VirtualSx

var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-26329776-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); Created, curated, and produced by Elements Behavioral Health, VirtualSx brings together experts in sex addiction treatment, the sex industry, and the relationship/dating space to discuss how technology and digital media affect our views on sex, intimacy, and relationships. Our events are also live on the VirtualSx USTREAM

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An American high school English teacher in Japan has made a YouTube video called Being Gay in Japan in which he interviews his friend about exactly that.

In the video, Mikine Dezaki asks an anonymous gay Japanese friend about life in Japan as a gay man.

The anonymous interviewee says there is a big community of gay men in Japan, but most marry straight women. The wives usually don’t know their husbands are gay.

He says that he has not come out at work because he’s afraid of being made fun of, and that he could be pushed out of his job. When he was at junior high school he felt like he was the only gay person and thought about suicide.

He moved to Sydney, where he came out to his boss and ‘he was fine’, but he depressingly says that he has given up on coming out in Japan.

He thinks Japan might change in the next 50 years but not anytime soon.

He ends the video with a message to Japanese gay youth and there is a link to a Japanese It Gets Better project.

Dezaki was inspired to make the video after his Japanese friend told him there weren’t any gay people in Japan.

’It really is shameful that the Japanese media hasn't done any stories about the gay community in Japan,’ said Dezaki. So he decided to make his own, inspired by the It Gets Better campaign.

‘I figured that if people don't even know that gay people exist in Japan, there must be a lot of gay people suffering silently, especially the youth,’ Dezaki said. ‘I really hope that this video gets those who are struggling with being gay in Japan, and lets them know that they are not alone.’

Dezaki said he’s be surprised about how positively the video has been received, especially by the vice principal at the school where he teaches.

‘I wasn't sure I was allowed to show the video,’ said Dezaki. ‘So when she asked to speak to me after class, I thought I was going to be fired. Instead she said “that was an amazing class!  I didn't know you were teaching these kinds of things.  You should teach this lesson to the rest of the teachers here”.’

Watch the video (in English with Japanese subtitles) above.

Article via Gay Star News

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This service is incredible and it's saving my life - plain and simple. I've had a gripping addiction to pornography for 22 years. It came before everything else in my life - my work, relationships, health, hobbies - really anything that could be considered 'living life'. Two years ago it all came to a crashing end - I hit rock bottom and hated myself. I needed to stop, to clear my head, and begin re-building a sustainable life without porn. But I didn't have 'all' the will power, so I signed up with RemoteWebGuard.com. This service has literally saved my life, I am so grateful and on the road to recovery." Joe S.

http://www.remotewebguard.com/testimonials.html

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20/20 Wants to Know: What Makes A Date Go Bad?

This article can be originally found on BadOnlineDates

20/20 is interested in your Bad Dates! The ABC Newsmagazine wants to know what makes a date go bad? We want to see! The ABC Newsmagazine 20/20 is working with BadOnlineDates.com and we are looking for videos of dates gone wrong, the wilder the better!

So the next time your date heads south, instead of just thinking what you will post here…..think of taking out your iPhone or digital camera and recording it all!  Make sure it’s obvious why this is an example of a “Bad Date”…you can narrate if you want….you can ask questions ….you can even shoot yourself too, not just the other person if you like….whatever will make it clear what’s wrong.

It may take some creativity on your part to pull it off;  it probably won’t work if you say “this date is so awful I need video to prove to my friends what happened!”. So by all means have fun…make it playful! But however you can do it, the video should show people what you went through.

If necessary for television broadcast identities can be kept confidential, but 20/20 wants to see whatever you can shoot. If you’ve ever recorded something in the past, that’s worth sending too. There’s no guarantee that what you submit will be used, but the producers will contact anyone whose story they like. 

Please don’t stage anything though, it has to be real. Send your video clips, bad date stories and contact information to [email protected].

We would also like to know about your bad dates. Submit yours in the comments below.

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Sex app launched for 'unsafe' Swedish youth

A new safe-sex initiative has seen the launch of Provligget (‘The Test Bonk’), a Facebook application which allows young Swedes the chance to virtually trial sex with their friends and aims to raise condom awareness.

The test is an initiative of the Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control (Smittskyddsinstitutet) and the the National Council for Coordination of HIV Prevention (Nationella hivrådet) and pits users against one another in a session of virtual sex. “With summer’s seductively long nights, short shorts and bright days - the opportunity for brief encounters grows too. Maybe under the sky, maybe home in bed as usual,” wrote the Knull De Luxe (literally: Fuck deluxe) website, which is running the campaign. “Wherever, whenever and with whomever, we want to remind everyone to use condoms. Sweden is actually almost the worst country in the world when it comes to condoms, and this is a trend we think is worth reversing.” According to the site, many young Swedes find it embarrassing to discuss the use of condoms and this has led to an increasing level of unsafe sex in the country. The goal of the Institute is to help young Swedes "dare" to bring up the subject, in a time where safe sex has become a decreasing trend. Gonorrhea cases in young Swedes shot up 13 percent in 2011 compared with the previous year, nowhere more so than among young women who live in the city, wrote the Institute in a statement. Cases of chlamydia infections have also risen since 2010. The app is available online, as well as on Facebook, and allows people to match themselves with friends on Facebook or with characters such as “the faker”, “the cheater” or the “summer fling”. Through virtual interaction, the user is then able to simulate a sexual experience. The website also lists details for how and where to test for sexually transmitted infections.

Do you think this will help young adults? Tweet your comments @RobWeissMSW.

Read the original article on The Local

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Sex and Tech

Sex & Tech: How Technology Has Escalated Our Access to Sex and Porn.

View this image larger here.

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Recovering From Sex Addiction

After several years in Alcoholics Anonymous, “Jennifer,” now a 74-year-old Tampa Bay–area resident, realized she had a problem with sex, too. “I’d been doing the same things in the rooms of AA that I’d been doing in bars: picking people up and having a lot of casual sex partners,” she recalls. Coming to the self-diagnosis that this behavior was proof positive of her sex addiction, Jennifer started going to meetings of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) two years after the pioneering group launched in 1976. There she quickly grabbed some tools—literally—to distract her mind from sexual thoughts. Building things and doing fix-it projects around the house have served her well ever since, allowing her mind to “go into idle.”

Fantasies are a tricky negotiation for recovering sex addicts (or people suffering from “hypersexuality”—the revised DSM, due out next year, reportedly will deny this problem the addiction label). Whereas a drunk can’t quite “think up” an alcoholic slip, euphoric erotic recall is rote for sex-obsessives the world over.

The addiction-or-not argument may remain unresolved, but treatment for sexual obsessions and compulsions has made impressive strides over the past three decades. Standard treatment for sex addiction these days is membership in a 12-Step program plus cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a systematic, short-term, goal-setting approach to the talking cure. In the 1980s, frustrated with the failures of the “just-stop-what-you’re-doing” method of fighting hypersexuality, Mississippi-based sex-addiction pioneer Patrick Carnes, PhD, developed a task-oriented CBT (the “Thirty Task Model”) that has inspired numerous treatment programs. Carnes is the eexecutive director of the Gentle Path program at Pine Grove Behavioral Center in Hattiesburg, where golfer Tiger Woods and other celebrity sexaholics have spent time.

As the thinking goes, Jennifer had to challenge her own patterns and routines before starting to figure out how she ended up trolling bars after an uneventful childhood as the daughter of non-alcoholic parents and the sister of three Eagle Scouts.

Unlike traditional psychotherapists, who tend to focus on family issues and early development, CBT therapists ask sex addicts to own up to their behavior and their beliefs about themselves; patients even get homework. Alex Katehakis, MFT, clinical director of the Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, gets patients to list everything they do that is “secret, shaming or abusive.”

And then there’s the all-important spring cleaning—the sex equivalent of “getting all the booze out of the house,” says counselor Jeff Schultz, LPC. This is a lot harder in the digital age than it used to be. Chucking flesh magazines and DVDs is one thing, but people need computers and the Internet—where more than 12% of all websites are pornographic—for work and for keeping in touch with family and friends, so cutting the broadband cord is rarely practical.

One option is to set up web-browsing filters or even “accountability software,” which tracks computer activity and shares it with an “accountability partner,” or if sexting is a problem, canceling the text part of your cell-service package.

But that doesn’t touch some of the biggest temptations. “Smartphone apps are crack for sex addicts,” says Robert Weiss, LCSW, founding director of LA’s Sexual Recovery Institute. GPS-based dating services such as Grindr for gays and Blendr for straights make it incredibly easy to find people willing to hook up. And now there’s Siri, the iPhone 4S’s “humble personal assistant.” In the past, if you wanted to find a prostitute, you had to get dressed, get in your car and risk getting arrested. Now all you have to do is ask, “Siri, where are the escorts?” And she will tell you.

It’s very difficult to get sober from sex addiction by yourself, even with the help of a therapist. Since hypersexuality is a problem of isolation and generally comes weighted with an extra dose of shame, 12-Step meetings—with their emphasis on fellowship and acceptance of newcomers regardless of the state in which one “comes in”—seem especially well-suited to the problem.

If a sex addict is unwilling to try a 12-Step program, group therapy can be a good stand-in, so long as the group is specifically focused on sex addiction. Futhermore, group therapy—which is widely viewed as offering more benefits than one-on-one therapy for people struggling with addiction of any kind—holds a potential advantage, in that groups are typically smaller in size, and members are allowed to express their thoughts and feelings about what their fellow members are sharing (whereas 12-Step meetings forbid such “crosstalk”).

But 12-Step programs are still the gold standard when it comes to sex addiction, although there are a number of differences among them. Of the four major “S” fellowships, only Sexaholics Anonymous (SA) defines just what “sexual sobriety” means. And SA is the most conservative from a Judeo-Christian point of view, teaching that “any form of sex with oneself or with partners other than the spouse is progressively addictive and destructive.” Sexual Recovery Anonymous (SRA) is SA’s close cousin, except that “committed relationship” is substituted for “spouse.”

Sexual Compulsives Anonymous (SCA) started as a fellowship for gay and bisexual men and is now much broader. One current SCA member, a 45-year-old LA resident whom we’ll call Scott, remembers about 90% of members being gay men at his first meetings in 1996. It was a welcoming community for him at the time, as a recent refugee from Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA): “For me to share [at SLAA meetings] about having gay sex at bathhouses was uncomfortable,” he says. That honesty allowed Scott to begin working the steps—although he ended up having to get chemically sober before his sexual sobriety could kick in.

Not everyone in an “S” fellowship has to stop drinking—or follow any particular formula for changing their sexual behavior, either. The big attraction for many SCA members is that they’re allowed to define their own sexual sobriety. You outline a recovery plan with your sponsor by pinning down your own “bottom-line” behaviors (other fellowships call these “inner circles”)—what you need not to do in order to consider yourself sexually sober. There are “plan meetings” or “plan workshops” for working on your sexual recovery plan in a group setting.

Perhaps the fastest-growing and most broadly based of all is Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA), which was founded in 1977 by a handful of men who desired greater anonymity from their sex-addiction program. Similar to SCA, members of SAA define their own sexual sobriety with a sponsor or therapist—and right now the program is booming. Katehakis mentions a daily meeting in Los Angeles that has been around for over a decade. A few years ago, the six to 10 individuals showing up each day doubled to 20, with 80 people attending the Saturday-morning meeting.

SLAA is for those with “a compulsive need for sex, extreme dependency on one or many people, or a chronic preoccupation with romance, intrigue or fantasy.” Members of both SLAA and SAA come up with lists of outer-circle, middle-circle and inner-circle behaviors as part of their sexual recovery plan, with “outer” being healthy activities and “middle” ones serving as warning signs on the road to “inner.” A middle-circle action for one person might be looking at pornography, for instance, or checking out photos of an old ex on Facebook, while that could be all the way to relapse (inner) for someone else.

Continue reading this article on The Fix

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Reversing Japan's rising sex aversion may depend on a rebirth of hope

"If young people's aversion to sex continues to increase at the present rate, the situation of Japan's low fertility rate and rapid ageing will rapidly worsen. ... The Japanese economy will lose its vitality even more than now. If this happens, this nation might eventually perish into extinction."

To read more about how the young people of Japan are averting to sex, click here

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Brian McKnight writes a theme song for YouPorn about anal sex

Brian McKnight decided that he would tackle another crisis griping our nation: anal sex. Furthermore, this song is an advertisement for arguably one of the biggest ironic takes on YouTube: YouPorn.

Read the rest of this article and listen to the song on Death and Taxes

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When Even a Little is Too Much: How Do You Block Online Porn and Sexual Content

This article was originally posted on PsychCentral by Robert Weiss

Tech-Connect: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly

For many of us, digital information gathering and online interaction have become integrated into our daily routine from the first multitasking moments. We check email, tweet and text, update Facebook, and simultaneously peruse “newspapers” from all over the globe, all while draining the morning coffee. And we do all of this on faster, more sophisticated, more portable and affordable electronic devices than ever before.

This incredible array of sophisticated interconnectivity provides endless new opportunities to support our very traditional human needs for community and social interaction. Innovations like Facebook, with over 500 million users, and Twitter, with over 300 million users, offer real-time interactions with an increasingly wider and more diverse group of people.

Friends and family who may have been too distant for regular contact just a few years ago can now be intimately folded into our lives. For partners, spouses and families separated for long periods of time by work or military service, the tech-connect boom is a godsend. Couples are now able to bond long-distance in real time, share a growing child’s latest milestone, and even engage in visual intimacy via the webcams now routinely incorporated into computers and smart-phones.

Those not yet in a committed relationship can put technology to good use when home or traveling via e-dating—establishing and growing budding relationships with a decreasing focus on who lives where. We make friends, we share and grow from our experiences, we celebrate, and we commiserate—one world, a growing interactive community.

One downside of the tech-connect boom is that whenever humanaccess to intensely pleasurable and arousing substances, like cocaine and crystal meth, previously rare treats, like refined sugar and sweets (now on sale at every gas station), or experiences, like gambling and sex, is increased, the potential for impulsivity, compulsivity, and addiction rears its ugly head.

This is especially true when the pleasurable essence of these substances or experiences is both highly distilled and amplified, as is the case with newer pharmaceutical drugs, online gaming/gambling and Internet porn/sex. As our increasing technological interconnectivity has brought with it affordable, easy and relatively anonymous links to intensely pleasurable sexual content and casual sexual encounters, mental health professionals are seeing a corresponding increase in people struggling with porn abuse, multiple infidelities and sexual/romantic hookups and sex addiction.

It’s just that simple. For sex and romance addicts, computers, laptops, smart-phones and other mobile devices are as much a gateway to problematic behavior as an unlimited buffet meal is to someone with an eating disorder.

While online sexual and romantic activities are a source of highly pleasurable amusement and distraction for the vast majority of healthy people who choose to engage in them, those individuals predisposed to addictive and impulsive behavior patterns can easily find themselves lost in an escalating, obsessive quest for sexual and/or romantic intensity.

Ultimately, some of these individuals begin abusing online sexual experiences—more as a means of emotional escape than sexual pleasure. For such people, repeatedly viewing online porn and/or following up on anonymous online hookups can escalate or underscore pre-existing problems, eventually producing profoundly negative relationship, personal, health, career and even legal consequences.

Protecting Your Online Self

So here’s the rub, if we’re not online, we might as well be living in the Stone Age, a concern that presents a serious dilemma for recovering sex and romance addicts, specifically those who’ve abused the Internet as a means toward sexual acting out. For these men and women, there are only two options: disconnect and miss out on life, or find a way to be online and connected in safe and healthy ways that enhance rather than detract from life and recovery.

Fortunately, there are numerous software programs that sex and romance addicts can utilize to protect themselves from impulsive online decision-making. Most of these are “parental control” programs, and, as the “parental control” label suggests, they were designed and intended to protect children/teens from exposure to age-inappropriate content. Fortunately this software can serve as an equally effective tool for adults in sexual recovery.

Romance and sex addicts, their partners and clinicians who treat them should consider the following in any protective software:

Customizable Controls: First and foremost, the software should include a customizable Internet filter. Most products offer various preset filtering levels. These preset levels are usually appropriate “as is” for children and teens. Adults, however, have different issues and needs. The best products allow for the blacklisting and whitelisting of certain sites—meaning sites that would normally be allowed at a certain preset filtering level can be manually blocked (blacklisted), and sites that would normally be blocked can be manually unblocked (whitelisted). The filter should work regardless of the language in which the website is written.

Accountability: The software should include some sort of accountability function, meaning an “accountability partner” is notified of the user’s online travels, including websites visited, attempts to visit blocked websites, chat-room activities, IM conversations, GPS location (on mobile devices), and time of usage (both when and for how long). For sex and romance addicts, the accountability partner who will best serve them is a neutral therapist, supportive friend, or 12-step sponsor (as spouses can initially be too understandably reactive to manage this task). Ideally, the software should allow for more than one accountability partner. The accountability feature should be customizable, meaning the accountability partner can get daily reports, weekly reports, monthly reports, on-demand reports, and even instant notification if the addict uses or attempts to use the Internet in a certain way.

HTTPS and Proxy Blocking: Tech savvy addicts have been known to use proxies (intermediary web servers) and encrypted HTTPS connections to circumvent filtering software. The software you choose should have features that prevent such abuses. The software should also be un-installable without a password. Ideally, the program will notify the addict’s accountability partner if the addict attempts to uninstall or circumvent the filtering and accountability features of the program.

Ease of Use: The software should be easy to install and to customize. If you are protecting more than one device, you should be able to configure global settings using a web-based interface. In this way, you can establish settings on all of your devices simultaneously instead of dealing with each machine individually.

Availability for Your Device, and Use on Multiple Devices: It doesn’t matter how great a program’s features are if it doesn’t function on your equipment. Software websites will let you know if their product is appropriate for your computer, laptop, smart-phone, and other mobile device. It’s also important to note how many devices (and what types of devices) the software license will cover. Most people need protection on a home computer, a laptop, and a smart-phone, and it’s nice if that can be accomplished with the purchase of only one piece of software through one company.

It is important to remember that even the best Internet filtering software is not perfect. A resourceful, desperate and/or tech-savvy romance or sexual addict can find ways to access whatever it is that he or she is looking for – if they work hard enough. As such, parental control software programs should not be viewed as enforcers of recovery, they should instead be looked at as tools of recovery that can help an addict maintain sobriety (through the filtering features) and rebuild trust with a spouse or partner (through the accountability features).

There are dozens of parental control software products. The best options today for sex and romance addicts appear to be:

BSecure Family Safety, www.bsecure.com/

CovenantEyes, www.covenanteyes.com/

McAfee Safe Eyes and McAfee Family Protection,www.mcafee.com/us/

Net Nanny, www.netnanny.com/

Before you purchase one of the products or recommend it to one of your clients, make sure it is compatible with your/their device or devices. For full reviews of these and other parental control software products, including information on device compatibility, click this link:www.sexualrecovery.com/online-controls-for-sex-romance-addicts.php.

Robert Weiss LCSW, CSAT-S is the author of three books on sexual addiction and an expert on the juxtaposition of human sexuality, intimacy, and technology. He is Founding Director of The Sexual Recovery Institute, www.sexualrecovery.com, in Los Angeles and Director of Intimacy and Sexual Disorders Services at The Ranch in Tennessee, www.recoveryranch.com, and Promises Treatment Centers in California, www.promises.com. Mr. Weiss is a clinical psychotherapist and educator. He has provided sexual addiction treatment training internationally for psychology professionals, addiction treatment centers, and the US military. A media expert forTime, Newsweek, and the New York Times, Mr. Weiss has been featured on CNN, The Today Show, Oprah, and ESPN among many others. Rob is the Sex and Intimacy blogger for Psych-Central, an online psychology site, and can also be found on Twitter at @RobWeissMSW.

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Online Sex Only?

Is dating online only attracting men looking for sex? Sasha from badonlindates.com gives a woman advice on online dating:

Remove all pictures of you bikini-clad or in any flammable attire

Take down any picture of you in Los Vegas or at a night club

Do not post any pictures of you with a drink in your hand

On your profile, make it painfully clear what you are looking for in a man

To read the rest of the article, click here.

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Porn Company Brings Military Families Together

RealTouch wants to bring teledildonics to Afghanistan. Company manager Scott Rinaldo, appearing at a CES party sponsored by porn firm Pink Visual, said he's working on distributing "a thousand dildos for the military wives"—in this case, Internet-connected sex toys that can let families thousands of miles apart get intimate.

To learn more about how technology is changing the way e can enjoy sex, read more here.

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An Interview with Novelist Michael Olson, Author of Strange Flesh

Strange Flesh by novelist Michael Olson, is a novel about emerging technology and particularly technology involving sex and sex toys... but it's more than that.

Read the rest of this article and the interview here.

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Robot Red-Light Districts By 2050? [VIDEO]

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A Poke and a Smile: Relationship Intimacy in the Age of Social Media

Check out Sexual Recovery Institute Founder, Robert Weiss' latest blog post on his Psych Central "Sex & Intimacy in the Digital Age" blog!

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E-books are rekindling women's x-rated reading

This article was originally posted the London Evening Standard

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Sex & Entertainment

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New Book Questions 'The Myth of Sex Addiction'

via CNN

Is sex addiction for real? Or is it “nothing more than a pop-psychology phenomenon, serving only to demonize sex, enforce moral views of sex and relationships and excuse irresponsible behaviors?”

Those are the fighting words of psychologist David Ley, who, in his rousing new book, “The Myth of Sex Addiction," expresses concern over the slippery ease with which America’s mainstream media and burgeoning “addictionology industry” have seemingly conspired to transform a debatable diagnosis into a foregone conclusion.

Click here to read the full article.