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In John's case, his wife's alcoholism was the secret that went ignored. About five years ago, the Virginia grandfather and former vice president of sales for a software company started hanging out on porn sites and viewing photos in newsgroups and chat rooms as an escape from his troubled home life. "There were just so many nights when my wife would fall asleep drunk on the couch and I'd find myself going into the den, bored or sulking, and going online -- just out of curiosity. Eventually it became less tantalizing and more numbing, but I did it anyway," says John (not his real name). He never sent a photo to anyone, only chatted with adults. "I'd just open a picture, look at it, and delete it," he says. What John didn't realize -- his profession notwithstanding -- was that the "empty trash" command doesn't delete delete. His username was traced to an AOL chat room where child porn had been traded; the cops tossed his house and confiscated his computer -- on which the FBI found thousands of un-deleted porn pics. Due to mandatory sentencing laws, John served two years in prison and lost his job, marriage and savings. He's now a convicted felon and registered sex offender.

Would the simple stopgap of a filter have made a difference? "Absolutely," says John. "None of this would have happened if I'd simply stopped having access." John does take responsibility for his own actions: "I know I shouldn't have been there in the first place," he says. "But if I had been forced to stop, I believe that I might actually have taken care of my wife and saved my marriage." Less of a threat to society than to himself, John is convinced that Internet blocks fit the crime better than prison bars. "I never would've gone to the part of town with the dirty bookstores," he says. "I never left my den."

It bears noting that both Ned Dominick and John are devout Christians who ascribe their ultimate resilience, at least in part, to their faith. Many filtering services and other anti-cyberporn weapons -- such as the Promise Keepers' "Eye Promise" accountability software, which sends your Web-browsing history to a buddy, and the much hipper *********.com's "Help at Home" program -- are explicitly evangelical. WiseChoice.net, however, is not messianic in its message; it's not, at least in its promotional copy, explicitly peddling a solution to sin.

"My point of view is that this is not a Christian issue, it's a sexual issue," says Dominick. "I've stopped asking the moral questions about porn. There is a moral issue, but there is a more compelling one: What are we willing to pay for our Internet porn? Are we willing to pay with our marriages, or families, our jobs, our reputations?"


Still, one wonders. Not all compulsive users are born-again Christians, of course. But does something about deep devotion also make one more vulnerable to the lure of the forbidden, like a kid breaking into the off-limits liquor cabinet?

"I know from having talked to so many people who come from more rigid backgrounds -- whether a fundamentalist religion, or the military -- that Internet porn offers this world or view of a kind of life that they could never live, and it's accessible and affordable," says Robin Cato, executive director of the National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity. "They become an easy mark for getting way into it before they really even know what's happened." Enter guilt, shame, and the fear of being found out. "These people may be from homes where sex wasn't talked about, or they've learned, if indirectly, that sex is 'bad.' Yet they have this sexuality that they need to acknowledge and they're not given permission to do that, so it can come out in ways they need to keep secret," she says.

And it's not easy when those secrets are revealed. "We've had a few knock-down, drag-out fights with men who've called to demand that we remove it," says Dominick, "but 90 percent of people we've talked to welcome the boundaries."

That, or they just know when to fold 'em. Dominick remembers one man who "flipped out -- raged and screamed until she took it back off the computer," he recalls. "I thought that was the end of it until about three weeks later, when I got a call from him asking me to set up the filter again. When I asked him what had changed, he replied, 'I'd like to move back home!' She'd thrown him and his computer out. He couldn't come back unless it was filtered."

Not every woman who buys a filter does so for the man in her life. "My husband is out the door by 4 a.m. I used to wake up when he left and think, 'OK, now I can go online,'" says Ivy (not her real name), 43, a St. Louis mom, of her months of caving in to cyber-temptation for up to two hours every morning, until her then 18-month-old son woke up. She first checked out online porn ("to see what all the hullabaloo was about," she says), after her husband Bud, 46, a truck driver, confessed to doing the same. ("I didn't have the problem when I didn't have a computer," he says.) At the time, they were going through other underlying problems: power struggles over money; her postpartum depression. Result: "I'd forgotten that he was on my team and started to feel like he was my enemy," Ivy says. But instead of talking with him and tackling the real troubles, she took the path of much less resistance: go to bed sad and mad, wake up early and lose herself in the online "fantasy" world of these "nameless, faceless" people who had no problems, only pleasure. "The 'answer' became the problem," she says. "I realized the porn was not only robbing my sleep (I was crabby all the time), but it made me want to withdraw from my husband even more. It made me feel good at the moment, but it was just a fix. The rest of the time it made me feel like crap."

Ivy and her husband entered marriage counseling and heard about Web filters. After Ivy installed WiseChoice and the two began to address the primary issues, her 4 a.m. urges gradually subsided, and without much of a fight. "It was annoying at first, but I would rather be annoyed than have my marriage fall apart," she says.

Experts acknowledge that filters can help curtail a compulsion -- when the users have taken a look at their own motivations and want the filter to work. "They can be great tools when someone is really ready to use them," says Cato of the National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity. But, as with other addictions, the choice has to come from within. "You can filter and monitor all you want, but it's not going to work unless you also address why you are trying to escape," he says. "Otherwise it's like just hiding the bottles from an alcoholic." For Ivy, who was more than ready, the filter was a means of tossing the bottles altogether so that she could devote her energy to shoring up not just her will power, but her relationship. "I still struggle with temptation at times, but the counseling is helping for sure. I am learning new ways to deal with stress, getting more exercise and having more conversations with my husband -- who says he understands how it feels to be stressed and want to self-medicate -- before things get out of hand," she says. "We are in this thing together and will fight it with our commitment to each other."