As I grow closer to receiving the dreaded senior discounts, I never realized that the path to geezerhood was such a slippery slope--even for those of us in fields like psychology and sex therapy. I can finally appreciate that while change is inevitable, staying relevant is not.

Nowhere do I find greater evidence of this than in the glut of sex-on-the-Internet threads on the sex-therapist listserves that I belong to. We seem to be in the midst of a sex and porn-addiction panic unlike anything since the 1870s when the anti-obscenity crusaders were given near dictatorial powers to help stem the flood of pornography that was thought to be ruining American minds.

Unfortunately, I see virtually nothing on the my listserves about the hours young adults spend playing online role-playing games like World of Warcraft, or music video games like Guitar Hero, or the need of the young to be constantly connected electronically. The main fear of my colleagues is when porn is on computers and smartphone displays.

Context is easy to ignore when giant crotches fill the screen.

As for young adults in college, I think we are failing to see that Internet porn might not be the same for them as it was for those of us who grew up coveting the Penthouse centerfold. We view it as a threat to relatedness when relatedness appears to be a beast of a different color for members of the younger generations.

I'm talking about young adults who can be having a conversation with you while texting three different friends and firing up their iPods. Being present is very different for them than it is for the psychoanalyst me, who spent years trying to create what I hoped would be the perfect listening environment.

I don't for a moment question that obsessions and compulsions can overtake and destroy people's lives no matter what their ages. But viewing sex on the Internet with generational blinders on is limiting our abilibity to help. It puts us on the precipice of sounding like the geezers of old who declared Elvis and rock music to be agents of the devil.

One of the reasons why we are so focused on porn and sex on the Internet as threats to emotional relatedness is because we fail to view porn as being on the same spectrum as World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero, texting, and the relentless tethering to the Internet. We aren't able to see the vaginas from the trees, or should that be the trees from the vaginas.

Relatedness is being defined differently by a generation that has given itself the option to have hooking-up sex as well as to enter into more traditional relationships. Members of the wired generations who are experiencing loneliness or alienation in spite of their constant connectedness need our help. But telling them to leave their devices at the door won't work, and stigmatizing porn on the Internet as the vortex of emotional dysfunction badly misses the bigger picture. Rather than throwing our tired addiction paradigms at them, we need to step back, observe and learn.

Mind you, I am no fan of mainstream porn and the shrink in me becomes unhinged when I think about pre-teens and younger teens watching it. I don't believe they have the developmental maturity to put porn antics like ass-to-mouth scenes, double-penetration and rough sex into context. They are particularly vulnerable because most of their parents have abdicated when it comes to talking to them about sex in an actual relationship. But I think we need to look at it differently when the people we are so worried about have reached college age and at least have one leg planted into adulthood.