Does sex addiction really exist? | Hacker News Reader

Does sex addiction really exist?

bbc.com

41 pointsevo_933 comments

Am not sure how many people will be ok to talk about it/ accept it from thr main account, I am clearly not.

I can 100% say this does exist, its not only sex but "sexual desires and talks / talking dirty if you like to call it" from companion. I genuinely feel very depressed for 4/5 days straight with very suicidal and lonely feeling (My companion is not very much into sex and 99% of time try to avoid any similar talks too). Its very difficult to talk about this also as people simply consider you pervert and don't understand or try to understand. I don't think its being pervert as I am more then willing to marry and have future, its just that I love having that high and it becomes very difficult to cope with lack of that.

Good that you try to talk about this at all.

You don't have to go through this alone.

Search for "Sexaholics Anonymous".

One day at a time.

Here's the key sentence from the article:

>...I no longer believe it's important whether the condition is called an addiction or not - because all of them clearly need help to solve a problem that is wrecking their lives.

Clearly, there are people out there who have problems with craving sex all the time, and some of those people are willing to go to such lengths to get it that it interferes with their lives. Those are the key symptoms of any addiction, no matter what you want to call it.

I work as a coder for a big porn website and I can confirm this. I've seen customers throwing away $10,000 a night on our site. Much like mobile gaming, this industry heavily relies on whales.

on what?!

Whales. People with huge amounts of disposable income. People who spend a lot. People who have a giant size portfolio. Etc. It's a term I've seen used in a number of different context but always eluding to someone with a ton of money.

I'm guessing that "on what?!" can more properly be read "throwing away $10,000 a night ON WHAT?!"

It could be money laundering

I'd guess a camsite. Same way a guy can chuck a thousand bucks at strip club's back room.

That's what I meant

Im guessing Web cams / Chat Rooms.

Like twitch you can spend money to have your donation read / request fulfilled.

One time I saw a sex toy that automatically updated the setting to the highest bidders request so there would be a tug of war between those increasing and lowering the setting. Definitely a great revenue stream if you are savvy.

Text-only version, for anyone else who happens to be at work and doesn't want all those racy illustrations on their screen:

https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//www...

You hear the stuff about porn addiction more and more, and it will be interesting to see how the generation raised with online porn fairs in the dating area and how they turn out. One side effect reported has been erectile dysfunction from excessive porn usage.

Case Point: Japan.

i think the biggest side effect is indifference towards dating.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/09/11/end-young-l...

The subreddit NoFap[0] shows that internet porn is already a significant problem for tens of thousands of young people, mostly men.

Porn addictions described on NoFap show that porn can cause men to have erectile dysfunction (due to "death grip" and desensitization), failure of arousal for real women, extreme shame, and even suicidal thoughts.

Reading through that forum, you'll see thousands of people who have tried to quit porn over and over, but continue to relapse. I suspect NoFap is likely a microcosm of the broader society; porn addiction is real, and it's likely widespread.

[0]: https://reddit.com/r/nofap

I think the type of people who frequent subreddits like NoFap have other issues.

It’s not the porn that’s the problem, but sexual repression, feeling ashamed of something that’s completely natural, etc.

Not a no-fapper myself, but my friends who do it seem to do so out of a belief in an effect on hormone levels/motivation rather than a sense of shame.

That's kind-of the trap this whole article is addressing; some people are dealing with issues that are well outside of most peoples' experience. Their issues are so unrelatable that they get written off with these side theories an treated as insincere.

I've mentioned elsewhere that Chris Rock and Terry Crews have come out about their experiences with this issue. This lends the issue some legitimacy I think.

Two interesting celebrities that have come out to talk about their own struggles with porn addiction: Chris Rock (in his stand-up special Tambourine) and Terry Crews in some IG posts I think.

It's always interesting how celebrities, who's lives we know relatively more about than internet strangers, can help contextualize and legitimize the sincerity of these sorts of problems.

"Nofap" is based on completely misunderstood studies and reaches absurd conclusions from them and from random individual experiences though.

This should be observable today; that generation is already in their 30s.

That's what, everyone under 30?

There's plenty to read about how dating has changed, but it will be hard to control for the other generational changes to relationships. Most significantly, the changes introduced when parents and institutional stand-ins for parents found more important things to do with their time than parenting.

Doesn't matter what to call these symptoms, sex addiction or extreme sex cravings, there are stranger mental and other illnesses and urges out there, the understanding should be that something is causing harm for those who have it and should be some kind of help provided.

Yes... Just go to your local SLAA meeting:

https://slaafws.org/meetings

Anyone can be addicted to anything. It's something that is wrongly wired in the brain.

1. sex is endorphins - "peptides that activate the body's opiate receptors"

2. porn is activating some of the above mentioned endorphins related circuitry plus dopamine.

One can see that there is a potential for addiction development in both cases.

The title is misleading. It should be "Does Porn addiction really exist?"

> Using this technique, called "edging", she was watching porn for two to three hours, seven days a week.

This and other statements throughout the article are referring to addition to online porn,

not sex (any kind of oral sex or intercourse or foreplay) of the traditional sense in what the work "sex" means in this context.

Did you read the whole article? It goes on to talk about people who actually have sexual encounters with partners.

Maybe it will help us break our relationship and reproduction addictions.

Raising people's standard of living is very effective at reducing reproduction rates, so you don't need to worry about that.

Agreed. There are a lot of crappy, manipulative, less than ideal partners who lose their effectiveness and raison d'etre with technology and other forms of satisfaction (sex bots, conversation bots, etc.). It's easy to see why some complain about their substitutability for something/someone better as they don't want to do the work.

I don't think sex addiction is a thing... Sounds a bit like oxygen addiction.

What is more real is sexual desperation...

If we take the number of women vs men, that have sexual addiction, and we corollate it with sexual partner availability. We can clearly notice that sexual addiction is not a thing. Sexual desperation is a thing. The less sex a man gets the more he thinks he should be having it.

Because we live in a society where men think that they should be getting sex like a pornstar when in reality most are in the 80% group that barely gets any sex. At the same time, most women can have a sexual relationship at any time at practically no cost.

i have....reason to believe yes

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