Hundreds of millions of people the world over use the internet every day to shop, chat, work, read the news and plan their next seaside holiday.
But many also go online in search of a little extra-marital cybersex, making the internet a new vehicle for adultery, suggests a book recently published in France.
”The internet will soon become the most common form of infidelity,” said Yannick Chatelain, co-author of In Bed with the Web: Internet and the New Adultery and an expert on new technologies.
”It is obvious to all that the computer has already unsettled relations within the family,” he added.
Cheating online offers new possibilities, according to co-author and psychologist Loick Roche. ”Infidelity has always existed but the internet makes it easier to remove inhibitions, and to graduate from virtual secrets to the real thing.”
”We are talking first and foremost about the 35-to-45 age group, people already settled and perhaps a little tired of married life.
They want something else and they are not afraid of new technologies, which can be discouraging for those over 50,” Roche explained.
For younger internet users, meeting people online — including sexual encounters — is already the status quo, he added.
Cyber adultery takes many unexpected forms that can, according to the authors, endanger a couple’s relationship. The British statistical office, they note, has pointed to the internet as contributing to a rising rate of divorce.
Online sexual chitchat with strangers in discussion forums, specialised gadgets that enhance online ”gender switching,” web-cam sex — all of which can lead to face-to-face encounters — are a few common cybersex activities.
Internet service providers, said Chatelain, often try to have it both ways by condemning online pornography while doing little to block intensive spamming of end users with ads for porn sites, web-cam encounters and sexual performance enhancers.
The online sex market ”will account for $70-billion (â,¬57-billion) in 2006,” according to Chatelain, noting that there are about 400 000 porn sites in the world.
Cybersex practitioners are mainly men, accounting for 80% of ”adult” website users. But the percentage of women visitors to such sites continues to climb, according to Netvalue, which measures internet traffic.
No country is immune from the virtual world of cybersex. In 2001, Spain topped the list ahead of Germany, Britain, Denmark and France, according to one study of pornographic website traffic in Europe.
Ranked by time spent, rather than number of visits, Germany comes out on top with an average of 70 minutes a month, followed by France at 45 minutes.
The rapid expansion of broadband, or high speed, access to the internet has also fuelled the increase of traffic to porn sites.
A survey of 15 000 internet users conducted by MSNBC in 2004 revealed that 32% of women, and 13% of men, feared that the web encouraged adultery.
Another study confirmed their fears: 30% of internet users who have online lovers, according the a US survey published on the BBC news website, admit to having met their virtual paramours in the flesh.
Chatelain and Roche, both of whom teach at the Grenoble School of Management, argue that newer mobile technologies will simply aggravate this trend.
Case in point: cellphones with built in cameras that make it possible to snap and send photos by e-mail (or post them on a website) within minutes, one reason they have been banned in public pools and sports clubs in Australia, German-speaking Switzerland and Norway. – Sapa-AFP