Monday, November 12, 2007

Jackin' Jill


Like the dude asked, how're you going to keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?

Pam's House Blend has an article about the ''growing crisis of sexual addiction among Christian women''. Oh my! It's fairly striking proof that the Internet has mainstreamed porn to hear that evangelical Christian women are claiming to be addicted to online smut, in fact something like 34 percent of them according to Christian Woman magazine. Online sexual addiction often leads to serious problems like masturbating and... um, napping. Maybe carpal tunnel syndrome.

I don't know how sexual addiction works- it's fairly hard for me to see a biological imperative as an ''addiction'' in the first place. But, I'm guessing that the standards for ''sexual addiction'' are a lot lower among fundamentalists than they are among the rest of us, no? And, indeed Pure Life Ministries, who claim to cure Christian women of sex addiction via a $5,1000 live-in treatment program, consider masturbation to be seriously out of bounds. I don't know how much of a 'crisis' online sex addiction is for some people, but you have to wonder if it's really worth giving up five thousand bucks and half a year of your life to learn how not to diddle yourself.

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm pretty annoyed at the breadth of things to which the concept of "addiction" has been applied. Internet addiction, porn addiction, sugar addiction...come on already.

Rufus said...

Right, well you can imagine some pathological sexual behaviors, but in this case, it sounds like they're characterizing a normal mammalian sex drive as addiction. And it's certainly different than, say, something like drinking in which wanting to drink every night of the week is a sign of alcoholism. Frequently masturbating or chronically thinking of sex is really just a symptom of being a post-pubescent human being.

clairev said...

not that i agree with calling masturbating and thinking about sex an "addiction" (as in this post), i would like to point out that sexual addiction is very real, is categorized in the DSM-IV-TR and can be just as damaging to someone as a hard core heroin addiction. I read a fascinating book on the subject that my mentor gave me, and was shocked to see how damaged these individuals are, and how low they go to get a 'fix'. i was so saddened by their stories. help is needed for them, and they truly do have a classifiable addiction, but i've got to echo hiromi and rufus here, this is just fucking bizarre.

c

Rufus said...

Claire- "this is just fucking bizarre."

and vice-versa.

Greg von Winckel said...

Since someone has to be the lowest common denominator here, let me just say "hawt."

Rufus said...

Duly noted.

SecondComingOfBast said...

It has to do with the release of chemicals in the brain. Yes, sex can be an addiction, for sure. Once those chemicals are released, the addict constantly looks for the atisfaction he or she derives, and their whole life can revolve around attaining that satisfaction.

Some people crash and burn, while some people adjust, or as the saying goes they become "functional" addicts.

What makes it an addiction is how much your life revolves around it, not just that you like it a lot.

Rufus said...

Right, but wouldn't a lot of us be highly functional sex addicts? I guess, as you get older, less of your life actually revolves around sex. But when you're young, nearly everything you do has sex as a theoretical endpoint. I see what you mean about it dominating people's lives, but I'm guessing the problem with these particular women is that they see masturbating at all as hurting their walk with Jesus.

SecondComingOfBast said...

When you're young your hormones are raging, and I guess in the case of an adult sex addict, this period of time would be the starting point of their addiction. That's just a guess, of course.

When it comes right down to Christian women on a computer, I guess it gets back to what we were talking about in that other thread, the degree of anonymity the internet provides, in combination with a sudden opportunity to discard years (maybe in some cases decades) of societal repression.

I did a post on that thread, by the way, and linked you on it.

Rufus said...

Thanks, I'll check. I usually read your blog every Sunday.

The societal repression aspect is what interests me. Here it would seem to extend to their fantasy lives as well. It would be like calling someone an alcoholic for regularly logging on to an online bar! I also wonder how they get identified as sex addicts. Do their husbands find out about their sex-chat, get upset, and say they need help?

SecondComingOfBast said...

Well, I doubt that all of them or even most of them are actually bona fide sex addicts. It's easy for such terms to be misapplied and overused. To a husband who discovers his wife is doing something like that, sex addiction might be a more palatable answer than the idea he might be a chump, and it's a devastating put down at the same time. Just maybe.

The name of the post is "Lounge Of The Cyberholic", you can find it in the archives near the top of the sidebar, which will save you the trouble of having to scroll down through a lot of other stuff.

Holly said...

Is there any room for someone to advise Christian men to attend to the "marital needs" of their women, so porn won't be interesting? Because women have needs, which are supposed to be met by their marriage partner, don'tchaknow. (Isn't this what the women are told, when their men go in for porn? Not that they're addicts and need help, but that their wives aren't taking care of business.)

Rufus said...

See, my sense of it, and I guess this is probably pretty obvious, is that men and women masturbate. Not all of them, but probably a pretty high percentage. And I think people are ridiculous for assuming that marriage is going to affect that very much. Sure, maybe they'll have sex more and masturbate less. But never masturbate again? Puh-lease.

Therefore, I sort of expect that some husbands will look at Playdude, or even call phone sex, and masturbate, and some wives will read romance novels, or look at porn, or even chat with strangers online and masturbate. I don't really think it says anything about their marriages, their spouses, or them.

To be honest, I think that what you should care about when you're married is that your spouse loves you and wants to have sex with you. But, aside from that, who really cares? I mean, monogamy is fine, but it can be carried out in such an infantile way. Expecting your spouse to never have sexual thoughts about anyone else until they die is like telling them, "You'll wear the same pair of pants for the rest of your life. Or you don't really love me."

But, maybe that's just me.

Holly said...

Oh, sure, I agree totally. It's just always surprised me that many religions have this idealized monogamy of only-your-spouse-and-not-even-yourself. It just irks me that when men do a normal thing, it's their wives' fault. When the wives do it, it's society's fault.

This motivates me to illustrate the Bible in a really lurid way and sell it as proper stroke material.

Rufus said...

Yeah, sometimes you forget how different other people's marriages are. At least I do. And some things that people worry about are just really weird.

I think National Lampoon did an illustrated Song of Soloman back in the 70s that was pretty dirty. It was not as funny as the Onan stained glass window that they ran though.

Greg von Winckel said...

Interesting how THIS topic gets so many comments. Even educated people would rather talk about women masturbating that postmodern literature.

Rufus said...

I'm probably going to change the blog to Educated Female Masturbation Madness.