Sex addiction — which includes addiction to cybersex and porn — is one of the fastest, most destructive addictions on the rise out there.
Unfortunately, the discussion? It’s a joke. It’s always along the lines David Duchovny or Bill Clinton wisecracks. People fail to see that the nature of sex addiction is to destroy every relationship the addict has. It steals the addict from life, costs them friends and families, it shatters the respect others may have had for them, and instills a self-loathing of the lowest kind.
I remember captioning a television show (my day job) about cybersex addiction, for instance, where they stated simple cybersex/porn addictions could be fatal — cases had occurred where an addict remained seated, wrapped up in the porn/cybersex before them, for so many hours, that blood clots and cardiac events killed them. I’d never even considered that possibility.
Or there’s the other side of the dangers — when cyber-addiction isn’t enough and the pursuit of the real deal takes the addict into physically dangerous situations, like illicit sex avenues — and the further the addiction goes, the more they need, so the more they have to spend, so the cheaper and seedier the purchased sex can be, thus the legal and health ramifications escalate. Or the majority get the more obvious, more likely consequence of living a highly-sexualized life: disease.
Nearly 70% of sex addicts get exposed to serious diseases like AIDS/HIV. A whopping 72% report suicidal tendencies. Almost 60% of addicts experience legal issues or face criminal charges, and nearly 30% report professional consequences for their actions. (Stats are from Love to Know.)
Me, I’ve never really liked porn. I’ve never watched any in my home. I’ve never surfed porn sites. I have erotica blogs I follow, photographic ones with really tasty, hot images, but I don’t go for actual “porn” porn.
Hot sex, however, I can dig. I’ve been a voyeur in the past, I like the realistic stuff on film, but porn proper as in seen-everywhere-today kind of more hardcore porn? Nah.
It’s not like I deny myself porn. Somewhere deep inside, though, there are sides of myself that I’d rather not put to the test. I’m happy with the visual fodder I currently indulge in, it does the trick for me, and I like looking at the human body like it’s art, not some side of beef —  a la “stick a fork in ‘er, she’s done.”
Paradoxically, because of this blog, I’m considered to run with the “sex-blogger” crowd, despite my contention, and the echoes I’ve heard from readers, that I have an awful lot more to offer than just smut on this bloggie de moi. I like to call myself a “sometimes-sex blogger”, personally.
Still, I don’t object to being considered a part of the sex blogger community. It’s certainly a part of who I am. I can confess, I do enjoy following a hundred or so really randy, pervy, dirty-minded sex-blogging type folk on Twitter.
They intrigue me to an extent. The range of they inhabit is a pretty fascinating thing — there are a lot who fall in my category, who simply have an appreciation of carnal matters, who could certainly be described as “enthusiasts”. [waves hand] And I like the quips or random comments about lusting after someone or a new toy they can’t wait to receive. It’s all good.
And then there are the people who speak about sex in such a raw, unyielding manner — always talking about the act in such a disconnected way — never referencing emotion or joy or longing. So devoid of heart or matter, passion or sensuality. And they’re pathologically sexually active too — frequent random encounters, daily experiences to report, et al.
It’s like hearing cyborgs talk about colonial duties or something. It’s a little harrowing, like they’re simply mechanically going through the routine of fucking like it’s going out of style, as if to be deprived of a fuck or four today would choke their oxygen supply off. It’s never about a kiss that kept on going through the final act of a movie, or post-sex banter, or fun and games, any of that.
It does nothing to turn me on. And I see it so often of these select people. I keep following them, wondering whether the drama will ever change, hoping they can remember how hot and fun a lower-key exchange — like mussin’ up your clothes with the hottest all-night horizontal makeout session on your sofa since you were 16.
Watching them speak of things so callously… the lack of emotion, the total machine-like execution of their sexual bravado, it hurts my soul a little.
I worry about the internet and its impact on us as a society as far as sex and relationships are concerned. I worry that this endless crass chase of tits, ass, hardbodies, hardcore porn, and the ever-present accessibility of cybersex, that the soul of what makes romance and love and passion so great is going to just… POOF. Vanish.
I worry that kids in the next generation are pushing to experience more sexually at a younger age, and not leaving anything for the journey down the road.
Thanks to my moralistic upbringing, yeah, I was indoctrinated against porn and random sex. I probably hold true to those principals more than I’d like to admit, but for very different reasons than those I was raised under, as I’ve already listed. I don’t do random sex, as I’ve written before, because I can’t do it — emotionally, I just can’t. I’m not that person. I don’t care if others are, but I’m not. And it’s also because I’d just rather not take more chances with disease than necessary. You wanna? Goferit.
Flat-out hardcore porn, though, I wish there were less of it. I wish we were a less vapidly sexual society. I wish we could remember passion, too; the art of longing and the deliciousness of lust. Tawdry dirty on-the-floor sex sure as hell has its place, man. I ain’t saying it doesn’t, but that there SHOULD be an emotional quality behind that dirty-on-the-floor sex.
I believe that the quality of porn out there,  it’s mostly shit. It’s degrading. It’s desensitizing us. It’s not “porn” itself — I think erotica, even full-on filmed sex, is a very different beast than hardcore porn. But I don’t even want to ban it. I just wish the demand didn’t exist, and that it wasn’t as prevalent. I wish people wanted better.
I don’t have a solution. I can’t even begin to offer one.
It’s the problem of our time.
We’re losing our soul and we’re losing our passion. North America’s attitudes about sex — usually either completely anti-sex or totally hardcore about fucking to orgasm — just frustrates the hell out of me. There’s got to be more than this.
What’s left for good old-fashioned dirty-minded keener enthusiast-romantics like me? Geez.

________________________

Are you curious if you’re a sex addict? Want to see the questions that decide such criteria? Some great tests are here. It’s worth noting that estimates say 3-6% of the population are sex addicts. That’s probably on the low side, as many of these stats often tend to be.