Are We Losing Our Intimacy?

By Ilex Bien-Aime

Everywhere I look, there is sex. I dare you to go a complete day without seeing one sexual image. Let’s face it, sexuality has become engrained in our society. Turn on the TV and what do you see, Bob standing there looking crazy in the face because he has taken ExtenZe. They show couples lying in bed excited about the new lubes on the market that help enhance the sexual experience. Women are shown walking around town with their hair blown back because they have received the new Trojan Vibrations. Try to do a simple Google search and you may get steered to a porn site. Unless we are living in a cave, we can’t seem to get away from it.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE SEX! I believe that sex is a wonderful gift that was given to mankind from the beginning of time. There is nothing wrong with or dirty about sex. I just think we have started making sex into this nasty thing that is no longer intimate but is now a money making machine. It has now become an obsession in our world. I read somewhere that 76 percent of porn buyers were men and that the porn industry makes about 13.9 billion dollars a year.

I am not here to tell you my moral stance on porn so I will try to just give you some researched facts. A study from the BBC radio 1 found that one in three young adults who occasionally watched even just light porn said it had upset a partner or caused relationship problems. That number rose to seven out of ten for those who watched more than ten hours. Divorce Wizard.Com says that at a 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, 2/3 of the 350 divorce lawyers who attended said the Internet played a significant role in the divorces in the past year, with excessive interest in online porn contributing to more than half such cases.

I can’t speak for all men but for the men that I know, porn has had a heavy influence on our lives. For the most part we learned about sex from these films. Some of our signature moves, and at some point maybe our wants and desires, have come from these movies. Let’s be honest fellas, sometimes we are guilty of wanting our women to do some of the things that our favorite porn star is doing. When our mates don’t provide this for us, we really become upset but don’t realize that we asking for some demeaning stuff. Real talk, some men are hard down mad because their woman won’t let them have anal sex with them or because their women won’t let them ejaculate in their faces. While in some homes, these things are normal practices, in other homes they are deal breakers.

Much research has been done and documented on the effects porn usage has on men but research is not as prevalent on women. Though women tend to view porn at a much lower rate than men, sex shops are dominated with female sex toys. Passion parties have exploded on the scene and most of the women I know have thrown or have been to at least 2-3 of these parties. Some of the items that are introduced can be used for the sexual enhancement of both male and female partners however that depends on the household.

For some men, a vibrator is considered his arch enemy. Let’s face it, the vibrator can do things that we just can’t do. The average man can have sex without orgasm for 3-13 minutes. On average it takes a woman 10-20 minutes to have an orgasm which by the numbers can make it hard for a woman to reach orgasm during sex. So the vibrator comes in and does the trick at a much faster rate. According to Dr. Lori Buckley, a psychologist and certified sex therapist, “When women become used to the intensity of a vibrator, it can be harder to have an orgasm during intercourse since they’re lacking the direct clitoral stimulation that they have learned to love and rely upon.” I have heard some women say that they prefer vibrators to sex because they can use them for five minutes and get theirs, without the fuss of having sex and possibly not having an orgasm.

I am not trying to argue against porn or sex toys. Some couples enjoy both of them and to that, I say “to each his own”. The point that I am trying to make though, is that too many of us are losing intimacy based on these things. Husbands are making wives feel dirty and unattractive because of porn. Wives are making husbands feel inadequate because of their toys. Human beings were born with everything we need for sex. We have hands to caress and stroke, we have tongues and lips to kiss and suck, we have brains to think about how to help us achieve our sexual pleasures, and we have mouths to speak up and tell our partners what we want.

My name is Ilex Bien-Aime and I live in Washington, DC with my lovely wife. I write as a man who has seen women mistreat themselves and who have allowed themselves to be mistreated. I write as a man who wants to give my future daughters a guideline on how to deal with men. Lastly I write what I write because my female friends are always asking my opinion about these situations. Connect with Ilex at Iamsayingit.blogspot.com or via email at ilexbienaime@gmail.com