GLENDORA, Calif. – If you study crime statistics, or any other statistics that track trends, you’ll quickly notice something undeniable: All trend lines start at zero, not because the events or actions they track never happened before, but because zero represents when tracking the phenomenon began.
Take the heinous crime of rape, for example: In most jurisdictions, spousal rape didn’t exist, legally speaking, until sometime in the past 40 years.
If you live in Tennessee, for example, prior to 2005 (2005!!), forcing non-consensual sex upon your spouse was considered “rape” only if the perpetrator “was armed with a weapon or any article used or fashioned in a manner to lead the alleged victim to reasonably believe it to be a weapon” or “caused serious bodily injury to the alleged victim.”
A Tennessee bill passed in 2005 changed this, finally, but would any reasonable person argue there was no such thing as unarmed spousal rape in the state prior to this bill?
What changed was not the nature of the behavior, but solely the legal disposition toward something that always should have been considered criminal.
You can go on down the line with this same observation, applying it to all sorts of things we now track and measure but prior to a certain point we did not.
Along those same lines, some pundits and observers are now talking about a new sexual orientation they refer to as “pornosexual,” which is loosely defined as people who prefer watching porn to having sex with another person.
Right off the bat, though, if you think past the catchy moniker, there’s an immediate issue with this “new sexual orientation” — namely, there’s nothing at all new about it.
Forgive me for sounding highfalutin, but I’m going to appeal to reason again: Does anybody reasonably believe aversion to human intimacy is a new thing?
If you think internet porn is the primary force behind some people’s aversion to intimacy, consider Sigmund Freud wrote about and discussed the phenomenon at length. Granted, most academics and professionals in the field of psychiatry disavow Freud’s ideas these days, but considering the man died in 1939, I still think it’s safe to say anything he wrote about at length can’t be an entirely “new” phenomenon — or an internet-driven one, for obvious, nature-of-linear-time-related reasons.
Beyond when and how the “pornosexual” orientation came into being, if excessive porn-viewing alone is the cause of a person’s rejection of interpersonal sexual intimacy, does this mean masturbation has no role in the bargain?
In other words, if I watch porn without doing anything more to pleasure myself along the way, does it seem likely I’d find this a satisfying replacement for sex? Somehow, I doubt it.
Yes, porn is more accessible now than ever before, which necessarily has resulted in more people being exposed to it more often. Does it also follow that a higher percentage of those who watch porn do so excessively than ever before, or that a higher percentage than ever before develop an aversion to intimacy?
In the Medical Daily article linked to above, the author asserts “for about five to eight percent of the adult population, porn use can evolve into an addictive behavior.”
Even setting aside the statistical claim is on shaky ground to begin with (considering a great many experts in addiction and behavioral disorders haven’t accepted excessive porn-viewing as an “addiction”), does it really make sense to re-classify existing behavioral disorders as new forms of sexual orientation? If so, what does that mean for our understanding of sexual orientation in a larger sense?
If a woman prefers masturbating with a vibrator to having sex with a man, is she now a “vibrosexual?”
If a man who doesn’t watch porn, but still prefers jerking off to having sex with another person, does this render him a “wankosexual?”
Or maybe, just maybe, instead of coining catchy new terms that really have nothing to do with sexual orientation, it might be more productive to consider the possibility there’s nothing new under the sun here — other than the new words we choose to describe the same old things.
