Josh Duggar doesn’t have a porn addiction. He’s just a hypocrite.
In the original version of the former Family Research Council lobbyist’s public statement about his alleged Ashley Madison account, he wrote: “While espousing faith and family values, I have secretly over the last several years been viewing pornography on the internet and this became a secret addiction and I became unfaithful to my wife.”
The reference to addiction was later removed. But now the ex-TLC star has “checked himself into a long-term treatment center,” according to a statement issued Wednesday by the Duggar family. Several media outlets reported that “Josh Duggar is going to rehab for porn addiction,” as if a “porn addiction” were a demonstrably real thing instead of a concept that should be relegated to the scariest of scare quotes.
Duggar’s problems are many but porn addiction is a psychological fiction propped up by the same moralism that Duggar has espoused for years. By crying “addiction” and going to rehab, Duggar is positioning himself as the victim of an unproven disorder instead of acknowledging his role as an anti-LGBT bully who has campaigned against sexual freedom while rampantly abusing his own.
In other words, this move is business as usual for Duggar: He gets to appear penitent while implicitly sending the pious message that pornography is an evil from which one must be saved. He’s not lobbying for the FRC anymore but that’s a message they can certainly get behind.
As The Daily Beast reported in June, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has rejected the inclusion of “sex addiction” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), once in 2010 and again in 2012, when it was framed as a “hypersexual disorder.” The APA had previously removed the term “sexual addiction” from the DSM in the 1990s, citing a lack of evidence for its initial inclusion.
But despite the fact that the leading professional organization of U.S. psychiatrists has dismissed “sex addiction” based on a lack of research, the term still shows up in popular discourse with surprising stubbornness, reemerging whenever someone like Tiger Woods or Josh Duggar is said to suffer from one.
Granted, the DSM may still add sex addiction in the future if further studies can prove its existence, but current research appears to be headed in the opposite direction.
In June, the largest study of the neuroscience behind so-called “porn addiction” was published in the journal Biological Psychology. After performing an electroencephalogram on 122 men and women, some of whom wanted to cut back on their porn viewing, the authors found that not even these “problem users” displayed characteristically addictive brain activity while watching pornography. This confirmed the researchers’ 2013 UCLA experiment, which came to a similar conclusion.
This doesn’t mean that viewing pornography in excess cannot interfere with one’s marriage or social life. It can. Nor does it mean that people who wish to reduce their viewing for moral or religious reasons should not do so. But addiction treatment may not be the best way to help someone in Duggar’s shoes because, psychologically and neurologically, there is no definitive proof that “sex addiction” even exists.
If “sex addiction” is a fiction, however, it is certainly a useful one.
Dr. David Ley, a clinical psychologist and author of The Myth of Sex Addiction, told The Daily Beast that sex addiction is, in part, “a way for powerful and wealthy men to avoid responsibility when their sexual misbehaviors become public.” Or, as The Daily Beast’s Kevin Fallon wrote of Duggar’s rehab stint yesterday, “It’s not about controlling vices. It’s about damage control.”
Instead of simply admitting that some of the standards of purity he asked others to follow were unrealistic in the first place, Duggar has now been set on the path to “complete repentance,” which, in Duggarspeak, means right back to his old tricks.
Sex addiction is also a profitable fiction. Institutions like the one in which the eldest Duggar son currently resides charge thousands of dollars for porn- and sex-addiction programs without clear scientific backing for their methods. Gawker is currently reporting that Duggar checked himself into the Baptist-affiliated Reformers Unanimous (RU) facility in Rockford, Illinois, citing confirmation from a local reporter. If Duggar is indeed at RU, his program may cost over $7,000.
A spokesperson for RU told The Daily Beast, “We are a private facility and cannot confirm or deny whether any particular person is here.” RU did provide the following clarification about their work: “RU is a biblically based, Christ-centered recovery program designed to rescue, recover and restore those in addictive behaviors with the power of the victorious hidden life in Jesus Christ. We are not a medical facility, nor [do we] call ourselves a ‘treatment center.’ We refer to our residential program as a Discipleship home.”
The Daily Beast asked to speak with one of their experts on sex and porn addiction and, tellingly, received no response to this request.
An addiction recovery page hosted by RU is rife with misinformation. “Pornography is as addictive as alcohol, drugs, or gambling—and this is a proven fact!” shouts one page, with no citation whatsoever. “Fully 50 percent of Christian men struggle with addiction to pornography as well [as] 30 percent of pastors and Christian women,” reads another, again with no proof. Some of the posts are written by a Dr. George Crabb, who argues that “homosexuality, with all its associated aberrations and perversions, threatens to inundate the nation.”
For reference, homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973 and sex addiction followed in 1994, as any physician in this field should know.
RU’s proposed porn-addiction treatment is not exactly scientific either: “Remember that Jesus can heal the unhealable. There is nothing ‘too bad’ for him to clean, and that includes a habit of pornography.”
Like RU, many vocal proponents of the concept of “porn addiction” are religious groups. Several U.S. treatment centers with porn- and sex-addiction programs are either explicitly religious or have a strong religious bent. The Ranch in Tennessee offers an optional “Christian program” to help participants develop “an authentic relationship with Jesus Christ.” Bethesda Workshops in Nashville, which claims—without citation—that “conservatively, at least three to six percent of the adult U.S. population struggles with sexual addiction,” is sponsored by a local Christian church. Desert Solace in St. George, Utah, was founded by a Mormon and supports that religion’s views on pornography.
“The idea of sex addiction is one that is used extensively by religious organizations who have moral issues with sexual behaviors and more permissive sex attitudes,” Dr. Ley told The Daily Beast. “By claiming that sex is an addiction, these moral zealots get to pretend that they are addressing a public health issue rather than imposing their views on other people’s behavior.”
As Ley observes in his blog post on the Duggar drama, a 2014 study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior found that “religiosity was robustly predictive of perceived addiction” unrelated to actual levels of use. In other words, if you think porn is bad—and Josh Duggar does, or at least he has been raised to believe that it is—then you are more likely to believe that you suffer from an addiction.
But you don’t have to belong to a fundamentalist clan like the Duggars to subscribe to a concept of “sex addiction.”
Mainstream American culture is puritanical enough for the non-religious to accept it at face value, too, especially in moments like these when a disgraced public figure retreats from view. When Tiger Woods allegedly had over 100 affairs with women before entering rehab, some called his “sex addiction” an excuse but others bought into the narrative of a helpless addict whose life was destroyed by compulsion.
“Sex addiction is intuitively accepted by much of society because it connects with our deep-seated fear and distrust of sexuality,” Dr. Ley explained. “We are taught by society and the media to obsess about sex but then, when people like sex too much, we tell them they’re addicted to it and they have a disease. That’s crazy-making.”
It may seem simple but it bears repeating in the midst of yet another sex scandal: People can do things repeatedly without being addicted to them. By using the language of “addiction,” we portray Duggar as a man without agency, as someone whose actions stem not from his own self-admitted hypocrisy but from a disorder that the APA does not and might never recognize as legitimate.
Josh Duggar isn’t going to rehab for porn addiction. He’s going to rehab for more of the same religious training that he has already tried to turn into law. It’s a harrowing thought but this may not be the end of his hypocrisy—it may just be a middle chapter.
