Licking the Razor's Edge (2015)

Addiction #12 – Freedom from SEX
According to Richard F. Taflinger, PhD, “Sex is the second strongest of the
psychological appeals, just behind self-preservation.” Maybe this is because it is also one
of the most basic facets of our biological programming (the male fetus can maintain an
erection during the third trimester of pregnancy, and over 75% of all men over the age of
70 remain sexually potent). Basically, our bodies are hard-wired to couple & copulate.
To make matters even more challenging, our human societies tend to encourage us to “be
good citizens” by making lots of babies (especially lots of grand-babies, right?), and our
businesses tend to use sex to sell us their products (over a third of all advertisements
contain blatant sexual imagery, and there are over 5 pornographic websites for every nonpornographic
one).
Essentially, we are basically being constantly bombarded both from within and from
without with calls to have sex.
Knowing this, it should be no large surprise to learn that every day people around the
world engage in approximately 100 million acts of sexual intercourse … That’s right: 100
MILLION times, every day. That’s over 200 couples having sex in any given second –
for every second – of every day of the year.
And it can thus be no great surprise as well that Viagra, the well-known blue pill
designed to help men with erectile dysfunction, made $411 million in profits within the
FIRST THREE MONTHS of its release in 1998, before going on to make over $1.8
billion in 2003 alone.
And it’s not just the act itself that is so prevalent. The latest studies show that the average
adult male thinks about sex around twenty times a day, with the average woman
entertaining similar thoughts only slightly less often (about a dozen times every 24
hours).
And these cravings are not even based solely in the physical pleasure that sex provides.
Studies show that men (and some women) use sex to feel powerful and superficially
enhance their own feelings of self-worth. Other reports show that women (and quite a
few men) use sex as leverage to get what they want (84% of women polled in one study
admitted to using sex to get their men to help out around the house).
In essence, then, we not only biologically desire to have sex, our society is actively
encouraging us to engage in it.
As a consequence, many people falsely believe that sex will make them happy, many
people falsely believe that sex will make them powerful, and some people even falsely
believe that sex will make them rich.
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