Ian Kerner’s SADD Anti-Porn Logic

A while back, CNN’s resident anti-porn commando Ian Kerner came up with the term SADD, or Sexual Attention Deficit Disorder, to describe what happens when a guy watches too much internet porn and then doesn’t care whether or not his lady-friend gets the attention she deserves.

Though Kerner has annoyed me with his sensitive new age guy anti-porn rhetoric for quite some time, this is where I, personally, have to get involved. What Kerner did in making up SADD is to cheapen and minimize a real disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD.

Though he’s got “PhD” after his name, Kerner doesn’t appear to be  a clinical psychologist, and his bio is far from specific about what degrees he has in what subjects from where. All I can really say for sure is that Kerner has never claimed to be a clinical psychologist or a marriage and family therapist. But even if he was Freud, he wouldn’t get to revise the DSM willy-nilly. Cataloging new disorders is a serious process. This isn’t something you do just because you feel like it.

Incidentally, this all occurred in the middle of Kerner backpedaling after stating explicitly in his CNN column that female infidelity was more serious than male infidelity. I don’t feel the need to comment on that assertion, since more than 1,200 CNN readers already did so. But when it comes to minimizing a real disorder — there, I start to take things personally.

See…I’m someone with the (real) diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, from one of those nice people with MD after their names. I get cranky when people forget their keys and say things like “OMG, I’m so ADD!” Try saying that around me some time. I may remain polite, but you’ll note a little deepening of my crow’s feet and a widening of my nostrils. That’s the gremlin that lives inside me pounding his sledgehammer on my brain stem. I will not punch you, but you will have lost some of my esteem.

ADHD is a real disorder, and I struggle with it every day. Using it as shorthand for “spacy” or “flaky” is insulting and offensive. Using a barely-altered variation of it as a shorthand for “doesn’t give a damn whether his lady friend enjoys himself” is even more so.

When it comes to SADD, Megan Van Schaick at Cafe Mom’s The Stir said it better than I could, and ripped Kerner a new Wikihole while she was at it:

Men get accustomed to the instant gratification and novelty of porn and then are unable to perform in a real world situation. Poor wittle babies…Get off it. This is just another excuse for guys to be lazy in bed.

…The Internet isn’t what’s turning your guy into a two-pump chump. SADD just gives him a “valid” reason to skip foreplay and make sex all about meeting his own needs….But nothing says he has to take that attitude….He can choose to pay attention. And if he chooses not to, it’s because it was a conscious decision, not because of some stupid disorder made up to get him off the hook.

And Van Schaick managed to do it all, if you read her comments closely, without being porn-negative. She does say that porn is inherently self-centered, but in that I agree with her. That’s both porn’s advantage and, in relationships or in individual cases, its potential disadvantage. If couples choose to share it with each other, its self-centered nature is one of the things that becomes its greatest strength, just like sharing sexual fantasies. Giving each other permission to be totally self-centered, within negotiated boundaries, is perfectly healthy. Being totally self-centered in a way that your partner is uncomfortable with is a relationship problem that goes way beyond “porn addiction.”

Speaking of which, the fact that Kerner has long painted porn as being strictly a male interest is another problem, but I don’t hold that against Van Schaick. Kerner’s the one who’s made up SADD as a strictly male “disorder” with female collateral damage. That means that any discussion of the “disorder” can and must boil down to the exact kind of self-centered bullshit men are often socialized to indulge in — a central ingredient in male privilege. Those of us who grow up past a state of emotional adolescence  have to deal with it one way or the other, regardless of whether we “unlearn our privilege” in some hippy consciousness-raising seminar on the Great Meadow in Santa Cruz, or just grow up enough to give a fuck what happens to people we love, and care how those people are feeling.

I can already hear a chorus of apologists who believe pornography drives men “out of control.” To which I say Talk To The Hand — and yes, I washed it. As someone who suffers from the real Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Predominantly Inattentive Type, I struggle daily with attentional situations where my focus is not something I control. ADHD is not an excuse, a game, or some way to describe what “everyone’s becoming” in this age of the internet. ADHD is real.

But adopting its name to describe men who compulsively use pornography implies that they as “out of control” or more out of control than I am. Is their “disorder,” then, more serious? Am I “out of control” if I succumb to my ADHD symptoms and eat 60 bon-bons and make myself sick, or stare at YouTube videos of cats slapping pit bulls for 10 hours instead of writing the novel I’m on deadline for? And if so, does it matter — given that no one is going to write that novel for me?

Kerner doesn’t get to “dub” a new disorder just so one set of problematic behaviors falls conveniently in his area of expertise. Brains are big, and the psychiatric profession is big, too. Psychiatrists, psychologists, licensed clinical social workers and marriage and family therapists are trained to help guys who jack off too much and/or don’t care whether their lady friends enjoy themselves. Let me say that again: They are trained to help.

If someone you are in a relationship with compulsively uses pornography, I highly recommend relationship therapy with a trained mental health professional. If someone you are in a relationship with is inattentive to you in bed, you have my sympathy — and that person does not have Kerner’s phantom “SADD.” What that person “has” is a tendency to be inattentive to you in bed. Take that at face value, and if it’s because of compulsive pornography use, then that’s what you discuss — not some made-up disorder. You discuss it as what it is — garden-variety disrespect and lack of attentiveness. If your partner refuses to address an issue that bothers you, that’s a very bad sign. But they’ll do it whether or not you wave a diagnosis at them.

Don’t go to a therapist with a pre-diagnosis. Go to a trained mental health professional — again, a licensed marriage and family therapist, a licensed psychiatrist, a licensed clinical social worker, or a licensed clinical psychologist. Go with a list of your grievances or concerns and your goals for the relationship  and your sex life — not the opinion of an Ask Men writer who’s never met you or your partner but feels like generalizing about men.

You know who gets to diagnose mental and behavioral disorders? Psychologists, psychiatrists, qualified marriage and family therapists. You know who gets to define new ones? The same. Not a writer for CNN, and not an advice columnist for Ask Men.

If you’re a human sexuality studies chauvinist, feel free to rail against the slow response of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual all you want — I don’t like it any more than anyone else does. You can bitch about the psychiatric field being “broken.” I’ll agree that psychiatry and clinical psychology are broken in many ways. They’re insufficient for many cases, including some major ones related to sexuality.

But is the DSM really so broken that, rather than using a flawed and frequently insufficient set of clinical guidelines developed by highly-trained professionals, we should let someone outside the American Psychiatric Association hierarchy unilaterally “dub” new disorders without peer review, and put them out there in the general press for self-diagnosis?

Image: Jennifer Massaux by Justin Ridler for Perk