With Teens and Internet Sex, Curiosity Can Become Compulsion

Initially, the UC San Diego freshman visited online sex sites because he had become so anxious during two dates with women that he couldn’t speak. For him, looking at pornographic photos on the Web was a relief from the pressure of interacting with real women. But the freshman quickly progressed to watching pornographic videos online and then to visiting interactive sites for online sex.

Eventually, his cyber sex encounters became so compulsive and disruptive that his grades dropped and his father began receiving exorbitant credit card bills for the services.

The freshman’s story is told in “The Sex Lives of Teenagers” (Plume, 2001), written by Dr. Lynn Ponton, a professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco. “It was so easy,” the freshman, whose name was kept confidential, says in the book explaining his attraction to sex sites. “I was in control. I knew what was going to happen next. I even felt like I was getting experience. I’m not sure when it started to change, but it was like it started running my life.”

Less than 3% of adolescents are “addicted” to cyber sex, said Ponton, but she and other mental health professionals say that the cases are troubling for many reasons. What happened to the freshman, whose father introduced him to pornographic videos as an adolescent in a misguided attempt to educate him about sex, is what is happening to other young men who are shy, insecure and have difficulty relating to a prospective romantic partner.

“This boy had started using these sites in high school and then went to college where a lot of boys become addicted to online sex because they are lonely,” said Ponton, who usually is contacted by parents after they get the credit card bills, up to $600 for online sex services. “These boys are low man on the totem pole and they don’t know how to ask a girl out on a date, so they go to these [interactive sites] for sex. What concerns me is I have already seen a lot of boys who can’t stop using Internet sex sites and they don’t have the ability to interact with a normal girl,” Ponton said.

Indeed, the fusion of sexuality and the Internet has created new and uncharted influences upon the development of adolescents and young adults.

In cyberspace, adolescents and teenagers flirt, talk dirty, send each other photos and have “cyber sex” with people they might never encounter face to face. In roughly 80% of pornographic sites, said Ponton, women are featured in an abusive way, in a state of degradation or as a victim of violence, thereby uniting sex and violence.

When those sex sites become a part of a boy’s sexual response trigger (which means sexual arousal cannot be reached without them), breaking the sexual compulsion becomes particularly difficult, Ponton said.

But the intersection of sex and the Internet isn’t all bad. “The Internet has become a place where teenagers can try flirting with each other without much risk,” said Ponton, who called it practicing relationships. The problem for girls, though, is they sometimes present themselves online as one or two years older than they are and they are more vulnerable to falling in love with a person about whom they have little real information. Aside from the issue of sex offenders trying to meet young girls or boys, some psychologists worry that teenagers who create online relationships are missing out on developing critical social skills.

“They are bypassing early social skills and jumping into these charged interactions that are sexually explicit or situations in which there is aggressive flirting,” said Chris Kraft, a psychologist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Marital and Sexual Health, Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit. “Adolescents are not always ready to deal with such things. Being exposed to such explicit information can speed up the sexuality of adolescents who, we know, are sexually active earlier and earlier.” The average age at which teenagers become sexually active in the U.S. is 16, Kraft said.

About 70% of 15- to 17-year-olds reported they had accidentally come across pornography on the Web, with 35% of girls and 6% of boys saying they were upset by the experience, according to the Kaiser survey. About 57% of 15- to 24-year-olds believed being exposed to online pornography could have a serious impact on those younger than 18; 41% said it’s “no big deal.” No one really knows how many teenagers are intentionally visiting the sites, but for some the discovery is more than “no big deal.”

“I actually had a boy who was 16 and he would be looking at pornography with his 12-year-old sister and he would turn to his sister and say, ‘Let’s try this,’” said Kraft, who added that over the last couple of years he has seen more adolescent boys dealing with compulsions for online sex.

“This is a good example of how this graphic material is overwhelming some adolescents when it comes to sexuality. Adolescent males are at the height of their sexual development and the amount of masturbation is high during this period, which is normal. But it’s a highly vulnerable period to be aroused by this graphic material.”

Potentially, Kraft said, adolescence is a period when a fetish could develop. Exactly how fetishes develop is still a matter of debate, but one prevailing theory is that sometime in early childhood or early adolescence, just as sexual maturation is occurring, a child will become aroused by an idea, object or image. If the arousal is intense enough, the theory goes, the child will work to repeat the experience and, at some point, the trigger object or idea becomes necessary for sexual arousal.

“This wouldn’t be a problem but everything that is a fetish that you can imagine is available on the Internet now,” Kraft said. “Seeing a lot of this imagery ... normalizes it for some adolescents. Not all adolescents will respond the same way. But some don’t necessarily know that they are learning unhealthy sexuality. The Internet can give a skewed impression.”

What’s a parent to do? Is a V-chip the answer? Teenagers are so computer savvy, Ponton said, that many know how to hack through a V-chip, plus computers are widely available outside the home. One of the best things parents can do, Ponton and Kraft agreed, is talk openly about sexuality and encourage children to get information from them rather than from the Web.

More important, parents should become computer literate themselves, check out various sites, supervise online activity as much as possible, counsel teens not to give out their address and intervene if an “online friend” appears to be an older person posing as a younger person. Kraft advises parents to remove computers from bedrooms and place them in a central room.

Sexual development and risk-taking are a normal part of adolescence, Ponton said, and unfortunately parents cannot control either one.

“Our best tool is to help our kids learn to assess risks and to have real friends as well as online friends.”

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Dr. Lynn Ponton recommends the following pamphlets: “Adolescent Safety on the Information Highway” (1998) and “Child Safety on the Information Highway,” (1994). To receive copies, call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at (877) 446-2632. Kathleen Kelleher can be reached at ka thykelleher@adelphia.net.