Internet porn isn’t just about sex – it’s about collecting

It’s easy to assume that internet pornography unleashes an uncontrollable sex urge – and that’s why (to put it delicately) men drive themselves to exhaustion in front of their monitors. But there’s more and more evidence that, like computer games, online erotica latches on to obsessive-compulsive traits in our personality. It’s a subject I explore in a long chapter of The Fix devoted to internet porn – probably the addiction that worries the experts most:

Internet pornography can unearth obsessive-compulsive traits. Enter the words ‘collector jailed’ into a search engine, and you immediately come across stories about the compulsive hoarding of internet porn. An accounts clerk from Lincolnshire was jailed for downloading the largest collection of child pornography discovered in the UK – 500,000 images. In Pittsburgh, a man was jailed after police found 60 hard drives filled with images of underage girls; the defence tried to claim that Tourette’s syndrome had led him to collect them compulsively. In any case hoarding on this scale would have been impossible without access to internet porn. These cases came to light because the material was illegal – but we should also bear in mind that the same technology allows men to amass large collections of images that may be explicit but don’t actually break the law. It’s hard to see, in fact, how anyone with an obsessive-compulsive personality and a weakness for online porn can avoid getting the two mixed up. The internet enables users to painlessly download and catalogue thousands of files; arranging them is often part of the fun of owning a personal computer. Add sex to the experience, and collecting porn can turn into an all-consuming pastime.