What a Taunt!
These days we vet or measure our relationships
by the amount of sex we’re having.
We’re constantly spun this line that the glue
to a relationship is sex, and without it our
relationship will fall apart.
There are a lot of commercial reasons why that
message is put out. It’s not just insulting,
it’s pernicious. It’s the ‘be happy’ rule
that’s become part of our conditioning.
We’re not allowed to admit our inadequacies,
our less that fulfilled lives. It’s as if
we fear the bubble bursting.
“I’m fine, everything’s alright, of course I’m happy,
I have a wonderful sex life’. We’re all participating
in some sort of mass delusion.
Sex Addiction Myth
There’s no standard definition of sex addiction.
It hasn’t been recognised as a bona fide disease
by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, the medical profession’s bible when it
comes to mental health.
Instead, there are a dozen or so competing definitions.
No two psychotherapists apply the concept in the same
way. A diagnosis is based on a therapist’s own idea
of what constitutes an excessive amount of sex.
The mistake all these “experts” make is to apply the
characteristics of drug and alcohol addiction to sex,
claiming too much sex works like a drug, causing cravings,
withdrawals, tolerance (the need for increasingly powerful “hits”)
and a downward spiral in which sex “takes over their lives ”.
There are many embedded moral concepts in these definitions,
all of which suggest that sex is dangerous, shouldn’t be
“enjoyed too much” and that something that creates imbalance
in a person’s life is inherently unhealthy.
Some “experts” have argued that sex addiction is more
like a compulsion, others that it’s a reaction to
sexual trauma, though there are many people who’ve
been abused and have none of these problems, and many
people who have sexual problems but were never abused.
Most importantly, unlike those who’ve become dependent
on alcohol or drugs, an individual who has been labelled
a sex addict faces no serious physical consequences if
he or she suddenly goes “cold turkey”. Nobody in history
has ever died from wanting sex and being unable to have it.
Wanting something that you don’t have and being
dissatisfied, even sexually, is a condition people
around the world deal with every day.
They cope with it without losing control, without
lying, cheating and manipulating, and without
proclaiming themselves an addict.
Most in vogue is the theory that people can become
addicted to pornography and, in particular, internet pornography. Men are supposedly lost to the powers of the internet, “clicking” themselves out of jobs, marriages and finances.
I don’t deny that porn is a powerful stimulant. It directly
targets aspects of male sexuality that have driven men
to seek sexual variety throughout the aeons. But is this
addictive? There are no studies that say so.
Porn exposure is almost universal in men and if it
had the destructive effect that doomsayers claim, we
would be awash with sex crime, and every day would
look like the erotic chaos of Carnival and Mardi Gras.
In fact, as porn access has increased, sex crime
has decreased. We cannot say porn has caused this
decrease, but we can say that the availability of
porn through the internet does not cause inevitable,
unstoppable loss of sexual control.
Do Feminists
Dream of Electric
Vibrators?
Blaming Porn
for Rape Culture
Trying to introduce legislation to ban, restrict or censor
pornography because it creates a ‘rape culture’ is based on
porn’s perceived negative effects.
Everything from incitement to violence against women to
family break up and sex addiction is blamed the desire in
men and many women to watch porn.
Consent Rape
The famous feminist claim that “pornography is the theory,
rape is the practice” continues to underpin anti-porn beliefs,
while US author Robert Jensen claims“pornography is what
the end of the world looks like”.
But on almost every indicator, the evidence on social and
sexual trends in liberal capitalist societies where pornography
is relatively accessible shows the opposite of the anti-porn lobby.
In societies such as the US and the UK, the recorded incidence
of violence against women has been falling for decades and is
at historically low rates.
Since rape and other forms of violence against women are often
presented as a by-product of pornography’s spread since the 1960s,
the fact that they are in decline in the most sexually liberal
societies is significant.