I’m hoping you see this response. I actually tried getting in touch with you a number of times. I have your email address, and I spoke with your academic advisor who said she was going to pass along your number. I actually wrote an article in response to what I could find about the research, which hasn’t been published yet, but I’d love to include your input and talk to you more. Please do get in touch. My email is bonnie [at] heroine-sheik [dot] com. I really would love to hear from you!

-Bonnie

I am the researcher for the Cybersex study which was published by various media outlets. Unfortunately, so much of what you report is misquoted and presented differently from what was originally said. My sample was a group of men and women recruited from cybersex news groups, so by mere virtue of where I recruited them, they were more likely to be heavier users than your average porn surfer.

I also think that depressed and anxious people are likely to be drawn to chat-lines etc just as much as people spending hours a day online is likely to likely to lead to depressive symptoms. Thank you SusanC for your comments above!!!! This is not a causal relationship, it is merely correlational, but your average person on the street does not have any understanding of statistics and the media like to create a story. But it is really hard to find lots of women to fill in cybersex research questionnaires because far less women engage in the activity. And I went out of my way to find sites that women were more likely to use. My sample consisted of about 9 % females, and other more representative studies have found around 15 % of the sample to be females.

Overall, I do not think that cybersex or online sexual activity is a bad thing and for the majority of people, they can manage their time online quite well and find it an enjoyable distraction or a way to meet new partners or flings. But as yet, I have not published my study and hope to do so mid 2009. But thank you all for your comments. There is loads ore intereting stuff that I researched than just the stuff on mood. And my five minutes of fame has been fun!!!! :)

Cheers

Marcus Squirrell

As far as I can work out, the research paper behind this story is:

Squirell, M. R. Psychological Dimensions of Online Sexual Activity. In proceedings of the 43rd Australian Psychological Society, Hobart, Tasmania, September 2008.

Unfortunately, the paper itself doesn’t seem to be online. (Cue the usual rant that in some other subject areas – like computer science – most of the major conferences put their proceedings online, for everyone to access for free, and these guys need to get into the 21st century).

Searching for that paper online was a load of fun. As I typed “squirell cybersex” into Google, my heart sank at the thought of all the Furry links that it was going to return.

I ought to get hold of the paper before commenting further, but I’ll note that webpronews quotes Squirell as saying that “But there’s also a chance that depressed people are spending time on these sites to help lift their mood or reduce stress”. So the unjustified leap from statistical correlation to causation is probably just bad reporting by some of the journalists who have reported on the story, rather than in the original research paper.

On the face of it, it seems quite possible that depression causes cybersex, rather than the other way around: you’re stuck alone at home, lonely and bored, and go and log on to the net to find someone to talk to.

People have cybersex for lots of reasons, but one of them is people whose real-life relationships have jsut broken up, looking for a replacement sexual activity. Now, people whose relationships have just broken up may be depressed, and they may be looking for cybersex, but the cybersex probably didn’t actually cause the depression.

Also: sampling bias. Suppose you go into a gay bar, and ask everyone in there to fill in a survey (this is actually done quite often, for e.g. evaluating the risk of AIDS/HIV epidemics). It may turn out that everyone in the bar was a guy. This doesn’t mean that women don’t exist, or that lesbians don’t exist, just that the kind of bar you went in to mostly attracts guys. Similarly, if a sample of people engaging in cybersex doesn’t include any women, this is a hint that the researcher wasn’t looking in the right places to find them.