[TysonWarm]

Heh, I had to Google 'DTF'.

I take it you don't watch Jersey Shore.

[MasterDragonfly]

Or **94** booze. At least for Europeans, we have the genes to break it down because our ancestors have been **94** beer for thousands of years.

I almost mentioned booze. Except that last week, I learned that two co-workers don't drink who I thought would have entertained **94** on occasion. Which makes 4 people I know who aren't interested in **94**. And I have a pretty small circle.

Would you support free distribution of booze to everyone who can read?  Assuming it cost nothing.

Straw man. That, and we're not talking about booze.

No one told me masturbation(specific types of) is addictive, or that it may cause eventual impotence. While I may be wrong, there's the neurological explanation, there is the number of people who self-report such problems(which of course doesn't give you the total extent of the problem), and then there is my personal experience.

Well there are people who are sexaholics. Sounds amusing, but their existences are dire. There will always be fringe case examples.

Do you completely and  reject that, and think it's just 'performance anxiety' ?

You seem to be ignoring my latest plea to DO SOMETHING.

Let me turn the question around. Are YOU convinced it's serious and worth doing something about? Because either you are, or you are not. Enough with the posturing, already.

The longer you continue to simply talk about it, the greater I am convinced that you merely want a platform to establish a position to convince others of your opinion, and nothing more.

DO something about it, and you may sway me.

[MasterDragonfly]

I take it you don't watch Jersey Shore.

Not regularly. I've seen less than 10 episodes. Probably 5 at most.

[YS]

I almost mentioned booze. Except that last week, I learned that two co-workers don't drink who I thought would have entertained **94** on occasion. Which makes 4 people I know who aren't interested in **94**. And I have a pretty small circle.

Puritanism making a comeback? I know very few people who categorically refuse drink. One is Russian, and has seen what alcoholism does to people, other one has a father who probably had some alcohol problems.

Straw man. That, and we're not talking about booze.

It's an 'analogy'.
Before internet, acquiring pornography was costly, in either money, time and so on. So it wasn't common.
Food is a better analogy, I'd say.
IF it's too cheap, suddenly  morbid obesity becomes an issue, that is, for people who suffer from it.
It's not a big issue in places where food is a major expenditure.

Let me turn the question around. Are YOU convinced it's serious and worth doing something about? Because either you are, or you are not. Enough with the posturing, already.

Yes, it's worth doing something about. I think I've already mentioned that.

Well there are people who are sexaholics. Sounds amusing, but their existences are dire. There will always be fringe case examples.

Time will tell. I'd be willing that this will get a lot  bigger than 'fringe'.

You seem to be ignoring my latest plea to DO SOMETHING.
...
Let me turn the question around. Are YOU convinced it's serious and worth doing something about? Because either you are, or you are not. Enough with the posturing, already.

^^cut off your dick and then consider the question again.  
If you have a problem understanding the suggestion above, it means yes.

[TheZookie007]

OK, now you're just whinging. No one likes a whinger.

[MasterDragonfly]

Puritanism making a comeback? I know very few people who categorically refuse drink. One is Russian, and has seen what alcoholism does to people, other one has a father who probably had some alcohol problems.

This is orthogonal to the original theme, but of these 4 people:
- 2 of them have some form of "I don't like the taste of it" (one of those tastes the alcohol in the drink, which puts him off)
- 1 simply has no interest, although he had no qualms about buying me a rather nice bottle of Sake
- 1 I don't know her reasons, just that she doesn't partake, and I'm sensitive enough to offer her an alternative

I drink. Both my parents were alcoholics. But as anyone who understands alcoholism will tell you, having a couple beers is not the same as alcoholism. If anything, my threshold is typically 2 beers; anything more than that an I'll typically have an unshakable headache in the morning at the very least.

OK, now you're just whinging. No one likes a whinger.

And here I was thinking I was the only one to have that perspective.

He kinda reminds me of QBE, taking a rigid position on an opinion, citing stats to prop up his claim. He's quite different from QBE in that he does seem to be suffering from something (something substantive enough to motivate learning more than the average Joe, because it seems to be affecting him personally).

Hmm. There's someone I know from the BEA (and from prior) who might be able to provide some valuable perspective. I'll ping him to see if he'll weigh in.

[YS]

2 beers? I've never had a headache from booze. Never tried to get one.
Point is, I drink a shot or two some evening, beer with special meals but especially after exercise.

I doubt I can develop alcoholism from this kind of 'habit'.

OK, now you're just whinging. No one likes a whinger.

No one likes truth either. So?

He kinda reminds me of QBE, taking a rigid position on an opinion, citing stats to prop up his claim.

Punning like that ought to be punishable by pinning the punner's pecker to a post....

He kinda reminds me of QBE, taking a rigid position on an opinion, citing stats to prop up his claim.

Not stats... symptoms. Apparently shared by others. There is no valid statistic I've come across. A friend promised he'll try to tactfully find out how many of his peers may be suffering too. He's a clever guy, but I doubt he'll find anything.

I'm toying with the idea of developing a questionnaire, the problem would be how to get a sample that wouldn't be suffering from self-selection effect.

Thanks for asking.
I'll check back in a couple of weeks.

[TheZookie007]

No one likes truth either. So?

Well, when you start talking the truth, then maybe I'll listen. Until then, stop whinging, you wanker. (Which may or may not be your problem in the first place, but your attitude doesn't bode well for someone trying to help you.)

[MasterDragonfly]

I think I've figured out the trajectory of this discussion thread.

/unsubscribe

[YS]

Well, when you start talking the truth, then maybe I'll listen.

What do you believe I am making up?

And why do you seem so irate?
No one forces you to read anything I write. You can, to put it politely, remove yourself from this thread if you have nothing to say that's to the point.

[TheZookie007]

I'm not "irate"...although I rate you as a wanker

But OK, I will leave you to your whinging and won't poke at you again. I promise.

[Nyer]

It's a long-ish essay by a psychologist. I recommend reading it whole before you jump in with criticism.

(moderator's note: Link to article removed because the linked page included a benign photograph of ch¡ldren, which is content prohibited by the forum rules. The full text of the article is reproduced in the next post.)

Note that all addictions share the same psychological mechanism..(though opiates and the like also create chemical dependency)



First two paragraphs:

The Cambridge University neuropsychiatrist Dr Valerie Voon has recently shown that men who describe themselves as addicted to porn (and who lost relationships because of it) develop changes in the same brain area – the reward centre – that changes in drug addicts. The study, not yet published, is featured next week in the Channel 4 TV show Porn on the Brain. Neurosceptics may argue that pictures of the brain lighting up in addicts tell us nothing new – we already know they are addicted. But they do help: knowing the reward centre is changed explains some porn paradoxes.

In the mid-1990s I, and other psychiatrists, began to notice the following. An adult male, in a happy relationship, being seen for some non-romantic issue, might describe getting curious about porn on the burgeoning internet. Most sites bored him, but he soon noticed several that fascinated him to the point he was craving them. The more he used the porn, the more he wanted to..........

.....

Many of you probably kind of discount the idea that porn may cause problems, but the issues is that
1) boys come into puberty(12,13) at an age where they probably can't get regular sex.
1.5) first sex is had on average at 17.. (http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/FB-ATSRH.html)
2) most parents can't prevent their teenagers from getting porn. Even if it was unavailable offline, teens would trade it on flashdrives.
3) the interval between start of puberty and age of first sex is years - in which kids can mess their brains up by using too much pornography.
4) in some cases, like mine, the interval is far longer because I went to a school that didn't have any girls and I was anyway extremely socially awkward in those years.  People claim however to have developed a serious porn addiction after they spent a year alone after a bad break-up. Recovery is far quicker in such cases usually.



So, while porn is probably pretty safe for those who are adult and who already have learned how to have sex...
... it likely isn't 'safe' for teens and others who have never had sex - because porn allows for far greater amount of orgasms and stimulation than plain old masturbation.

Which may eventually lead to sexual dysfunction, that is for men inability to have penetrative sex because of their inability to maintain an erections. You don't need a fully erect penis to jerk off after all. In my experience at least.


Disclaimer: I was one of the people whose brains were looked at in the UC study. And the study was I believe a little flawed- because even though I provided examples of porn I liked to see, such as that featuring big breasts or curvy women and so on, we were only shown generic mainstream porn featuring the basic skinny body type, which I believe weakened the study  somewhat, at least in my case.

[gonZo]

Full text of the article:

Brain scans of porn addicts: what's wrong with this picture?
Scan images show that watching online 'adult' sites can alter our grey matter, which may lead to a change in sexual tastes

The Cambridge University neuropsychiatrist Dr Valerie Voon has recently shown that men who describe themselves as addicted to porn (and who lost relationships because of it) develop changes in the same brain area – the reward centre – that changes in drug addicts. The study, not yet published, is featured next week in the Channel 4 TV show Porn on the Brain. Neurosceptics may argue that pictures of the brain lighting up in addicts tell us nothing new – we already know they are addicted. But they do help: knowing the reward centre is changed explains some porn paradoxes.

In the mid-1990s I, and other psychiatrists, began to notice the following. An adult male, in a happy relationship, being seen for some non-romantic issue, might describe getting curious about porn on the burgeoning internet. Most sites bored him, but he soon noticed several that fascinated him to the point he was craving them. The more he used the porn, the more he wanted to.

Yet, though he craved it, he didn't like it (porn paradox 1). The cravings were so intense, he might feel them while thinking about his computer (paradox 2). The patient would also report that, far from getting more turned on by the idea of sex with his partner, he was less attracted to her (paradox 3). Through porn he acquired new sexual tastes.

We often talk about addicts as though they simply have "quantitative problems". They "use too much", and should "cut back". But porn addictions also have a qualitative component: they change sexual taste. Here's how.

Until recently, scientists believed our brains were fixed, their circuits formed and finalised in childhood, or "hardwired". Now we know the brain is "neuroplastic", and not only can it change, but that it works by changing its structure in response to repeated mental experience.

One key driver of plastic change is the reward centre, which normally fires as we accomplish a goal. A brain chemical, dopamine, is released, giving us the thrill that goes with accomplishment. It also consolidates the connections between neurons in the brain that helped us accomplish that goal. As well, dopamine is secreted at moments of sexual excitement and novelty. Porn scenes, filled with novel sexual "partners", fire the reward centre. The images get reinforced, altering the user's sexual tastes.

Many abused substances directly trigger dopamine secretion – without us having to work to accomplish a goal. This can damage the dopamine reward system. In porn, we get "sex" without the work of courtship. Now, scans show that porn can alter the reward centre too.

Once the reward centre is altered, a person will compulsively seek out the activity or place that triggered the dopamine discharge. (Like addicts who get excited passing the alley where they first tried cocaine, the patients got excited thinking about their computers.) They crave despite negative consequences. (This is why those patients could crave porn without liking it.) Worse, over time, a damaged dopamine system makes one more "tolerant" to the activity and needing more stimulation, to get the rush and quiet the craving. "Tolerance" drives a search for ramped-up stimulation, and this can drive the change in sexual tastes towards the extreme.

The most obvious change in porn is how sex is so laced with aggression and sadomasochism. As tolerance to sexual excitement develops, it no longer satisfies; only by releasing a second drive, the aggressive drive, can the addict be excited. And so – for people psychologically predisposed – there are scenes of angry sex, men ejaculating insultingly on women's faces, angry anal penetration, etc. Porn sites are also filled with the complexes Freud described: "Milf" ("mothers I'd like to fuck") sites show us the Oedipus complex is alive; spanking sites sexualise a childhood trauma; and many other oral and anal fixations. All these features indicate that porn's dirty little secret is that what distinguishes "adult sites" is how "infantile," they are, in terms of how much power they derive from our infantile complexes and forms of sexuality and aggression. Porn doesn't "cause" these complexes, but it can strengthen them, by wiring them into the reward system. The porn triggers a "neo-sexuality" – an interplay between the pornographer's fantasies, and the viewer's.

Of all our instincts, sexuality is perhaps the most plastic, appearing to have broken free of its primary evolutionary aim, reproduction, even though a certain naive biological narrative depicts our sexual tastes as hardwired and unchanging, and insists we are all always drawn to the same, biologically fit, symmetrical features and attributes which indicate "this person will produce fit offspring". But clearly we are not all attracted to the same type, or person.

Sexual tastes change from era to era: the sexual goddesses painted by Rubens are corpulent by modern standards. Sexual tastes also change from individual to individual: different people have different romantic "types". Types tend to be caricatures: the free spirit, the artistic type, the bad boy, the strong silent type, the devoted woman, and so on. We learn that types are related to plasticity, when we discover the individual's history. The woman attracted to "the unavailable man", often lost her father in childhood; the man attracted to the "ice queen" had a distant critical mother. There is little hardwired about the specifics of these attractions. But the ultimate sign that sexual desire need not be hardwired into reproduction is the fetishist, more attracted to a shoe than its wearer.

Sexual tastes change over the course of our individual lives; not all love is love at first sight, based on looks; we may not notice someone as especially attractive, until we fall in love with them and feel such pleasure in their presence, that we soon "awaken" to their charms. And successfully monogamous couples, who love and feel attraction to each other over decades, slowly change their sexual tastes, as their partners age and look different. Sometimes change comes quickly, but no changes are as rapid or radical as those occurring in teenagers, who go from having limited, to all consuming attractions.

Teenagers' brains are especially plastic. Now, 24/7 access to internet porn is laying the foundation of their sexual tastes. In Beeban Kidron's InRealLife, a gripping film about the effects of the internet on teenagers, a 15-year-old boy of extraordinary honesty and courage articulates what is going on in the lives of millions of teen boys. He shows her the porn images that excite him and his friends, and describes how they have moulded their "real life" sexual activity. He says: "You'd try out a girl and get a perfect image of what you've watched on the internet … you'd want her to be exactly like the one you saw on the internet … I'm highly thankful to whoever made these websites, and that they're free, but in other senses it's ruined the whole sense of love. It hurts me because I find now it's so hard for me to actually find a connection to a girl."

The sexual tastes and the romantic longings of these boys have become dissociated from each other. Meanwhile, the girls have "downloaded" on to them the expectation that they play roles written by pornographers. Once, porn was used by teens to explore, prepare and relieve sexual tension, in anticipation of a real sexual relationship. Today, it supplants it.

In her book, Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion, Izabella St James, who was one of Hugh Hefner's former "official girlfriends", described sex with Hef. Hef, in his late 70s, would have sex twice a week, sometimes with four or more of his girlfriends at once, St James among them. He had novelty, variety, multiplicity and women willing to do what he pleased. At the end of the happy orgy, wrote St James, came "the grand finale: he masturbated while watching porn".

Here, the man who could actually live out the ultimate porn fantasy, with real porn stars, instead turned from their real flesh and touch, to the image on the screen. Now, I ask you, "what is wrong with this picture?".

[gonZo]

Porn is a simulacrum of sex without the burdens of a relationship with an actual sex partner. It is immediately obtainable and not contingent on the wishes of other people. Unlike most sexual experiences with partners, porn can be fine-tuned to the desires and fetishes of the individual, and precisely synchronized with physical stimulation.

Addictive substances deliver pleasurable stimuli to locations in the brain that are most receptive to those stimuli. Similarly, porn delivers sexual ideation to the brain without the attendant distractions of human relationships. Porn isolates sexuality and delivers it in an undiluted form.

It would therefore be surprising if porn were NOT addictive.

[pedonbio]

Oh, Gawd, not this again!  


Yes, it feels good.

Yes, some people can't handle stuff that feels good.

Wake me up when this thread dies.