Pornography and Sex Addiction in the Workplace

Posted under Sexual Addiction on Friday, July 24th, 2009

The porn industry is a global obsession: Every second, $3,075 is spent on adult content, more than 28,000 Internet users are viewing porn, and 372 Internet users are typing adult terms into search engines to find porn. Every 39 seconds, a new pornographic video is produced in the United States. Even more shocking, 70 percent of all online porn access occurs during the workday.

CNBC news aired a TV special that took an unprecedented look inside the $13 billion dollar porn industry. One of the many people interviewed in the show was Michael Leahy, a recovering sex addict and founder and executive director of BraveHearts, a website that helps people who are fighting “for freedom from sexual exploitation and sexual addiction.” Michael is also the author of Porn @ Work, Porn Nation, and Porn University.

Michael wrote a guest blog called “Recognizing a Sex Addict @ Work” for CNBC. In it, he describes running in to an old friend he used to work with at a software company in Atlanta. The friend started telling Michael about an employee who was recently fired after being caught and reprimanded twice in less than a month for looking at porn during work.

The friend said to Michael, “I just don’t get…the guy gets caught by someone who sees him looking at porn in his office. So the IT department checks his computer and discovers he (has) a bunch of porn loaded on his hard drive. He basically almost loses his job over it…Less than a month later, they catch the guy looking at porn again. But this time, he’s used another employee’s computer and logged on with their user name and password. Of course they found out it was him and fired him for it on the spot. What an idiot! I mean, he had to know that he’d get caught. Right? How stupid can you be?”

Michael writes that for most people, this is a logical question to ask. But as a recovering sex addict, Michael realizes that what his friend is really saying is that he doesn’t understand the mind of a sex addict at work.

Michael points out that of 61 million US visitors logged into pornographic web sites in March of 2006, every fifth visitor was from an office work station, and that two-thirds of 474 human resources professionals said they’ve discovered pornography on employee computers. Nearly half of those said they had found such material more than once.

In addition, a 2004 study of 350 companies in the US, the UK, and Australia found that one-third of all workers said they’d been exposed to sexually explicit materials by co-workers. In 2003, employees at the UK Department of Work and Pensions downloaded about 2 million pages of pornographic content. Of these, about 1,800 contained child pornography.

Michael writes that while a conclusive diagnosis for sexual addiction should only be carried out by a mental health professional, there are several behavior patterns one can look out for. These behaviors, compiled by Dr. Patrick Carnes, can indicate the prescence of sexual addiction in any environment:

1. Acting out: a pattern of out-of-control sexual behavior
2. Experiencing severe consequences due to sexual behavior, and an inability to stop despite these adverse consequences
3. Persistent pursuit of self-destructive behavior
4. Ongoing desire or effort to limit sexual behavior
5. Sexual obsession and fantasy as a primary coping strategy
6. Regularly increasing the amount of sexual experience because the current level of activity is no longer sufficiently satisfying
7. Severe mood changes related to sexual activity
8. Inordinate amounts of time spent obtaining sex, being sexual, and recovering from sexual experiences
9. Neglect of important social, occupational, or recreational activities because of sexual behavior

Here are a few telltale signs of what this looks like in the workplace:

• Hiding Internet use or secretive behaviors
• Declining work performance
• Withdrawing from others
• Increased irritability
• Losing sleep and declining health
• Declining interpersonal skills
• Inappropriate sharing of sexual beliefs with others

Michael admits that in his own life, he displayed every one of these behavior patterns while at work at one time or another, and that even though he made conscious efforts to hide the behaviors, he was still in denial that any of them were “all that serious.”

“But as my disorder progressively got worse, the symptomatic behaviors and their related consequences became more obvious to family, friends and coworkers,” he wrote. “As such, the presence of four or more of these showing signs within a six month period of time is a strong indicator that this individual may have a serious problem and require some help or intervention.”

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