The Marine staff sergeant knew things were spinning out of control. What he once thought was a harmless flirtation with online porn had become a full-blown obsession.
But looking at photos and videos of men and women having sex wasn’t hurting anyone, he tried to tell himself. His wife never needed to know.
“It’s like the old line about what happens on deployment, stays on deployment,” the 34-year-old infantry platoon sergeant says.
Except that he couldn’t escape the images and the need to look at more. At night, after his wife was asleep, he would sneak out of bed and spend hours online. Secret subscriptions were piling up. What started as passive voyeurism led him to prowl online hook-up sites and have webcam cybersex with strangers.
“I just started needing more and more of it constantly more,” he says. “It felt like I couldn’t stop.”
Military therapists and chaplains say they hear such stories with alarming regularity. Online erotica has been a marital minefield since the dawn of the Internet. But with the explosion of Web 2.0 — social networking sites, video sharing, blogs, wikis and mash-ups — the seamy side of Porn 2.0 is picking off military marriages and killing promising careers like a shadow army of well-placed snipers.
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