The invention of addiction to pornography

SummaryThis article outlines a genealogy of knowledge and practices regarding “addiction” to pornography; a sexual “disorder” that supposedly affects mainly men, and meaning an “excessive and uncontrollable” consumption of sexually explicit images. We shall firstly investigate how this new medical terminology appeared and spread: the start of new management practices for “sex-addicts” in the United States at the end of the 1970s; the development of medical expertise in the 1980s at the intersection between several disciplines (psychiatry, psychology, sexology, psychoanalysis) and emerging fields of knowledge, such as sex-addiction, sexual compulsion, addiction to the Internet; then circulation of this concept in the French media from the year 2000 onwards. By analyzing the different public discourses held on this pathology (not only by clinicians, but also by “ex-addicts”, journalists and anti-pornography militants), and shedding light upon the contradictions to be found in the portrayed “evidence” of its existence (case studies, screening tests, epidemiological surveys), we will then consider from a same epistemological and political perspective both scientific (expertise, evidence, diagnoses) and laymen practices (testimony, evidence, labeling) that target porn-addiction. By examining the sexual norms that underpin the medical definitions of this pathology, the article then raises the question of the type of normativity produced by these practices. Rather than seeing it as increased interference from sexual health professionals in the lives of users, the article looks at this process of remedicalization of the use of pornography as a revival, at a more microphysical level, of ordinary practices of control of the self and others.