Despite the fact that "pornography addiction" is not a recognized psychological condition, talk show hosts continue to treat it as if it were real. And today, Oprah Winfrey was no exception.
Her first guest on Wednesday's show was singer Kirk Franklin, a three-time Grammy winner with 20 number one gospel hits ... but with a "dark secret": Since the age of 8, he'd been "addicted" to sexually explicit magazines and videos, claiming, "From my first look, I was hooked."
Of course, the fact was that Franklin was from a broken home, adopted by a 64-year-old aunt when he was very young, and by his own admission, sex was not something he could discuss with the elderly woman. Perhaps worse, when he was still a preteen, he took the story of his addiction to his pastor, who told him that he'd "grow out of it."
"'Someday I'll grow out?' I grew in; I grew deep," Franklin claimed. "Magazines and videos were like company for me."
This craving continued even after he got married, he said, and the fact that he saw so many fellow church members "doin' dirt" didn't exactly inspire him to stop looking.
"That's when I realized how much it was an addiction," he said, "because I figured, if I find somebody, fall in love and get married, well at least I'll have somebody I can be with and I won't feel bad. Then after marriage still didn't take away that urge ..."
"I never saw a married man faithful to his wife, coming up," he added. "Even in church, I never met a guy who was faithful to his wife, in love with his one wife and not messing around. I never saw those images. It's like everybody's cheating, everybody's watching porn."
And considering how many churches this world-famous gospel singer must have attended over the years, that's one hell of an indictment.
Before marriage, however, he had no shortage of lovers, describing himself as a "ho."
Franklin's wife Tammy joined her husband on stage, and Kirk told how he had tried to "make porn ... part of our marriage, to watch it with her, and she's looking at me like, 'Oh? I don't know who you think I am, but you better turn that off.'"
If there was any discussion between the partners as to why he wanted to watch porn and she didn't, that never came out during the hour-long program, but there certainly seemed to be a question as to whether the couple was sexually compatible. A later discussion related Kirk's asking Tammy to "dress up" for their lovemaking to add "fire" to the experience.
Kirk's "rock bottom moment" came when, after he'd driven to a remote dumpster to discard his videos and magazines, he found himself unable to sleep, and at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, he drove back to the dumpster in his underwear and dove in to retrieve his stash.
Tammy surprised her host by admitting that Kirk had come and told her of his addiction himself, and surprised her even further by saying that the admission didn't make her angry.
Still, Oprah questioned, "Weren't his expectations of you sexually unrealistic" because of the porn
"I'm okay with doing a little something different," Tammy admitted, "add a little spice to the marriage, a little fire, but it started to get to the point where it was all the time."
But, "it made me feel awful," she told Oprah. "You don't want to feel dirty with your husband... I wasn't feeling that this was sacred, that this was special."
"Sacred?" "Just how religious is this woman?" one might ask.
Although Kirk has been "clean" for five years, he admitted that he'd had "slip-ups" – apparently, just about every time he had a fight with Tammy.
One unintentional bit of humor (and revelation) crept in when Oprah started to say, "I think the church is hypocritical in many ways, because they pretend ..." then stopped, apparently because of some off-camera hand signals from her producer, because Oprah then said, "Okay; watch it now ... But we all know this is true. The church can be hypocritical in that it is scornful of certain behavior, and then the people who are scornful of the behavior are the very ones who are doing it; you know what I'm saying? Y'all know what I'm talking about!"
No doubt true – but careful; don't offend your core constituency, Oprah!
More interesting than the guests were the montages that led into each segment, with Oprah intoning in voice-over, "Once thought of as a small seedy underworld of smut and sleaze, today porn has gone mainstream, almost glamorized, and there's almost no avoiding it... The biggest money, $20 billion worth, comes from adult movies. Every year, 11,000 titles are produced. And guess how many rentals of videos and DVDs that are triggers for porn films? $800 million. This is way bigger than Hollywood – way, way bigger."
"In a recent poll, 47 percent of Christian families say pornography is a major problem at home," she continued. "Even 40 percent of clergy admit to visiting websites that are sexually explicit and more than half admit that it is a temptation."
Gee, you'd think with that many religious types finding pleasure in looking at sex acts, the church could easily come to the conclusion that it was "God's will" ... but not today; not on Oprah.
Later, she said, "Experts call the Internet the crack cocaine of sexual addiction. Porn is and has always been the number one business of the Internet. There are more than four million pornographic websites. A quarter of all Internet search engine requests are porn-related; that is 68 million per day."
The final segment of the show brought out Rebecca, who wrote that her husband Josh was "addicted" to Internet porn – so of course Oprah had to bring both on the show.
If Josh was in fact addicted, it didn't appear that he was exactly recovering yet; he admitted that he'd last looked at porn online just two weeks ago.
"It's not pleasurable any more," he said. "Now it's a compulsion."
In fact, obsessive-compulsive disorder is a recognized psychological condition, and the obsession can be anything from frequent hand-washing to avoiding cracks in the sidewalk (think TV's "Monk") ... to looking at sexually explicit materials. It can usually be controlled by medication ... but somehow, the "sex addiction expert" Oprah brought on to comment on Josh's "porn addiction," Rob Weiss, never got around to mentioning this relatively effective treatment.
"I think of sex addicts as being drug addicts also, only their drug is their own neurochemistry," Weiss said. "Sex addiction not about sex, and certainly not about orgasm."
"Can you cure yourself?" Oprah asked.
"No," Weiss replied.
After predicting that her mailbox and blog would be flooded by comments on the show, "We will do this subject again," Oprah promised.
Somehow, we don't doubt it.
