Preview
O.COM: CYBERSEX ADDICTION
The Passionate Eye
Monday, February 7 at 9 p.m.
CBC
"Seventy per cent of the people who meet the clinical label of sexual compulsives name the Internet as part of the problem."
That's just one of the many compelling factoids dropped by the documentary O.Com: Cybersex Addiction, airing on CBC’s The Passionate Eye.
The film also makes more than one reference to the Internet as the crack cocaine of sex addiction. Seeing the extent of the damage done to the personal and professional lives of the four online addicts featured here, the comparison to the notorious street drug seems valid. One of those addicts, Nicole, is a woman in her 30s who has lived much of her life in Calgary. Nicole's favoured online venues have been racy chatrooms, often complemented by intimate webcam contact.
O.com recounts Nicole's descent from simply playing around with chatrooms to inviting unknown men over for sex and, ultimately, making an online suicide attempt. She speaks candidly of her chatroom exploits. "A lot of them (men) are doing some pretty weird stuff on those cameras," she says at one point. "It's amazing they can type at the same time."
In the documentary, Nicole also demonstrates her pre-log-on ritual of dressing provocatively and putting on plenty of dark makeup to compensate for the poor video quality of most web cameras.
Nicole's willingness to tell her story with unrelenting candour was greatly appreciated by O.com producer-director Melanie Wood. "Nicole is such a brave soul," she says. "I really admire her and I still talk to her a lot."
Another cybersex addict featured in the film is Alan, a former lawyer in his 50s, who recalls the day they brought Internet-equipped computers into his office by claiming, "That was a gift from the devil. I got the only computer in the office with the monitor turned away from the door."
This luxury soon afforded him the opportunity to surf the ’Net for pornographic images incessantly, until eventually he could hardly concentrate on anything else and he'd done great damage to his legal career.
"The point I try to make philosophically is these aren't crazy people that I'm showing," says Wood of her choice of subjects for the film. "They are ordinary people from completely varied backgrounds who for one reason or another went down this dark tunnel on the Internet."
A considerable amount of time has passed since Nicole shot her segment of the film and she has mixed feelings about seeing the documentary for the first time. "Probably in some ways it will be hard to watch," she says, "but I am totally in touch with what was going on in my life at the time.
"If this (film) is something that reminds me of probably the worst period in my life and I look back on it and say, ‘Hey I made it through,’ it's a good thing."
Looking back to the height of her addiction, Nicole says one of the biggest draws for her was the instant appreciation. "Most of the men who use those chatrooms are pretty hard up, so to be made to feel like you're worshipped by someone you don't even know, that was more of the addiction for me. Having someone say ‘You're beautiful and I'll do anything for you’ – that was more of the appeal of it for me. It was not so much getting the sexual kicks out of it."
Today, Nicole admits that she still dabbles in some of her past online activity. "I don't do it anywhere close to the extent I was at the time (of the film), but still the chatrooms beckon."
However, she adds, "I certainly won't be taking the risks that I took back then, like meeting a stranger or something like that. I suppose I could always fall back into it, but I don't want to." |
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