This article (at http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/internet-porn-nearly-cost-me-my-marriage-man-tells-forum/2005/08/07/1123353212143.html?oneclick=true) got me thinking (again) about pornography addiction. In the article a man who'd been watching internet porn for the last ten years is now confessing his addiction at the ripe old age of 22.

Now a lot of people may see his predicament as a matter of perspective. While a 22-year-old with no wife or kids may be seen as going through a highly sexual phase, the 22-year-old family man - with commitments and obligations - who is enthralled with computer porn has a serious problem.

Let me just say right now, I am neither a psychotherapist nor a psychoanalyst (I do not play either on TV, I did not stay in some fancy hotel last night, etc). For a professional take on pornography, I can't recommend the following resource enough:
Are You a Pornography Addict? (http://www.noeldouglas.com/psychology/pornography/Are_You_a_Pornography_Addict)

That being said, the purpose of this article is twofold:
1. To help people - specifically men - who have a porn addiction look at it from another perspective; and
2. To present an average joe's approach to enjoying and coping with porn without it leading to sexual deviance, visual desensitization, or sensual failure/disinterest in the bedroom.
Who knows, someone might actually find this piece useful. :)

Although the man in the story was Australian, I'd like to speak to American culture because this porn addiction is far too common where I live and breath. It's no secret that this is an addictive society. We work hard, we play hard, we drink to excess, we eat far more than is healthy for us or necessary to sustain life; all-in-all we seem to overdo things and live life with greater abandon than any other country.

We're such a nation of over-doers that our kids learn early in life how to go overboard with things. The problem is, they tend to pick up and repeat the worse habits along the way: habits such as over-eating and playing video games for long hours at a time.

And I'm not saying that this is a relatively new phenomenon (of over-doing things). Maybe overindulgence has been interwoven within the fabric of our culture since long before people can remember. It's just that in such a technologically and culturally progressive society, it seems we find new things to exploit everyday, new ways to go overboard on something. Internet pornography has been in full swing for the better part of about a decade and a half now. Frankly, it's about time we started abusing the privilege.
Since everything else in this culture is overdone and overwrought, why not porn?

Too much of anything is not good for you. Case in point, did you know that too much water is actually detrimental (http://www.chclibrary.org/micromed/00059400.html) to the human body? As you might expect, different substances require different dosages to ruin your health. So while it would take copious amounts of water to hurt your system, it would take less bad food to prove toxic to you (insofar as skyrocketing your cholesterol, making you obese, and bestowing upon you all the negative things that a poor diet can). And it would take even less heroin or any other manner of illicit narcotic to accomplish the same feat. Levels of toxicity change from person to person.

Likewise, it takes various degrees of different vices to ruin your life. Internet pornography is no different than any other vice. It can destroy you if you're not careful, and you need to know when to say to say when (to borrow a popular beer slogan) given your own coping skills.

Now let's take a look at addiction as it pertains to pornography - whether on the internet or otherwise - and the men that get hooked on it. It's been said time and time again that one of the problems with porn is that - much like a drug - if you partake of it frequently enough, eventually you'll need bigger and more extreme doses to afford you the same sexual high. (This was also the case for the Australian gentleman.) I'll get back to this point in a moment.

One of my favorite expressions is, "A man gets wed (hopefully when the time and circumstance is right), he doesn't go dead." That is to say, a heterosexual male - as long as he has a pulse - will always find other women attractive (depending on what he deems attractive) even in supposed wedded bliss. We all know that men are creatures of sight, it's hardwired into the male evolutionary agenda and that's not going to change anytime soon. Straight men just get turned on by beautiful women. (Again, that is defined by the eye of the beholder.)

So what is the problem here? If men are so turned on and attracted to beautiful women, how is desensitization possible? Why does it take the porn "veteran" ever-increasing extremes of porn - like so many drugs - to arouse the same feelings?

About the author:
The author is affiliated with http://www.sex-toys-videos.comand writes regular porn and sex toy articles for his blog page at http://www.buyadultxxxhardcoredvdandsextoy.com/sexblog