SEC porns it up. What were they thinking!?!

Late yesterday afternoon, I got a call from a harried producer for ABC World News asking me if I could make it to their studio in downtown Washington D.C. within the hour. They wanted a taped interview of me to use on the evening news and they needed me “in the chair” by 5 (I made it in time, but the interview got edited out…that’s TV for ya).

Turns out yet another report had just been released about the excessive use of porn at work in the SEC, this one more shocking than the last. I sighed and told her “That doesn’t surprise me in the least.” She chuckled and quickly updated me on the shocking revelations, including one SEC attorney spending up to 8 hours a day accessing internet porn and another staffer making 16,000 attempts to access blocked porn sites from his work computer in one month (by the way, that comes out to about 800 attempts a workday).

Then came the question of the day, the same question that I was asked several times during my interview with their Capitol Hill correspondent and heard asked repeated throughout the day by disbelieving reporters and news commentators: “What were they thinking?” “I mean, c’mon, 16,000 times! 8 hours a day! One female accountant tried accessing porn sites 1,800 times in a two week period and had 600 porn images on her hard drive.

When the lawyer with the 8-hour-a-day habit filled his hard drive up, he downloaded so many images to CD’s and DVD’s that he kept them in boxes in his office. Others disabled filters, found workarounds by using flash drives, even used time-tested strategies like searching Google images for porn (no filter or blocker on earth can detect porn in an image, they all use algorithms to search for “clues” in a web sites alphanumeric tags and data). “What were they thinking?”

The answer, as I described in my latest book on the subject “Porn@Work”, is both simple and complicated. The simple answer: not much. That is, they’re not thinking about much else than finding just the right kind of image they’re looking for so they can get off. Yeah, we’re talking the “M” word, and it’s not Madoff (as in Bernie, the guy they should have been thinking of). While the financial markets were going through a collective melt down and the world teetered on the bring of financial collapse, our six figure public servants hired to be the watchdogs were doubling down instead on naughty.com and skankwire.

Sexual arousal and masturbating to porn at work (yeah, they really do that at work…behind closed doors, in the 6th floor bathroom, in the employee parking lot) has become our Great Escape, our tension reliever of choice, men and women alike. “But 8 hours a day!? Risk losing your job over just one more look at that amateur video on youporn? What gives?” OK, this is where it starts to get complicated.

In a nutshell, and trust me I know about this subject all too well (yeah, I used to do the 8 hour a day thing and lost some jobs over it before getting help), here’s what’s really going on…I see it all the time:

1) They probably started viewing and using porn back when they were pre-teens

2) When they discovered that porn + masturbation = orgasm, their “relationship” with porn began changing from that of a novelty to becoming their escape from reality (stress, boredom, anger, hurt).

3) With the advent of Internet porn, they discovered they could now easily and anonymously access huge volumes of pornographic material in secret. As a result, their porn habit escalated in frequency and variety.

4) As their use of porn increased in frequency and variety, the neurochemistry of their brains continues to change as well. As tolerance builds up to these increased levels of dopamine production, sexual stimulation and sexual pleasure decreases. The result is desensitization and the need to discover ever more arousing material in order to experience the same level of sexual stimulation.

5) The user crosses moral boundaries and increasingly compromises personal values of decency in seeking out new, more arousing material. The sexual shame and guilt that sets in acts as high octane propellant in the development of an addictive cycle. Filled with shame and guilt over their secret sexual behavior, the user turns back once again to their drug of choice – pornography – to numb the pain and disappointment. An addict is born.

Why did I take you through all of that? Because at the end of the day, the ONLY way anyone can explain the seemingly insane behavior of those in the SEC who are being investigated is to think of them as addicts – sex or porn addicts – who will do things in pursuit of the next high, the next buzz, that ordinary citizens think and know is totally illogical and even insane.

Only addicts would continue trying to access porn from their computer at work, knowing all too well that they’re probably being monitored and could lose their job. Only addicts would resign in disgrace from a job and most likely a career rather than seek out help. And only addicts can get lost in a fog of their own obsessive acting out behavior to the degree that 1 hour spent looking at porn at work could turn into 8, day in and day out.

And here’s the scariest fact of all – what this investigation has exposed for all the world to see is only the tip of the iceberg. Don’t believe me? Just wait for the next sex scandal headlines to appear. It won’t take long. It never does. Tell me what you think about it.