THERAPYVILLE—A young Brooklyn-based male writer who uses the pen name Isaac Abel has published articles with Salon and The Atlantic about self-professed porn addiction issues he experienced growing up as a millenial private schooler. The second article, posted Friday on theatlantic.com, “Was I Actually 'Addicted' to Internet Pornography?” builds on “Did porn warp me forever?” which was published six months ago on Salon.com, We don't actually know if the writer is young or male because s/he could actually be any age, gender or persuasion. Where pen names are concerned, we take nothing for granted.
But no matter; in the same way one enjoys reality shows that are anything but real, confessional journalism that may be neither confession nor particularly journalistic can still offer an entertaining read, even if the underlying thesis remains unpersuasive. In this case, Isaac Abel, a biblical moniker if there ever was one, whose professional writing career appears to have begun with the Salon piece, is able to paint a plausible enough portrait of an electronically enabled Portnoy whose mouse substitutes for a nice piece of liver, and who gorges himself on "porn even before [he] had first ejaculated.”
This supposed reversal of the natural order of things has extreme results, according to Abel, who bemoans the fact that “I never even had the chance to learn how to achieve an orgasm without a voyeuristic element—through an exploration of my bodily sensations or fantasies of intimacy that I conjured myself. I—and I don’t think I’m alone here—conditioned myself with the help of Internet pornographers to pair the feeling of ejaculation with the specific images that those sites provided. And even years later, I couldn’t cum without them.”
Assessing the situation from the presumably more mature vantage point of 23, he laments, “Even now, my ‘fantasies’ are essentially rooted in the fantasies of my 14-year-old self.” Those teenage fantasies by definition veer toward the deviant, he adds, because a preference for “age discrepancies in sex,” “rape or S&M—or any “fantasies of power and domination”—is a “nearly predetermined result for an immature adolescent being given a vast selection of pornography with no guidance.”
Like other millennials—so many of them stuck, it would seem, in the role of lab rats in a vast social experiment testing the boundaries of sensory overload on unsuspecting innocents—Abel depicts the disheartening results as nothing to be particularly surprised about. After all, “A decade before we were having intercourse, our neural pathways associated ejaculation with an addictive, progressive perversity that demanded a superlative overstimulation—skipping from climactic scene to climactic scene so that it’s always the most novel, deviant, kinky.” How the hell did you think we were going to turn out, he seems to be crying.
In his follow-up article, Abel picks up on the porn addiction topic, which has now achieved an ever more prominent role in his personal road to happiness, not least because its existence as a fact of science remains hotly contested. Having already admitted in the previous essay to having dealt with something sexually problematic for just about his entire life, and having in the interim received "hundreds of personal emails from people I'd never met, detailing their relationships with Internet pornography," Abel decides it is time to launch himself “on a rather academic investigation with some of the world's leading experts on ‘porn addiction,’ to find out what's been going on inside my head and what it says about who I am.”
The resulting article is unfortunately not terribly academic, at least as far as that term is generally understood in academia, not least because of the author's apparent belief that he can objectively use self-analysis of his still-confused sexuality as a basis from which to judge the viability of his interviewees’ theories. Sorry to say, but even an older pen name would find such arrogance to be a fatal flaw; with a young pen name, it comes off as soundly narcissistic, which may also be the point.
Already predisposed to the “neural pathway” theory, it is hardly a surprise then that Abel begins his academic inquiry in complete agreement with the findings of “Marnia Robinson and Gary Wilson, a science writer and science teacher who are married and the founders of YourBrainOnPorn, [and] leading voices in the [science of how porn affects the brain] space.”
Conversely, he quickly rejects the more clinically based opinions of Dr. Marty Klein, a pro-sex therapist and writer, of whom he writes, “Dr. Klein's critics note that he has been defending pornography against censorship since the 1980s (apparently to the adoration of the industry; he is listed as a ‘porn star’ on Adult Video News' website) and assert that he has not adequately taken into account just how different Internet porn is from its antecedents.”
While it is true that Dr. Klein, as the author of America’s War on Sex, has been an anti-censorship advocate for years, it is hardly the case that he fails to recognize the influence of the internet on his patients. Having interviewed him, I can attest to that. As to the “porn star” listing comment, we are all sadly enshrined as “porn stars” in that particular database, including many company owners. It’s a limitation we have to live with until it is fixed, but no more fraught with meaning than that.
More problematically by far of course is Abel’s insinuation that Dr. Klein’s pro-porn bias influences his anti-addiction model beliefs. After all, he suggests that if AVN likes Dr. Klein enough to grant him “porn star” status, it stands to reason that Klein would reciprocate with a stance against addiction. The only problem with this theory is that Dr. Klein is not a knee-jerk apologist for the adult entertainment industry and never has been. To the contrary, he has always been critical of industry practices he disapproves of while remaining supportive of sexual expression.
Much of this criticism actually feels personal in nature, which may explain why Abel’s main complaint about Dr. Klein appears to be that he feels ignored, and even worse, criticized, as if Dr. Klein’s refusal to accept a porn addition model represents a personal set-back for Abel’s personal progress.
“Dr. Klein,” he even writes, “informed me by email that I was more alone than I thought: ‘[I] do NOT see the epidemic of young men with porn-created erection problems that Robinson wants to help ... she's probably making a sampling error.’”
Abel, of course, identifies as being a part of that epidemic, which of necessity puts him at immediate odds with Dr. Klein's position and aligned with Robinson and Wilson's insistence that porn addiction can actually be seen (and thus proven) in brain scans courtesy of the relatively new field of neuroscience.
Ironically, only one day after The Atlantic article was posted, Salon published an article on just this subject, titled Pop neuroscience is bunk!, which had been excerpted from their book, “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience.” In it, the authors are highly critical not of neuroscience as a field of study as much as it's vulnerability “to being oversold by the media, some overzealous scientists, and neuroentrepreneurs who tout facile conclusions that reach far beyond what the current evidence warrants—fits of ‘premature extrapolation,’ as British neuroskeptic Steven Poole calls them. When it comes to brain scans, seeing may be believing, but it isn’t necessarily understanding.”
While no one wants to mitigate the impact of the “thrill and shame" Abel says he felt when as a young teen he would sneak “downstairs to the family computer once the house was dark” and “settle into the polyester-cotton seat of the swivel chair and open a browser," and while one does empathize with his by now fully articulated need to “have my struggle recognized, so that I can stop wavering with useless guilt over my behavior,” do we really all have to believe the same thing in order for his struggle to be recognized? Really, is that now a millennial requirement for the rest of us? Really?
What if Abel and all the others are wrong; what if it is they who are rushing to judgment and neuroscience as they think of it really is bunk? Or what if the truth lies somewhere in the middle, which it usually does? It really doesn’t matter in terms of Abel’s own personal journey and course of treatment—which he should pursue anyway—unless he demands that every therapist and doctor accept porn addiction as a fact and prescribe the same general treatment for him, which he seems to be doing.
But even while he seems resigned to the idea that for people like Dr. Klein, "Rich qualitative data and physiological evidence may never be enough to ‘prove’ the existence or non-existence of porn addiction as was true with tobacco," he refuses to let go of the absolute need for acceptance of the diagnosis. "So it's worth asking," he challenges his readers, "would the consequences of formally recognizing ‘porn addiction’ be good or bad?”
For Abel, the answer is of course a resounding yes, one must say it exists if only “to mitigate the “profound psychological effects of being unrecognized—suffering, and being told it's either your fault, you're making excuses for yourself, or you're making it up altogether."
One must do this, in other words, because Abel insists it.
