Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Sex on the Download: A Four part teleclass

Find out what is wrong and what is right with looking at porn on the internet and chatting with others on the internet.

SEX ON THE DOWNLOAD:
Part 1

A four part teleclass with Joe Kort and Tammy Nelson

"Sex on the Download" is a reflection of our current culture of internet relationships where the growing societal influence of connecting in cyber relationships can create real time intimacy, but may also lead to compulsive sexual behaviors, porn addiction and compulsive infidelity.

Is it inevitable that in the not too distant future we will ultimately download all of our intimate and sexual connections?

For some users, this time may already be here. And it may be effecting real life partnerships, jobs, and the ability to create healthy sexual connections.

Therapists, educators, sexuality counselors and medical practitioners will benefit from this training to assist anyone who uses the internet as a pathway to relationship, connection, sexuality or pleasure and who finds themselves caught in a web of cyber chaos, pain, addiction or crisis.

Learn direct interventions, insight oriented and nonpathologizing behavioral changes, and directed attempts to connect for couples and individuals. We will use lecture, case example and worksheets and handouts. Supervision, group discussion and ongoing support is included in this LIVE teleclass.

Four Tuesdays: Jan 25, Feb 1, 8, 15, 2011
12pm – 1pm EST

COST: $200 (student discount may be available)

Week 1 - Participants will learn to provide appropriate diagnosis of sexual disorders such as sexualcompulsivity, sexual addiction, porn addiction, compulsive infidelity and other sexual behavioral disorders that manifest as internet disorders. Is there such a thing as sex addiction? Is porn addiction real? Can it be something else? What is healthy use of the internet? Can pornography use ever be healthy?

Week 2 - Participants will learn ways to work with partners to accept responsibility for the repair of sexual dysfunction as it relates to object relations and personal sexual history. Work with couples to repair relationships after infidelity, after porn addiction, after betrayal or trauma. Move partnerships through specific stages of erotic recovery necessary for healing.

Week 3 - Participants will learn ways to address the nonsexual meanings of sexual behaviors or lack thereof including cracking the code of fantasy and desire as it relates to internet behavior. Learn ways to share fantasy with partners to decrease anxiety and bring erotic energy back in to the relationship instead of splitting it off to outside exits.

Week 4 - Participants will learn ways to explore their own countertransference, assumptions and assertions and the difficulties this presents in the treatment of internet relationships. The non-pathological use of theinternet is reflected in positively framed couples work using fluidity, intuition and sexual empathy.

Tammy Nelson, PhD, LPC, is a Certified Sexologist, a Licensed Professional Counselor, a Certified Imago Therapist and the author ofGetting the Sex You Want: Shed Your Inhibitions and Reach New Heights of Passion Together, and lectures and trains internationally on sex and relationships. http://www.DrTammyNelson.com/

Joe Kort, PhD, LMSW, is a psychotherapist and Board Certified Sexologist who specializes in sexual identity issues, IMAGO relationship therapy, sex therapy and sexual addiction. He is the author of two books on gay male identity and relationships, Gay Affirmative Therapy for the Straight Clinician and has a chapter for female partners who are involved with men who have sex with men in Mending a
Shattered Heart
. http://www.joekort.com/



Tuesday, December 1, 2009

When sex gets in the way of your relationship

INTERNET PORN = ADDICTION, RECREATION or INFIDELITY?
with Joe Kort, MSW and Tammy Nelson, MS

http://www.joekortclasses.com/default.asp?id=4434

In this course we'll explore a differentiated view of pornography use, assessing for addiction and compulsive use, as well as defining when porn is used as recreation and its possible meanings in different relationships, of all sexual orientations.

We will define monogamy, fidelity and exclusivity as it relates to pornography use in couples and look at the pathological perspective of pornography use as it desensitizes and/or traumatizes viewers.

We will also see how porn can re-eroticise relationships when there has been erotic neglect.

Participants will learn the three reasons people go on the Internet to look at porn and will find ways to assess, treat and intervene when porn is a problem.

TELECLASSES ARE ON-THE-PHONE CLASSES - YOU DO NOT NEED TO JOIN LIVE - YOU WILL RECEIVE A RECORDING OF THE CLASS TO LISTEN ON YOUR OWN TIME

WHEN: December 7 - 1PM to 2pm EST
COST: $25 (Intro class does not include CEs)

To REGISTER: Click the link to below to register, pay by MC/Visa and receive the number and info to join the class.

http://www.joekortclasses.com/default.asp?id=4434

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Depathologizing Porn: Why Can't It Be Just an Acceptable Diversion?

Usually this site is only about straight men who have sex with men. However, I have an article featured in a national psychotherapy magazine and I thought it would be of interest to readers of this blog.

It focuses on a heterosexual couple where the husband is caught using pornography by his wife. I illustrate how I work with the couple. The way in which I treat this couple is similar to how I would work with couples entering my office for the men who are caught viewing online male on male pornography.



Depathologizing Porn
Why Can't It Be Just an Acceptable Diversion?


by Joe Kort

In more than 25 years of practice, I've heard hundreds of stories of how pornography use can damage people's sex lives profoundly and ruin their marriages. I've personally had many couples describe the shame and secretiveness of one partner's involvement with porn. Time and again, I've treated people for whom viewing porn has become a compulsion and who've come to prefer it to being with a partner. Yet I've worked with many for whom porn isn't destructive to their relationship, but, in their view, offers a source of excitement and satisfaction they wouldn't otherwise experience.

Of course, these days, it's impossible to grasp the impact of pornography on relationships without considering the role of the Internet. Years ago, finding new and titillating erotica was a time-consuming chore.In the last couple of decades, though, the range of graphic material available online has exponentially accelerated the appeal and use of porn. Trying to explain the effect of the Internet on porn consumption, sex researcher Al Cooper has written that the driving force is the "Triple-A engine of Access, Affordability, and Anonymity." While it may take alcohol 30 years to ruin an alcoholic's health, only a year's worth of heavy cocaine use can lead to a total mental and physical collapse. Now, for some porn users, the Internet has become a kind of virtual cocaine.

Yet, despite the undeniable harm that porn can do, we therapists need to bear in mind a fundamental fact: the overwhelming majority of people exposed to it don't become addicts. Patrick Carnes's research shows that sexual addiction affects three to five percent of adults, suggesting that porn use isn't about to turn us into a country of addicts glued to their computer screens. Further, assuming that porn inevitably leads to addiction can blind us to understanding its nonpathological appeal to so many people—most of them men who are quite normal in every other way.

It can make it harder for us to accept that, in many relationships, porn use may satisfy needs that have nothing to do with psychological pathology or sexual dysfunction. In fact, noted sex researcher Helen Fisher argues that the brain-inhibiting effects of antidepressants pose a much graver threat to couples' sexuality than porn. She even advises couples to go on the Internet and look at porn as a kind of hormone booster, arguing that porn "drives up dopamine levels, which drives up your testosterone."

To be sure, porn use is permeated with a sense of the forbidden that triggers intense emotion, but as therapists, we need to understand it on a case-by-case basis and be careful to separate our own biases from our clients' needs. To begin to see porn in a more normalizing light, it can be helpful to understand the ways in which porn can be incorporated into a relationship without secretiveness or shame.

To continue reading this article click here

Friday, August 17, 2007

Cuckolds: Straight men having sex with men with women present

Cuckolds: Straight men having sex with men with women present

By Joe Kort, MSW

From time to time I will blog about various cases I have had in my office to illustrate how men can have sex with other men and it not be about homosexuality or even bisexuality.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a cuckold is “a derisive name for the husband of an unfaithful wife.” The concept of being a cuckold is that a man’s wife or girlfriend is interested in being with another man, usually because she complains of not being sexually satisfied by her husband or boyfriend. Often the other man is more endowed and the male partner is therefore humiliated and shamed for not being able to satisfy his woman as this man can. Usually these sexual fantasies involve the women being sexually dominant and forcing their male partners to watch and/or participate in the sexual acts.

In the case of cuckolds, straight men have fantasies where their wives are having sex with another man either in their presence (or not), but with their knowledge. Other straight men fantasize and/or engage in sexual activity with another man's female wife with the husband present and watching (or not), but with the husband's knowledge.Either way the men involved in cuckold fantasies need a woman to be involved or they are left cold.

In other words, if women are not part of the sexual fantasy or the other man is known to be gay or bisexual, the husband or boyfriend is often turned off. The erotic part of the fantasy for these men is that both are heterosexual.

Some argue these men are gay and/or bisexual and in denial—and some are. But there are too many heterosexual men who enjoy the homoeroticism of another male present for various psychological reasons—none of which have to do with homosexuality.

The Story of Jim being a cuckold

Jim, a heterosexual 35-year-old accountant and father of two young children, came to see me after his wife of 10 years found bisexual pornography on their home computer. Jim would erase his computer’s history to avoid his wife’s discovering what he was looking at on the Internet. What he did not count on was that these sites were saved in the computer’s anti-virus software cache. His wife, Lori, accidentally discovered a list of “Googled” websites; the majority of which were bisexual porn sites where men were sexual with other men while women were present.

Jim denied that he was gay or that he was even bisexual. He admitted that he had been looking at gay and bisexual porn and he was horrified that his wife had found out. He told me that he did not have sexual or romantic feelings toward other men, and he had shame around his interest in being sexual with men. This interest began when he realized he was aroused by having threesomes. Jim had always had fantasies about threesomes in which he was with two women.

In college his male friends talked about openly and proudly about their conquests when they convinced a woman to do a threesome with them. One night he and a buddy were drunk and both discovered they were eyeing the same young woman at the bar. They began hitting on her and ultimately all three agreed to have a three-way. They went back to Jim’s apartment and both he and his friend were sexual with her. He was not aroused by his male friend, nor did he have direct sexual contact with his friend during the threesome.

He and his friend enjoyed this experience very much and did this several more times when they were drunk or high during their last year in college. Neither Jim nor his friend ever talked about these experiences after they happened. They never had direct sexual encounters with each other. Jim denied being in touch with any sexual feelings toward his friend in any way. Jim did, though, begin having masturbatory fantasies about threesomes between himself, another man and a woman—involving both men taking turns with the woman. He found pornography that showed images of this both in magazines and on the Internet. It was nothing more than fantasy at that point.

After he graduated he began dating and eventually marrying his current wife to whom he was 100% committed. During the first few years of marriage he felt sexually satisfied and happy. However, as is true for most people, the sexual intimacy reduced between him and his wife. He admitted she was more open to things than most women he had been with. She was willing to give him oral sex and was “good at it;” as well as allowing him to give her anal sex.He stimulated himself with Internet pornography between sexual contacts with his wife.

The pornography was the same as always--two men being sexual with a woman at the same time. This excited him and he joined online groups to find images where two or more men were having sex with one woman. He did not dare disclose this to his wife or friends as he was concerned he would be judged and labeled as gay or bisexual. He knew he was turned on to women both sexually and romantically and found images of women erotic as well. But he also enjoyed the fantasy of threesomes.

Then about five years ago Jim discovered a porn site about men being “cuckolded”.

He did not know what this word meant but found himself strongly interested in the images and stories on these sites.What aroused him most was the idea of being sexual with a woman while he husband watched. He found message boards where couples were looking for a male and masturbated to the thought of his being that male.

One night Jim was on the Internet and found a chat room called “Pix of my hot wife” and discovered men looking for other men to be sexual with their wives while they watched. Jim had now entered an entirely different realm and found himself unable to stop going back to these chat rooms.Jim started chatting with both men and couples about pleasing their wives, about being seen the couple as the one who could satisfy her in ways that the husband could not. The thought of the husband’s watching aroused him more than just finding a woman to have sex with. Ultimately these couples invited Jim to have sex with them in real time rather than just cybersex. Jim agreed and began meeting various couples during which he would have sex with the women and the husbands would watch.

One time Jim was with a couple and in the excitement of doing the wife of one of the couples the wife asked Jim to ejaculate into her husband’s face and mouth. In the heat of the moment, Jim did this and found himself now excited by the thought of doing that each time he was with a couple. This progressed to having the husbands fellate him while the wife watched. Jim was excited by having men get him erect to have intercourse with the man’s wife and/or accept his ejaculation after having intercourse with the man’s wife.

A number of times Jim realized he was being tricked by men who said they had wives while chatting over the Internet but having met them in person found that these men were single and simply wanted to meet a straight man. Jim was turned off by this. He tried to be sexual with the first man who tricked him by convincing him he was with a wife, but Jim could not finish and left the situation.I asked Jim what turned him on about all of this.

Jim enjoyed the dominance and receiving the ultimate prize of a man giving up his wife for him to enjoy.

Jim was truly a heterosexual man who enjoyed erotic play with other men but only in the presence of a woman.