The explosive growth of Internet sex -- ranging from pornographic Web sites to steamy chat rooms -- may be creating a group of people with sexual compulsions they cannot control. The results of a study conducted at the Stanford and Duquesne Universities reported that hundreds of thousands of Internet users show compulsion for porn sites, X-rated chat rooms or other sexual materials online. I venture to guess that 90% of them are on America Online. In one of the first studies to estimate the number of ``cybersex compulsives,'' these researchers say it is at least 200,000 and millions more are at risk.

``This is a hidden public health hazard exploding, in part, because very few are recognizing it as such or taking it seriously,''  And why should we take it seriously? The study never says. They define someone as “cyber sex compulsives'' if they spent more than 11 hours a week visiting sexually oriented areas and scored high on a 10-item questionnaire about relationships and attitudes toward sex. Eleven  hours? That is less than 1.5 hours a day. I know people with 28.8 modems that spend that long just reading their e-mail attachments, are they addicted to that too?

Earlier analysis of the some 9,000 validated responses showed that more than 90 percent of respondents spent less than 10 hours a week on cybersex, pouring cold water on the idea that most of the millions of daily Internet users were surfing for pornography. I don’t think so.  If they really wanted to know how long people spend online looking at porn why ask them when you can just look at the logs that are kept by these web sites and get some hard evidence of how long they are online instead of relying on people that notoriously lie on sex surveys.  I still think 90% of people are online looking at or for sex.

I think the word addiction is tossed around a little too much. Everything is a disease or another. I think it’s just a ploy by scientists to get money to study things. Addictions need to be treated, they sound really horrible and so probably are a great way to solicit money to treat it and even more to prevent it. They called this “an epidemic that nobody is talking about.'' Maybe because people don’t feel comfortable blaring out how often they masturbate in the basement.