Why am I not Accountable?

I don't think I've ever been held truly accountable for anything in my life. I can pull up countless examples from my childhood. For example, I once cut a set of my mother's drapes. I was probably in late elementary school or even junior high. I knew I shouldn't have, but I did anyway. Afterwards, my mother noticed and she knew it was me. She asked me about it, and I denied it. I don't know to this day why I cut them, but I denied it masterfully. Denied, denied, denied. I don't think I was punished.

Later in junior high, I punched the bully who was always making fun of me and my mother in the face. He retaliated by hitting me in the gut. I lied, claimed he started it, and got him suspended for a week. That should have been me. It happened in front of the whole class. I have no idea how I got away with that. It was stone cold wrong. I should have been punished.

In high school I made a home-made pipe-bomb (this was pre columbine and 9/11 and all that) that blew up in my face. I got shrapnel in my face. I needed plastic surgery. I have a scar to this day, and I lied my ass off about how it happened. The story wasn't even plausible. Again. No punishment.

I wrote a term paper for a kid in high school. I got busted by the teacher. I got a an F for the 9 weeks, an A for the other 9 weeks and an A on the final, and I pulled a C. 2 years later I went to the teacher and told him I had been a model student - the truth - and asked him to fix it. He changed the F to a B or an A, and I got an A for the semester. Unbelievable. How ballsy! How completely wrong! Do children face any consequences in this world? I don't even remember any significant punishment from my parents. I think the fact that I didn't do much prevented them from punishing me.

These are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head. I have never faced consequences for anything. I think this fuels a sense of invincibility when I am doing wrong.

Truth: There are consequences for actions. Even if no person knows about what you did. God knows. Karma knows.

Truth: I am not a lone individual interacting with a bunch of amorphous blobs. These are real people on this Earth. My interactions with them have meaning to them and affect me. This includes my wife.

Another Brief Childhoood Anecdote

I had a good childhood. I was a happy little boy. My earliest exposure to the sex industry was probably a bit early to keep me from being screwed up. Both of my parents worked, and I was watched by two different sitters on different days. One of them was a nice high school girl. I don't think she ever did anything to help mess me up. The other was a very nice little old lady. She watched the garbage daytime talk shows while I played on the floor. When I was somewhere around 4 years old Phil Donahue had strippers on. She made me watch. "Watch this." "Watch how they strip down to almost nothing." Why the fuck does a 4 year old need to watch that! What a cluster. I never should have been exposed to that. And I definitely soaked it up. I got an erection. I remember playing with it. On the living room floor. With the baby sitter and I watching strippers on TV. It's not like I was molested. But some innocence was probably lost there.

I saw a CNN.com story yesterday in a similar vein.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/12/28/xrated.mp3.player.ap/index.html?iref=newssearch
This girl got an mp3 player that some douche bag bought, filled with porn, and returned. That girl is wrecked. Just like that.

Sobriety

I've been struggling with a bunch of thoughts and ideas over the past few days. We are visitng my parents for New Years. They are finishing up a divorce and separation that I just found out about a few weeks ago. This has been strangely therapeutic for me because it reinforces some thoughts about their marriage and my behaviors that I have been considering recently. That stuff is too thick to get through right now. I'll blog on that another time.

Today I want to discuss sobriety. What does it mean for me? I spent a few days going over the possibilities in my head. Mostly I was trying to come up with scenarios that involved masturbation being OK. However, I really don't think porn is OK for me, and I have virtually always masturbated with porn. It would potentially be nice if I were able to masturbate in the shower or in my own bed. I'm really not sure if that would lead me down the slippery slope to porn, internet porn, phone sex, video sex, sex with hookers and random internet people though. What would I fantasize about while masturbating? Sex with hookers? The sobriety must be complete. My sobriety will mean no masturbation and sex only with my wife. December 28, 2007 will be the anniversary. That's when I last masturbated. I last had a hand job from a hooker some time in late November. I last had sex with a hooker in mid-May, and with a random internet aquaintance in mid-March.

I really believe masturbation is a normal healthy thing...for most people. For me it has practically been the focus of my life for 16 years. It is a shame to cut it off, but I believe it is the right thing to do. If I'm still sober in 6 months, I'll revisit this.

To Do:
1. clear porn off of computer
2. cancel online memberships to forums
3. cancel my adult bittorrent tracker account (more free porn than you could imagine)
4. cancel my unlimited monthly newsgroup downloads (more free porn than I could imagine)
5. cancel my membership to a pay as you go amateur phone sex site.
6. tell my last remaining internet conquest (whom I would have hooked up with a month ago if she hadn't had a schedule conflict) to buzz off.
7. Throw out the sim card to the "'ho phone". For those not quite as messed up as me, this is a pay-as-you-go cell phone. You can give the number out to anybody...hookers, strippers, internet people. Then you don't have to worry about drug addicts and losers calling your personal cell at inopportune times. The sim card is where I have stored the numbers of strippers, crack whores, and escorts. How slimy is that?
8. I also need financial accountability. I have a credit card with out-standing sex industry and other impulse-buy related expenditures on it. It carries a balance that will probably take me the better part of a year to pay off. I need to turn over access account info to my wife. Not because I feel like I need a police officer, but because I think knowing that she could look is important. It also further elminates duplicity. This is the hardest. It involves my wife at least being aware that I have a problem, at least on some degree, with sex. I suspect that she already knows a little bit. I'm not ready for full disclosure, now, if ever.

This means certain other things are off limits too. I can't go driving around some of the worst neighborhoods in our city at all hours of the day and night cruising for prostitutes. I can't go to strip clubs.

There are a lot of benefits here. Money I would have spent on sex related stuff can be spent paying down the balance on that credit card. I'll save money on gas. I'll save probably an hour plus daily that I would have spent looking for porn on the internet or reading up on escorts and cruising sites. I can use that time for so many more productive things: reconnecting with my wife, exercising, HEALTHY hobbies. I have a lot of self-loathing, but I am excited about the person I could be.

Where to Begin?

I guess we'll start at the beginning. I'll give you all the messed up stuff about my childhood before I tell you about sleeping with people I wouldn't even let in my house. I've been trying to figure out how it came to this. Why does it seem like I have been on a collision course with this stuff?

I was a preschool boy who was always looking up girls' skirts. Yes, I was that guy. I got talked to about that. I suspect they didn't want to give me a complex about sex, and I don't remember what my preschool teacher told me, but I don't remember any punishment.

I have early memories of trying to force girls to kiss me on the school bus. Yes, I was that guy. I didn't know what the hell I was doing--I was only 5 or 6, but I was definitely into it. I would wait until the bus driver wasn't looking before jumping seats and then squishing some poor terrified looking girl into the corner and giving her a smooch. This went on for days after it started before the bus driver yelled at me and told me to cut it out. But that was all she did to me. She didn't keep me on the bus until last and then go tell my mother when she dropped me off (common practice for misbehaving children on rural bus routes). She didn't
report me to the school. She didn't sit me down and tell me that wasn't appropriate. She did tell me to stop, but looking back on it, I wish there had been more.

Fast forward to my teenage years and my discovery of porn. I was probably 12-ish when I discovered dad's stash of like 3 Playboys, which I thought were phenomenal. Then fast forward a year, and I'm out at my violin lessons with time to kill, so I wander around town and find a gas station. Now: this is how ballsy I was. I walk into a gas station, (at thirteen years old, mind you, and I was not an old looking 13 year old) spend a few minutes looking at the covers of their porn, and then I take a magazine up to the counter and buy it. What the fuck kind of clerk sells porn to a 13 year old?!! In fairness I was probably already on my path, but that certainly didn't help. Then I was obsessed. I bought porn almost weekly there, accumulating a collection of pornography that would rival the average dateless 35 year old bachelor. Several YEARS later, my dad found the box of porn and took it to the road with the trash. He indicated that he did not feel it was appropriate reading material for a 16 year old. That was it. No discussion about denigrating women. No "How did you afford this?" "Where did you buy this?". I, of course, had the same amount of respect for my parents as most teenagers, so I snuck out of the house after dark, went out to the road, and dragged them back in. Never heard about it again, even though I am sure my dad was going through my stuff. Several magazines disappeared, and I am sure that he took them.

Then I discovered the internet. I started on the internet in 1993 I think. I used to access it by dialing into an RS6000, on old PowerPC server from IBM that ran UNIX. I surfed the internet with a text-based browser called lynx. I discovered IRC and had my first online sex chat with women. I claimed to be 18 and found no shortage of women in their late 20s and 30s who wanted to talk. I even had phone sex with some of them. It helped that I had all the lingo down from reading porn for several years already. They would probably be pretty disturbed at knowing that I was 16. I discovered the bottomless pit of internet pornography that was and still is the Usenet newsgroups. The newsgroups and IRC are the home of absolutely the lowest forms of smut.

I started stealing my father's credit card to pay for phone sex, thus beginning the slide towards paying for sex. He never noticed that. I did, however, accidentally get charged like $100 to his phone bill for accessing a phone sex line. That he noticed. He yelled at me about it. I told him I didn't know you could get charged over the phone like that if it wasn't a 900 number (which was a half-truth) I'm sure I pressed "1" in there somewhere to agree to have it charged to my (father's) phone. He got them to cancel it by threatening to sue them for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He should have made me pay it off to him and told them to strengthen their age verification process. That was a week and a half's+ pay at my $4.25 minimum wage high school part time job, which as I recall was about $3.75 after taxes. I never paid a dime. No responsibility. The point is, he never talked to me about what I was doing. The only conversation we EVER had on sex was probably when I was 16 he asked me if I had any questions about sex. I said no. We left it at that.

So that is how my downward spiral started. There were some points for intervention in my early and middle teenage years, but I can't put the blame on other people for the decisions I made. I wish I had never found the Playboys, bought the porn, had all the cyber sex. I think it helped establish my duality as well. There was never any significant interplay between my sex addiction and my real life.

Diary of a Sex Addict

Welcome. My name is John and I am a sex addict. This will be the first post of probably many over the next year. I am doing this instead of therapy, and I think I need a lot of therapy. Here I will discuss past transgressions and future attempts to "stay clean."

I am not going to say too much about myself, as my anonymity is still very important to me. I am in my late 20s. I work and live in a major Midwestern city. I have a respectable job and a wife who loves me more than I deserve.

I have had lifelong issues with sex and sexuality. I realize that I am not the only one out there who can say that. In my case, these issues came out in an ugly way early in my marriage. I have a relativistic sense of morality and I have no history of significant punishment for smaller moral infractions in my youth. But you can hear all about that another day.

I don't know who, if anybody, is going to read this. Your feedback and comments are welcome, even if it is things that are hard for me to hear. Also, humor is welcome. The sex addict jokes in Blades of Glory remain riotously funny, for example.

There is a website for sexaholics anonymous, an organization that I may become more involved with in the coming year. Right now I can't even imagine going to a meeting, but we'll see where all this leads.