Cybersex: change of sexual customs or pathology?

Abstract

The technological advancement developing – among others – in computerization and the Internet has influenced all spheres of social life and every individual, irrespective of the place of residence. It has become an indicator and a tool of the progress of civilization, science and economy. However, one should reflect on whether the Internet poses a threat, not only for the human intellectual development but also for the psychological foundations of humanity, its humanitarianism, the application of the scale of values in everyday life, including such fundamental indicators as emotionality understood as a basis for friendship and long-lasting partnership relations. 
The on-line contact has reduced human sensitivity and emotionality, has limited human sensuality and the sense of reality on one hand, while establishing self-confidence, the sense of attractiveness (including sexual one) and deviousness, often resorting to a lie and jeopardy carrying legal sanctions. 
The sixth sense (premonitions), cultural, racial and national differences do not exist in principal in the contacts of that kind. The Internet has become a substitute for the desire to reach the feeling of happiness and of everything that is burdened with difficulties of implementation in real life. At this level, the Internet does not know moral norms and principles of ethics do not exist. 
The man sitting in front of the computer screen loses the sense of reality, of decorum, and the reality ceases to be an attribute of time; what begins to mater is an uncontrolled life in the fiction of on-line connections. For the domination of the Internet over the common sense and psycho-social prerequisites of real life has entered even the sexual life of its users. 
The number of people using the Internet for on-line sexual activity (cybersex) has been increasing continuously for over ten years. The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy confirms that the majority of therapists are able to diagnose and conduct therapy for adults addicted to various forms of cybersex, while half of them feel deficient in their preparation for acting in this capacity in case of children.