Cybersex: Human Sexuality and Internet Chat Rooms

Definition We are currently living in a world dominated on many fronts by the Internet. For some people, the Internet is their primary means of life – they communicate solely by e-mail, instant messages, and message boards, they shop on-line, and they meet new people in Internet chat rooms. For this group of individuals, communication with the outside world is limited to the daily routine of work. As a result, the Internet is altering patterns of social communication and interpersonal relationships. This is nowhere more true than in the field of sexuality (Cooper 1998). Furthermore, sex is the most frequently used search term on the Internet today (Brown 2002). With the rapidly enlarging role of computers in homes and offices, psychotherapists and addiction counselors are increasingly seeing clients with a new problem, "cybersex addiction." Cybersex can be defined as the use of digitalized sexual content (visual, auditory, or written), obtained either over the Internet or as data retrieved by a computer, for the purpose of sexual arousal and stimulation (Schneider 1994). Cybersex is a phenomenon unknown before the mid 1980's. As use of computers and the Internet has exploded in the United States and other countries, accessing the Internet to obtain sexual stimulation has increased considerably in frequency. In 2000, about one in four regular Internet users, or 21 million Americans, visited one of the more than 60,000 sex sites on the Web at least once a month (Griffiths 2001). In addition to viewing and/or downloading pornography along with masturbation, Dr. Deborah Corley and Dr. Jennifer Schneider (2002) say that cybersex activities also include reading and writing sexually explicit letters and stories, visiting sexually oriented chat rooms, placing ads to meet sexual partners, e-mailing to set up personal meetings with someone, and engaging in interactive online affairs sometimes using electronic cameras for real-time viewing of each

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