Porn addiction and sex addiction experts from Compulsion Solutions answer your most pressing questions. We’ll answer your question too… e-mail Porn Doc.

Dear Porn Doc:

I’m a 22-year-old college student. I look at a lot of online pornography and have been since I was about 13. I’m concerned about my ability to perform with a real person. Technically I'm a virgin but the few times I was with girls before, I was not able to get a good erection. I’m very embarrassed about this and a bit freaked at the idea of failing again with a girlfriend. Have I somehow damaged myself by looking and masturbating to porn? Do I have erectile dysfunction?

Porn Doc:
Your situation is not at all unique. We talk to many young men who worry that they are “damaged” by both the quantity of porn they have seen and the explicitness and severity of what they find sexually stimulating. They too have had embarrassing moments when trying to be sexually intimate with a real person. Regardless of whether you look at porn or not, being truly intimate with another human being is asking yourself to be vulnerable—you are naked both literally and figuratively. Since you do look at porn (you say “a lot”) it makes sense that you have become somewhat desensitized by what you are viewing. The porn you are watching is not based on what really happens in the bedroom but rather on fantasies and images that can give you a false sense of what sex is. Also porn does not reveal, illuminate, or teach you the high degree of trust or safety that is needed to allow you to feel able to intimately have sex with a real, living, breathing human. It seems that when someone who has watched a lot of porn is confronted with a real sexual encounter, the idea of connecting with a real human being can feel numbing—and therefore frightening. Stopping your addictive use of pornography is vital to being able to establish an intimate sex life. And that will require some hard work on your behalf so you can rewire the way you relate sexually.

Dear Porn Doc:

I’m trying to find my bottom lines with my sexual behavior and masturbation. What's okay and what's not?  I’m not sure if it is okay to masturbate. Should I just stop everything cold turkey? I quit smoking by just stopping completely. Is that what I need to do with my sexuality?

Porn Doc:
As you have likely noticed, the reasons for quitting smoking and stopping or changing compulsive sexual behavior are different. The rationale for stopping an addiction to nicotine, alcohol, or drugs, for example, is fairly black and white. Smoking is specifically bad for you, while you likely want to continue to be a sexual person. Similar to battles with food and eating, having a healthy sexual life requires more sorting, searching for what your question is really asking—what’s healthy behavior and what’s addictive behavior when it comes to your sexual expression?

Masturbation, in my personal view, is healthy…if that’s what it is. Things to consider would be:

1) Are you using pornography when you are masturbating? Can you do without it?
2) Are you using masturbation to escape feelings—stress, boredom, etc?
3) Do you feel like you are doing something that is self-pleasuring…or are you disappointed and frustrated afterwards?

Masturbation is an internally driven need, one that is done for self-pleasure, we can even call it “making love to oneself.” People who struggle with compulsive sexual behavior tend to make masturbation more of an externally driven act, connected to the use of porn or driven by an urge or need to escape.