Wouldn’t we all like a way to interpret our sexual fantasies?  Where do they come from? What do they mean?  Often sexual fantasies seem to take hold for no apparent reason. Their meaning seems like some kind of mysterious code that we could crack, as we do in dream interpretation.

If you ask someone to describe their most compelling sexual fantasies, especially a sex addict, you will find that there is a central core, a rather specific set pattern as to where their imagination takes them.

Addictive fantasies are laid down early in development

Simply put, men are objectified in terms of money in a way that parallels the sexual objectification of women.  That is not to say that men are treated in the same exact way as women, or that men in society are disadvantaged in the same ways or to the same degree as women.  But men can be treated as objects too.

Many people, both men and women, cheat on the person they are in a relationship with; at least 20-30% admit it depending on which data you are looking at and how the research questions are phrased.  Some people cheat very rarely and others cheat a lot.

Some people cheat repeatedly but do not meet the criteria for sex addiction. 

No matter where you get your data it is clear that online pornography is very big business.  Whether you look at attempts to measure page views for the top porn sites (over 5 billion per month), porn web sites (4%), porn search engine searches (10-15%) or numbers of sites blocked by filtering software programs (2.5 million in CYBERsitter) internet porn is huge.

In my April 6 2013 post “New Anti Porn Laws on the Way” I described recent attempts by three countries to make and/or enforce laws that would effectively prohibit adult pornography on the internet, specifically in the UK, Iceland and Egypt.

I said that such laws were a long way off in the US.  I received a correction from my acquaintance Dawn Hawkins at Morality in Media’s Pornharms.com.

You hear a lot about the potential evils of the online pornography epidemic.  Now some governments are starting to make moves to seriously regulate the availability of pornography.  Their attitudes and rationales are all over the map.

There are laws in the U.S. and elsewhere against pornography involving or depicting children.  But there is increasing concern about pornography in general.

Many sex addiction therapists base their thinking on the idea that real or “relational” sex, sex with a real person as opposed to porn, cybersex or masturbation is healthier in some way.  They tend to believe that a preference for non-relational sex is not entirely healthy and that it is often the basis of sexual addiction.

Other clinicians and many people generally feel that it is wrong to place relational sex on a pedestal.

I have heard from any number of women who are understandably shocked and confused to find out that the man they are seeing or married to has been having sexual experiences with other men.  Sometimes it is in the form of actual sexual encounters in various situations and sometimes it is only in the context of cybersex experiences.  These are situations in which the relationship had previously seemed like a normal heterosexual one.  Often it is confusing to the man as well who feels he cares for and is genuinely attracted to his female partner.

Straight men who are interested in gay sex are not at all uncommon. 

You don’t have to be a sex addict to get totally distracted by a great looking woman (or a great looking man for that matter, especially if you are gay).  But everybody looks at women; men look at women and women look at women.  And women who appear in an obviously sexy manner will get almost anybody’s attention, at least momentarily.

Sex addicts in recovery are encouraged to see sexual gaze as problematic behavior. 

The sexual hookup culture seems to be in the process of crowding out traditional dating.

Sexual hooking up is common among college age youth and in sexually active kids of high school age.

But recent findings suggest that it may exist on a continuum from normal exploration to harmful and even addictive sexual behavior.

What is a sexual hookup?