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By Annie Ruth C. Sabangan, Senior Reporter
(Fourth of five parts)
THE day has just begun. Quezon City’s silent
roads have waken to the honking of horns, stifling smog and a motley
crowd. Outside a two-story commercial building in the city, vendors
have started to ply their trade, beggars occupy their usual pitches,
pedestrians fill the sidewalks.
But on the second floor of that building, eight
people, mostly young adult men, are doing things discordant with the
turns of the biological clock. They have skipped one Friday night of
sleep. Their minds are superactive, as if driven by a dose of
cocaine.
They have stayed at the building’s cybercafé,
huddled in cubicles, from dusk to dawn. All of them are immersed in
cybersex chats made more interactive by web cameras.
A few blocks from the building is the University
of the Philippines. At the U.P. College of Engineering a male
student has become infamous among his batch mates.
They say he has become a walking zombie, often
staying up late at night chatting, most of the time in Internet sex
rooms. His foray sometimes lasts for 12 hours. He often goes to
school spaced out. He has become so oblivious to grooming that he
has neglected to bathe. His tangled hair reeks of a pungent smell
down to his body. He flunked his exams and failed to graduate.
If these people would be subjected to a
psychological assessment, it wouldn’t be hard to diagnose that
their lifestyles are symptomatic of an emerging psychological
disorder called cybersex addiction—a phenomenon extensively
studied by psychologists in First World countries but which remains
unexplored in the Philippines.
Nevertheless, cybersex addiction can be compared
to other types of addiction, like substance abuse, gambling or
sexual abuse in its corporeal sense, explains Joseph H. Puyat,
professor of psychology at the University of the Philippines.
“Someone is addicted to something when he or
she is no longer under control of his or her behavior. If it is an
activity, the activity is already controlling that person. It
becomes one’s obsession,” he adds.
Four signs of cybersex addiction
Puyat says addiction is generally characterized
by at least four abnormal signs of behavior—anxiety and/or
personal distress, maladaptability, statistical frequency and
deviance from social norms.
An addict feels anxiety and/or personal distress
when he cannot engage in cybersex.
“If you don’t do it, you feel that your day
is not complete. You feel distressed, and relief comes only when you
engage in cybersex,” Puyat says.
“Maladaptive” behaviors manifest themselves
when cybersex hobbles a person from performing his or her regular
routine or from being productive in other aspects of his or her
life.
Maladaptability arises from cybersex through
these examples: when one’s working hours in a regular job are
eaten up by cybersex, when a student’s time for his or her
homework is consumed by Internet activities leading to gross
irresponsibility or when males addicted to cybersex no longer look
at women as persons but “think of them in terms of breasts and
vaginas.”
When these maladaptive behaviors are reflected
in a person’s attitude and ways of interaction, they become not
only a personal problem but a societal burden, Puyat says.
Maladaptive personal problems arising from
cybersex addiction infect society when, for instance, Puyat says,
“the activity already controls your behavior and you cannot
control your impulses that you either start to harass people, tell
them [sexual] jokes that they don’t like or give them unwelcome
remarks that discomfit them.”
Statistical frequency is measured, albeit
subjectively, by the level of engagement of a population to an
activity.
To determine disorder in cybersex, one must take
a representative sample of who are into it, determine the usual
Internet use of the sample population and get the average number of
people engaged in that kind of use. If individuals are found using
the Internet divergent from the common use, one is led to conclude
their behavior is abnormal.
Deviance from social norms happens when a
person’s lifestyle runs counter to the values of his community so
that it looks perverse in the social mirror.
Puyat considers statistical frequency and
deviance from social norms superficial. “These standards are
subjective. If, for example, an ordinary person strips in public,
people would interpret that as a sign of lunacy. But when ‘bold’
stars—say Katya Santos or Diana Zubiri—do that, it’s no longer
abnormal,” explains Puyat.
Addicts and nonaddicts
Not all drinkers become alcoholics. Similarly,
not all cybersex chatters become cybersex addicts.
The difference lies in wanting or indulging in
the activity. A man may have had engaged in Internet sex chat at one
time or another, but he would never make it a part of his everyday
life, much less the center of his life. A husband who has had a
passing interest in pornographic photographs of young women on the
Internet would not be an avid visitor of the site and eventually
solicit a quick sex fix.
There’s nothing wrong in thinking about sex
most of the time, says Puyat. “It’s normal for some people at
some stage in their lives. Like for teenage boys. It’s something
biological.”
Sexual fantasies are also normal, he observes.
“What differentiates normal from abnormal people is that normal
people do not act out their fantasies. It’s like the Ally McBeal
type of fantasy that after you fantasize, that’s it,” he says.
However, between two people facing a situation
conducive to abnormal sexual behavior—one who is not into cybersex
and the other often engaging into it—Puyat says it is easy to
surmise that the one preoccupied with cybersex would engage in
actual sex. “But then again, it’s just a presumption and it
stops there,” he points out.
Cherrie Joy F. Billedo, a psychology instructor
at U.P., says the literature on Internet addiction set a clear
distinction between addicts and nonaddicts.
She notes that people who often get addicted to
the Internet are into a “synchronous form” of online interaction
like chatting.
Facades and excuses
Like other addicts, most cybersex dependents do
not admit their addiction although their behavior indicates
otherwise. “Either addicts don’t admit it or they don’t
recognize they have it,” says Puyat.
Dr. Robert Weiss, founder and clinical director
of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles, thinks cybersex is
dangerous because “it reinforces and normalizes sexual
disorders.”
The Times’ online interviews with cybersex
chatters and research on Internet sex websites elucidate this point.
The Times notes that most of those who are hooked on cybersex either
believe or pretend nothing’s wrong with what they do.
For instance, an Internet editorial written by a
Filipino cybersex buff made it appear that cybersex is all fun and
safe.
Some of the advantages of cybersex that the
writer noted were: (1) no sexually transmitted disease and no
unwanted pregnancies, (2) hooking with someone is easy; you’ll go
to the same chatroom so it is expected that everyone is horny, (3)
you don’’t have to pay for a good day, (4) cybersex partners
never complain if you want another; sexual partners do, (5) cybersex
doesn’t make you feel like a loser; you can be what you want to
be, (6) you are allowed to have sex with a 16-year-old girl on the
Internet; in real life you’ll be sentenced to life and (7) you can
do it in the office without having to wait until everyone has gone.
Getting beyond these facades, rationalizations
and excuses on engaging in cybersex would, however, disclose deep
cuts in the inner feelings of an addict, according to Weiss.
The inner feelings of sexual addicts (including
cybersex addicts), Weiss noted, could fall into one of three
categories: shameful, secretive or abusive.
He says shame is characterized by “a feeling
of inner worthlessness or despair about ever being good enough.”
“[Shameful acts] become the hidden inner core
of feelings, which end up sabotaging relationships, careers and
self-esteem.”
Secrecy, on the other hand, he says, is the
“hallmark of sexual addiction.” Sex addicts often
compartmentalize their lives because they hide their sexual
behavior. Consistently wrapped in a “web of lies and
manipulations,” addicts often hide from those who are close to
them “while using justifications, rationalizations and outright
denial to lie to themselves.”
The abusive behavior of sex addicts “can run
the gamut from manipulations to lying in order to be sexual,” says
Weiss.
“Potential sexual partners are being abused
when invited into situations they don’t fully understand, when
there is a clear inequity of power in a relationship or when the
right of sexual choice is taken away,” Weiss noted.
Not the cause
Is the use of the Internet the cause of cybersex
addiction? Puyat and Billedo say it’s not. Most of the people who
engage in cybersex, they say, already have unresolved problems
before they indulged in the activity.
Finding themselves in a deadlock and in very
stressful situations, these people look for ways to rid themselves
of their burden until they develop compulsive behaviors.
“That’s how addictive behaviors develop. You
engage, for instance, in cybersex in response to a stressful
situation and because that behavior helped you resolve the stress,
you engage in it again and again to resolve your stress,” explains
Puyat.
Billedo says the Internet acts like a
facilitator—much like a peddler making the drug more accessible to
the user.
Like other forms of addiction, cybersex cannot
be resolved overnight. “Although the original problem has been
resolved,” Puyat says, “most of the time the addiction stays.”
(Addendum: The second and third parts of this
report were written by Annie Ruth C. Sabangan.)
Part 1
| Part 2 | Part
3 | Conclusion
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