Here's a self-assessment quiz from Pine Grove Behavior Health and Addiction Services about sex addiction. It's a live-in treatment center for addictions. On staff is the well known and respected psychologist specializing in sex addiction, Patrick Carnes. Do these apply to you?

1. Have you experienced difficulty resisting impulses to engage in sexual behaviors?
2. Have you tried to stop, control, or reduce these behaviors?
3. Have you thought of killing yourself because of your sexual behaviors?
4. Have you experienced legal consequences due to your sexual behaviors?
5. Do you spend large amounts of time trying to get sex or recover from being sexual?
6. Do you ever feel anxious or irritable if you are unable to engage in sexual behaviors?
7. Do you worry that others will find out about your sexual activities?
8. Do you often find yourself preoccupied with sexual thoughts?
9. Do you feel that your sexual behavior is not normal?
10. Are you experiencing family problems as a result of your behaviors?

How many men could answer no to all of these? Especially 1, 2, 5, 6, 8? I think most men would answer "yes" to several of the above.

Is it that the quiz is too sensitive, or is that most men are sex addicts?

How about women? I wonder if women are really much less sexual than men, or are they just more inhibited in their expression, or do they express it in different ways or at different times. Most of my former girlfriends actually weren't much less interested in sex than I was, if at all.

Still, one does get the sense that the male sex drive, at least, is out of hand. Consider this quote from C.S. Lewis (from Mere Christianity):

"Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it: the old Christian rule is, 'Either marraige, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.' Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong.

"But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite ture that most of us will eat too much: nut not terifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetige goes a little beuond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.

"Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act---that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrng with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?"

Hmm. So are most men sex addicts?

Again, taking a break from hardcore philosophy (I just submitted my journal article revisions, and am tired). So it's to the lower brain I go.

Is it just me, or are there a lot of women who are taken and flirt with other guys? Does it seem the same to women, about taken guys being more flirty?

Doesn't it seem a bit unfaithful?

I sometimes get frustrated when a taken woman flirts with me. I get far more flirts from taken (and even married) women than single, avaliable women. I even had an attractive married woman throw herself at me! But this never happens with single attractive women. I don't like it. It's like clouds without rain, a sunny day and you have a 12 hour shift in the office with no windows. It's especially frustrating when I find the woman attractive. I usually try to distance myself from such women.

Yet the single girls clam up. Hmm. I'm sure some of it is due to lack of interest. But still, I wonder why it seems that the marrieds/takens flirt with me a lot more. Do other guys have the same experience? Do women have the same experience with men?

When I'm in a relationship, I cease flirting. I feel I like it's not being true. Plus it makes me less attracted to the girl I'm dating. I start comparing, etc. A recent survey from McGill said this is true of most men. The same article said that women are more attached to their guy after flirting with other guys.  Is that true?

I guess then if your wife or girlfriend starts flirting with other guys, it's not a such a bad thing -- you may receive more affection as a result. If your boyfriend or husband starts flirting, however, then trouble is brewing.

In any case, it's hard on us lonely single guys when we see that big juicy lollipop dangling in front of us, if it belongs to someone else.

These are just casual observations, of course.

Edit: It would be nice to have a survey: do people with S.O.s flirt more, less, or the same as people without?

A theory -- people who naturally flirt a lot are more likely to be taken than those who don't naturally flirt very much. So it isn't the fact that they are taken that makes them flirt as much as their flirting makes them be taken. They are just being themselves.

What do you think of this quote?

"Why is pornography the number one snare for men? He longs for the beauty, but without his fierce and passionate heart he cannot find her or win her or keep her. Though he is powerfully drawn to the woman, he does not know how to fight for her or even that he is to fight for her. Rather, he finds her mostly a mystery that he knows he cannot solve and so at a soul level he keeps his distance. And privately, secretly, he turns to the immitation. What makes pornography so addictive is that more than anything else in a lost man's life, it makes him feel like a man whithout ever requireing a thing of him. The less a guy feels like a real man in the presence of a real woman, the more vulnerable he is to porn." From Wild at Heart, by John Eldredge

It's a bit of pop Christian literature, I know, but I tend to see his way here.

Partly because of feminism, men have been given the impression that they aren't to fight to find, win, or keep their women. According to them we are supposed to be equals who enter into some sort of mutual contract of care and understanding or something like that. It's also that they don't realise that women, regardless of their complaints (or at least how they used to complain about masculinity, back when feminism was more powerful), want men who are wild, and valiant. Men don't realize (or want to realize) that they have to be conquerors, at least of themselves and their fears, if they are to really find the beauty they crave.