College Lecture: Porn and Sex Addiction with Reid Mihalko, Stony Brook College
A snippet on Porn and Sex Addiction taken from sex and relationship expert Reid Mihalko of ReidAboutSex.com’s longer lecture, “Non-Conservative Sex: From Fantasies to Taboos to Kink to Queer to Poly and More!”
Reid: …other things? Porn! Wooo… yeah. Again, my only note to porn is just know that some porn doesn’t look like what real love making and fucking looks like. There’s a lot of queer porn out now that is supposed to be like much more realistic. The cunnilingus looks like this… not like this… that’s how you know, okay? But even some of that queer porn they’re getting on and they kind of turning for the camera because you just still want to see this stuff happening which isn’t really like you do at home with your partners. You’re not like… you’re doing it in this weird position. You only do that when there’s a mirror in the room and you’re like, “Yeah… mirror” and then your partner’s like, “What the fuck are you doing? Get back in the other position” and you’re be like, “Sorry, dear.” Okay?
There’s a lot of stuff in the news about porn addiction and sex addiction and stuff like that. If you think you have a problem or you think that a partner or a lover has a problem, there’s a lot of resources on the web around 12-step programs. I, myself expecting you’re doing sex and love addicts anonymous because I’d really bad breakup in the open relationship and I find on my thought I might be a “sex addict” and so I spent a year doing the 12-step program to kind of find out. What I found out is I was using sex and love to feel some self-esteem issues that I have. And once I figured those things out, I did the emotional work and short up those gaping holes, “Love me. Tell me I’m a good person.” Once I figured those things out then it was like, “Wow! I’m kind of slut.” Which in that program wouldn’t be allowed because I was “relapsing”. That was really tricky for me to figure out like, “Am I really relapsing or am I really polyamorous and I like to be slutty?”
If you are looking into any of those 12-step programs and you’re not really sure what’s going on, you’re more than welcome to email me or call me. I’ll tell you what my experience was more in-depth. The problem with 12-step programs around sex addiction is there’s not good role modeling in our culture for what not monogamy looks like. Because SLAA is based on AA and the way that they say this many people as possible and they say, “You never going to drink again.” And that kind of saves “makes everybody” as the easiest choice to help the most people. There are people in AA who can learn how to drink responsibly but if they start telling people, “Oh, you can drink responsibly” then the people who could never drink responsibly it’s going to fall right off the wagon. It keeps things more simple in sex and love addicts programs or the 12-step based, basically what they say is you can only have one relationship at a time or one sexual partner at a time. Because we don’t have a good role model for open relationships and ethical sluts.
So know that it can get a little bit tricky if you figure out your self-esteem issues and your non-monogamous. That program will tell you you’re relapsing, I have a different opinion for that so if you ever have to deal that kind of stuff, come talk to me. Similar with porn addiction — people who use porn and it kind of squish with their life. There’s also people who use video games and squish with their life. It doesn’t make porn bad.