These are compelling images, but alas, like the sirens themselves, they are more fantasy than reality. The Examiner, though, chose to stick with the fantasy. Well, that's more than a little misleading. Cooper did find that roughly 8 percent of respondents to his survey said their online sexual activities were causing problems in their lives. But Cooper said that 8 percent figure is close to the estimated 5 percent of the population at large that struggles with sexual compulsivity.
Some people simply have trouble keeping sex in perspective.
For them, porn sites and the alt.sex newsgroups can be as problematic as strip clubs or Juggs magazine. For the rest of us, Net porn just isn't that big of a deal. The media, on the other hand, seem to have their own compulsivity problems with online sex. It doesn't take a psychologist to see that reporters turn every story having anything to do with sex and the Internet into a full-scale scare piece. Maybe they're miffed their own online sites don't make nearly as much money as porn pages.