Girl on the Net

I follow a number of sex educators, researchers and journalists who are sceptical about the idea of ‘sex addiction’ – where an activity is so wrapped in societal shame, it’s hard to separate out what might be a ‘problem’ for an individual with what constitutes simply a ‘problem’ for a conservative society. As a result, I’ve always been hugely wary of anyone trying to tell me (or people I know) that we might be sex ‘addicts’ as opposed to just ‘fans of fucking.’ But as yet I’ve never had anyone write about sex addiction for the guest blog, so I was delighted when Big Ed Magusson pitched me a post about exactly this. He’s here to share his own journey exploring addiction and libido. If you would like to read more, his collection of short stories – Addictive Desires – is available on Amazon and Gumroad. And do check out his website as well if you’d like to read more of his work.

It’s not an addiction, it’s my libido

The hung-over morning after the sex workers left, I knew I needed help. It wasn’t that I’d hired them, I was practically living in strip clubs every weekend anyway. It was that I’d been too drunk to —ahem— perform. And for someone with my sex drive, that meant I’d been really drunk. The women had been disgusted at my condition. I was ashamed by that as much as why I’d called them in the first place.

A few weeks later, at the urging of a woman I was failing to seduce, I attended my first Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA) meeting. I found community. I started to find answers to some of the misery in my life.

SAA says “the sex is not the problem. It’s the crappy solution to the problem.” SAA helped me identify why I was using strip clubs, phone sex, and online porn to numb myself. In short, I had come to believe, deep down, that I was ugly and unattractive to women. I might have fit in with the incel (involuntarily celibate) community, if it had existed back then. Instead, I’d learned that attractive women were happy to pay attention to me if I slipped some cash into their g-string. So that’s what I did. There are no ugly men with fat wallets.

Working with SAA, I wrestled with my demons and grew healthier. I shed some toxic friendships. I learned that confidence actually attracts more women than pure physical looks. I began to recognize when I felt the compulsive urge to run to the nearest tittie bar and drown my sorrows by motorboating some big breasts.

And then… I discovered something unexpected.

I still wanted to motorboat those big breasts!

Even when I wasn’t trying to numb myself because… it’s fun! Likewise, I was reading erotica because… it’s enjoyable! I wanted to get laid regularly because… well most people reading this probably want to get laid regularly so I don’t have to explain that.

The less I used sex to numb myself, the better the sex got. The more visiting a strip club was a choice than a compulsion, the more I enjoyed it.

SAA was right. Sex was not the problem. Sex, in all its myriad permutations, could be pretty damned good.

But there was one last stumbling block.

I’d been in meetings where other men moaned about their compulsive masturbation. How they couldn’t stop and were masturbating twice a week.

I was jacking off three to five times a day!

If someone has three to five beers a day, we wonder if they’re an alcoholic. So I wondered and I worried. Would I never be free of my “addiction”?

Then in one SAA meeting, a man broke down in tears because of his inability to stop thinking about sex with other men. His church considered it a deep sin. His family had disowned him, even though he’d never acted on his thoughts. His life was in shambles, and still he couldn’t stop getting turned on when he looked at handsome men.

The way his completely natural desires had been reframed as ‘addiction’ purely because his church disapproved was causing him serious harm. Framing it as an ‘addiction’ was not just wrong, but dangerously so. We comforted him, and others talked more privately with him afterward.

I… I was caught up in a moment of revelation.

My desire for frequent orgasms were no less natural than his desires. It was my biology—my libido—that drove my masturbation frequency. Fighting my own body would be at best a pyrrhic victory. More likely—a lifetime of misery.

So what then?

If you’re short, you figure out how to rearrange your life so you don’t have to constantly climb stepladders. If you’re tall, you don’t install low-hanging ceiling fans in your house. With a high libido, I needed to find ways to fulfil my sex drive without creating collateral damage.

And so began a decade plus of conscious sexual exploration. I went into alternative sexuality communities not only to discover what I liked, but also to learn how folks who were unapologetically horny lived their lives. The BDSM community taught me the most about communication and self-awareness, but every sex community held an honesty that I found refreshing. Some of the best conversations of my life began with someone saying, “This turns me on. I don’t know why. But it does.”

Along the way I met people with libidos like mine. One woman worked from home (this was well before the pandemic) so she could take masturbation breaks like others took coffee breaks. One man was in a polyamorous relationship because neither of his partners could keep up with him on their own. These people understood. And they weren’t addicts.

By exploring, I found ways to relieve my libido without causing chaos in the rest of my life. One of those methods was writing my own erotica, which has turned from outlet to hobby to nascent career. Even better, when I met my wife, I had the awareness and tools to form a deeper relationship, where my libido added to our connection instead of causing issues.

It was a long journey, and it’s not over. I also suspect there are others on a similar path. A high libido is not the problem, even if it looks like an addiction. Realizing this has made all the difference.