Brick's blog

I have not had an orgasm for 20 days, have not watched porn for 22 days, and have not used a porn substitute for 14 days. I'm writing this entry in order to delay what seems to be inevitable (that is, a relapse), and it provides and opportunity to catalog situations or emotional states that trigger the urge to relapse.

Someone has probably already grappled with this question somewhere in the blogs, but I have been thinking about the nature of addiction and whether all pornography use or orgasm-seeking is necessarily addictive behavior.

From the dictionary:

Addiction: compulsive need for and use of a habit-forming substance (as heroin, nicotine, or alcohol) characterized by tolerance and by well-defined physiological symptoms upon withdrawal ; broadly: persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be harmful.

Indulgence: to give free rein to b: to take unrestrained pleasure in.

[The purpose of this post is to document the most significant personal symptoms of orgasm withdrawal at T+12 days]

Starting on the fourth day of my first no-orgasm experiment, and on the fifth day of my second experiment, I began to have difficulty sleeping due to obsessive, recurring, and spontaneous sexual visions. I deliberately used all of the preceding adjectives, because the same vision (with minor changes) presented itself (spontaneously) for at least 30 minutes but for up to an hour (obsessive), and resurfaced after intervening dreamless sleep (recurring).

Yet another male-centric post, I’m afraid. I was unable to find a discussion in the forums about the paper entitled “Endocrine response to masturbation-induced orgasm in healthy men following a 3-week sexual abstinence”Exton et al. 2001 World Journal of Urology. 19, 377-382., so I shall introduce it here with advance apologies if it has already been dealt with somewhere else in the site.

For those of you without electronic access to the archives of the World Journal of Urology…I present a transcription of the abstract [comments mine]:

A few forum entries (and many entire websites) discuss the importance of avoiding orgasm, either for taoist practice, for vaguely new-age-tantric reasons, or for promoting the pair bond. Most of these discussions or sites seem to be concerned primarily with retaining semen, apparently based on the perception that semen release and orgasm are simultaneous and perhaps even indistinguishable. However, for several reasons I believe that this definition of orgasm is incomplete, and that the muscular-mechanical methods for semen retention are misleading.

I shall not narrate each day of my first no orgasm experiment, but instead provide some general comments about my state of mind, the difficulty of self-denial, and my problems with anger. The reason for not writing a day-by-day account is that most of my notes from those days proved superfluous. Only after the first experiment failed and I started another one did I have the necessary perspective to identify some of the personal phenomenology of dopamine jolt withdrawal. I plan to write a separate post about my temporal progression of withdrawal.

I am blog-naive, so my first post was not initially private, as I had assumed...in case a non-member is reading this post without having seen the first, I shall provide the short explanation of why I am writing here.

1. I have an anal sex/anal porn fixation but I have never actually had anal sex
2. I am in a marriage where both partners have been faithful, but I am plagued with infidelity fantasies
3. I want to preserve relationship harmony, but I cannot control mood swings, irrational anger, and occasional feelings like 'my wife is the wrong woman for me'

Given that several million blogs exist, and that access to this particular set of blogs is restricted to the site membership, I suppose it is highly unlikely that anyone will ever read this, or read past this sentence... However, my hope is that act of posting to this (relatively) public space will lend a sense of accountability to the work of treating orgasm addiction, and that I will be less likely to 'relapse'.