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Category: Porn

Have you had your fix of porn and cake?

July 4th, 2012 · Posted by: One comment

This morning’s Metro newspaper has a double-page spread on The Fix:

How many times have you checked your phone for messages so far today? Do you constantly have one eye on your Twitter mentions feed to see who’s talking about you? Would you like another cupcake?

If your answers to these three questions are ’32’, ‘Both eyes’ and ‘No thank-you, a fourth would be too much for me’, then there is nothing special about you whatsoever.

You are just one of the millions who find themselves compelled to continuously refresh their emails and help themselves to just one more piece of cake.

In his latest book, The Fix, which has the slightly frightening subtitle, ‘How addiction is invading our lives and taking over your world,’ Damian Thompson, blogs editor at The Telegraph, says that it is becoming harder and harder for all of us to resist the world’s temptations.

For Mr Thompson, one example of this is how sweet bakery goods have become culinary cocaine – ‘Why cake is the new coke’ is the title of one of the book’s chapters.

‘If you see people bring cake or donuts into an office, people flock to it and then make return visits,’ he told Metro.

‘It does remind me of hedge fund managers or city businessmen in the 1980s frantically returning to the glass table on which the lines of coke are set out.

‘The little sugar buzz is so intense and so irresistible that a little drama of temptation is played out in the office.’

The Fix examines how cupcakes, prescription drugs, smartphones, internet gaming and online pornography are becoming our new addictions of choice.

Mr Thompson speaks from experience. A former alcoholic, he has been sober for 18 years, thanks in part to the help of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

He has been criticised in some quarters for his insistence in the book that addiction isn’t a disease, something that flies in the face of what many alcoholics adhere to when going through AA.

‘My own experience of AA was very, very helpful,’ he recalled. ‘I was almost the caricature of a drunken, young journalist. I reached a point where if I kept on drinking it was clearly going to kill me…’

You can read the rest here.

 

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Posted in: Booze, Cupcakes, Porn, Tech

The Fix: How Addiction Is Invading Our Lives And Taking Over Your World is OUT NOW, published by Collins. Click here to buy your copy in hardcover or on Kindle.

Addict nation

May 25th, 2012 · Posted by: One comment

My essay based on The Fix is the Spectator’s cover story this week:

When future generations look back at the early 21st century, they may well decide that its political turmoil — the collapse of the euro, the spread of Islam, the rise of China — pales into insignificance next to a far more important development: a fundamental change in the relationship between human beings and their social environment.

This was the moment in history, they may conclude, when our species mastered the art of manipulating its brain chemistry to produce intense bursts of short-term pleasure. As a result, billions of people began to have more fun than their minds and bodies could handle — and developed insidious, life-sapping addictions.

Already, the distinction between ‘addicts’ and ordinary people is far less clear than it was even 20 years ago. The line between consumption, habit and addiction is becoming dangerously blurred.

It’s not difficult to find evidence that appetites are spinning out of control. At Victoria Station, young commuters pant like elderly spaniels after rushing to catch their train. Many of them are clutching over-filled baguettes; they have to lick the mayonnaise off their fingers before fishing for their ­tickets.

Other travellers are hovering over a gigantic free-standing food counter loaded with thousands of pieces of loose candy: jelly beans, toffee, bonbons, liquorice sticks, fudge and lollipops, all glistening with artificial colouring. These sugar addicts look furtive as they scoop the sweets into the paper bags. Anyone would think they were buying pornography, from the way their shoulders hunch and their eyes dart sideways.

Not that many of today’s porn connoisseurs have to go through the ordeal of scanning the top shelf in the newsagents. That embarrassment has been made redundant by technology. More than 150 million people visit porn sites every year, and the figure will soon rise into the hundreds of millions as the developing world hooks up to the internet.

The numbers tell only part of the story, however. It’s not just that digital technology creates unprecedented desire for pornography; the images themselves are shockingly explicit compared with most pre-digital porn. Never before have so many nice people discovered that they have depraved sexual tastes. Husbands who would once have retreated to their dens to pore over car magazines now download videos of ‘teen sluts’ being violently penetrated and gasping for more.

The difference between old-fashioned porn and internet porn is a bit like the difference between wine and spirits. After hundreds of years as a mild intoxicant, erotica has undergone a sudden distillation. Digital porn is the equivalent of cheap gin in Georgian England: a reliable if unhygienic hit that relieves misery and boredom. And, unlike the old ‘dirty mags’, it is available in limitless quantities.

You can read the rest free of charge on the Speccie’s website here.


Posted in: Disease, Eating, Porn, The Fix

The Fix: How Addiction Is Invading Our Lives And Taking Over Your World is OUT NOW, published by Collins. Click here to buy your copy in hardcover or on Kindle.

Internet porn isn’t just about sex – it’s about collecting

April 26th, 2012 · Posted by: 6 comments

It’s easy to assume that internet pornography unleashes an uncontrollable sex urge – and that’s why (to put it delicately) men drive themselves to exhaustion in front of their monitors. But there’s more and more evidence that, like computer games, online erotica latches on to obsessive-compulsive traits in our personality. It’s a subject I explore in a long chapter of The Fix devoted to internet porn – probably the addiction that worries the experts most:

Internet pornography can unearth obsessive-compulsive traits. Enter the words ‘collector jailed’ into a search engine, and you immediately come across stories about the compulsive hoarding of internet porn. An accounts clerk from Lincolnshire was jailed for downloading the largest collection of child pornography discovered in the UK – 500,000 images. In Pittsburgh, a man was jailed after police found 60 hard drives filled with images of underage girls; the defence tried to claim that Tourette’s syndrome had led him to collect them compulsively. In any case hoarding on this scale would have been impossible without access to internet porn. These cases came to light because the material was illegal – but we should also bear in mind that the same technology allows men to amass large collections of images that may be explicit but don’t actually break the law. It’s hard to see, in fact, how anyone with an obsessive-compulsive personality and a weakness for online porn can avoid getting the two mixed up. The internet enables users to painlessly download and catalogue thousands of files; arranging them is often part of the fun of owning a personal computer. Add sex to the experience, and collecting porn can turn into an all-consuming pastime.

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Posted in: Porn, Tech

The Fix: How Addiction Is Invading Our Lives And Taking Over Your World is OUT NOW, published by Collins. Click here to buy your copy in hardcover or on Kindle.

If you think addiction is an incurable disease, answer this question

April 19th, 2012 · Posted by: 15 comments

Addicts love, just love, being told they have a disease. Or, better still, in the words of the American Society of Addiction Medicine:

…a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry.

And it’s incurable. So if that’s what you’re suffering from, no wonder you say ‘Okay, I’ll have another pint/line/cupcake’ when temptation rears its head. How can you be expected to say no when all that ‘related circuitry’ is kicking in?

Here’s my rough and ready translation of ‘primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry’: This is not your fault. Your ‘disease’ left you no choice, whether you’re addicted to bourbon, crystal meth or Krispy Kreme. That’s what you’ll be told if you attend Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous or any other 12-step group.

But there’s a problem here. Many of the people in ‘the rooms’ have stopped drinking, taking drugs, binge eating or whatever without any medical intervention whatsoever. And lots of them don’t relapse. (Me, for example: gave up booze 18 years ago, haven’t gone back to it.)

So here’s my question: is there any other ‘primary, chronic disease’ whose sufferers can cure themselves without medical intervention?

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Posted in: Booze, Cupcakes, Disease, Drugs, Eating, Gaming, Pills, Porn, Shopping, Tech

The Fix: How Addiction Is Invading Our Lives And Taking Over Your World is OUT NOW, published by Collins. Click here to buy your copy in hardcover or on Kindle.