to porn clips.

The Journal of the American Medical Association—Psychiatry also published a study last year by the Max Planck Institute that found that years and hours of porn use correlated with a loss of grey matter in the brain.

Meanwhile, a study that was published in CyberPsychology and Behavior in 2006 that followed Internet users found that accessing pornography online was predictive of compulsive computer use after one year.

Gary Wilson, author of the e-book Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction and host of the Your Brain on Porn website, says that porn addiction is all too real indeed, and that neuroscience proves it.

Internet porn today is far more damaging than more seemingly benign sources of pornography in the past, like Playboy magazines or VHS tapes, Wilson claims. In an article on Psych Central, he says that galleries of short porn clips featuring the hottest few minutes of an endless supply of videos, which began appearing online nearly a decade ago, encourage viewers to constantly search for the “right” clip or seek out the next click, actions that constantly raise dopamine.

“Chronically elevated dopamine is the trigger for the brain changes that lead to addiction,” Wilson writes. “This well-researched and established set of changes is behind the key indications of addiction: hyper reactivity to cues, declining response to everyday pleasure, decreased ability to handle stress, and loss of self-control.”

While Your Brain on Porn has all kinds of convincing material on the addictive nature of porn, there are those who say there is no such thing as porn addiction. Call it an addiction and you can get away with salacious behaviour; with a condition you have an excuse.

David Ley is one of them. The Albuquerque, N.M. clinical psychologist maintains that arguments like those of Wilson are based merely on rhetoric and inferences and that solid research into the brains and behaviours of people using porn simply doesn`t exist.

In a 2013 article in Psychology Today, Ley pointed to a study in the journal Socioaffective Neuroscience of Psychology that used EEG testing to examine the effects of visual erotica on the brains of people who felt they had problems controlling their porn use. The results didn`t reflect any unique brain-related issues whatsoever.

“Like any other human characteristic, sexual desire occurs along a spectrum, with wide ranges of individual variation,” Ley wrote. “The problems and complaints reported by self-identified porn and sex addicts have to do with the context within which these individuals are expressing or pursuing their high libido, NOT with a unique disease.”

What’s hard to deny, however, is that online porn normalizes things like anal sex, gangbangs, BDSM, fetishes, fisting, rough sex, double penetration and more.

How are parents of kids growing up in the wired world to handle that whole side of things? Installing parental controls on home computers is one thing, but you can’t avoid the fact that your cherubs are going to see porn.

Start by talking to your kids openly about it, suggests Marnie Goldenberg, a lawyer turned sex educator who founded the Sexplainer blog to help parents “raise sexually intelligent kids.” She says she can’t say for certain whether porn addiction is legit, but she too worries about porn’s long-term impact on developing minds.

ALSO SEE: Everything you need to know about parental controls

“I don’t know if porn addiction is a real thing or not, but I do have ongoing concerns with young, sexually naïve people utilizing it to learn and to get off,” she tells Yahoo Canada. “Some research indicates that the average age of first seeing it is 11. I want to lead my children on this; I don’t want to take their lead on this. It’s not going to be easy, but we need to explain what it is, who it’s for, and what its purpose is. It’s for adults. Its purpose is to titillate, not to educate. And it’s quite limited as to what real and healthy sexuality looks like.

“[American sex therapist] Marty Klein had this analogy for porn: it’s like the highlights reel of sports,” she adds. “If all you ever see is the highlight reel of a hockey game, you’re going to think that’s what hockey’s like. Then when you go to a game for the first time, you’re going to be like ‘This is boring,’ or ‘This is terrible.’ We need to help our kids contextualize what they’re seeing. It’s about leading them with open eyes.”

Goldenberg also notes that kids simply don’t have the savvy to handle porn safely. She says it’s important for young people to explore and discover their sexuality without porn (or, more realistically, with limited porn) to ensure they’re able to actualize their own desires and pleasures.

“I don’t mean to sound airy fairy but rather feel strongly that porn limits our understanding of what is possible sexually unless we’ve had a chance to decipher our personal limits, or limitlessness,” she says. “Once we have a good sense of that, I think people can engage with porn in healthy and satisfying ways. It’s even possible to engage without compromising your values relating to consent, mutuality, and respect. Young people largely lack the skills, knowledge, and experience to navigate the world of porn without harm.”