Some addictions are better for you than others.

Years ago I had a roommate who was addicted to gay porn. Not a boyfriend, just a roommate. Okay, so he’d been a boyfriend, but by the time we moved in together the bloom was off the rose and we’d just became friends. With an occasional upgrade to fuck buddy status. As roommates go, it was an ideal living situation. I worked a regular Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 job, he worked late nights and weekends. I rarely saw him since our time at the house seldom over-lapped. Unfortunately, when it did I’d see far too much of him. He spent all of his free time splayed out naked in the living room watching gay porn on the wide screen. Which accounts for his occasional upgrade to fuck buddy status.

You’d think coming home to a hot naked stud who was always primed, ready, and willing would be a little slice of heaven. Especially one whose birthday you didn’t have to remember. Or your anniversary. Or any of the other stupid occasions that cause turmoil for forgetting when two guys become a couple and one of them starts acting like a little bitch. ‘Cuz a bitch in heat only cares that you remembered to bring the lube. But a surround sound system blaring Jeff Stryker’s catch phrase, “Yeah, suck that big cock!” in THX isn’t quite the, “Hi honey, how was work today?” you’d expect, and it got old pretty fast. Like about eight months after we’d signed the lease.

His porn hobby was an all encompassing one. He was always either watching porn, or making a trip to the local video rental shop for a new batch of porn tapes, or copying his favorite porn scenes onto his collection of gay porn mixed video tapes. He had several hundred of them. Stored in what should have been the coat closet. Which invariably led to a first-time visitor to the house thinking he was gonna hang up his coat only to be greeted by shelves full of homemade videos with titles like Best Blow Jobs, Biggest Black Cocks, and Anal Action +++, instead of the hanger he’d expected to find. Most took it in stride. My moms, not so much.

Watching gay porn often requires a bit of multi-tasking.

Not quite knowing the best way to stage an intervention for someone addicted to watching gay porn, one day I suggested that perhaps his hobby was keeping him from enjoying sex with an actual human being. Other than himself. His reply was a garbled, “Mmmurghph.” So I took my dick out of his mouth and told him I didn’t think his obsession with gay porn was a healthy pastime. He claimed watching porn was educational. Even if it was obvious he’d already earned his PhD. And while his actual male-on-male body contact was limited, he said by watching all that porn he was becoming a better lover, that he’d been learning new and better techniques. Which I couldn’t really argue with. Other than that watching a porn star use an orange traffic cone as a dildo might not be the type of sexual repertoire that would lead to a satisfied bed partner. I’m sure he had some excuse for that point too, but by then I couldn’t understand anything he was saying again. So at least he’d learned not to talk when your mouth is full.

Despite a roommate whose availability for giving blow jobs was more reliable than the refrigerator’s ice maker doing its job, his claim that watching porn made him a better lover smelled like a bunch of lame excuses. But researchers at Concordia University and UCLA recently reported that watching lots of porn may in fact mean a healthier sex life. And that change in scents means yup, it smells like science to me.

The study published in the online journal Sexual Medicine suggests that men who regularly watch porn may enjoy greater desire and sexual arousal when having sex with their partners. Researchers surveyed 280 men, asking them how many hours per week they spent watching porn, their levels of sexual desire, and their experiences with erectile function. Their findings suggest that many popular stereotypes about porn don’t hold up and that watching porn may indeed have a place in a healthy sex life within a relationship.

Does an overindulgence in watching porn lead to a lonely sex life?

Previously, the general opinion of porn addicts was that their obsession with watching porn could lead to problems with getting or sustaining an erection; that men who love their porn become desensitized to the actual act of having sex. But Nicole Prause, associate research scientist in the Department of Psychiatry in the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and Jim Pfaus, professor in Concordia’s Department of Psychology and Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology, says their study shows the opposite to be true.

“When we analyzed the data from these prior studies, we found that the men who had watched more sex films at home were more aroused when they watched sex films in the lab,” says Prause. He says their research showed that men who watched more than 25 porn tapes per week responded more strongly to sexual stimuli – even very vanilla erotica – than the guys for whom porn movies were more novel. “While this association doesn’t establish a cause, it proves viewing erotica at home is not desensitizing and perhaps even sensitized the men to respond more strongly,” he says.

And Pfaus says that watching porn is not only good for you, but good for your relationship too. “Many clinicians claim that watching erotica makes men unable to respond sexually to ‘normal’ sexual situations with a partner,” he says. “That was not the case in our sample.”

Here’s to your health.

Pfaus says that of the 280 volunteers who agreed to stroke it in the name of science, 127 were in a relationship with a regular sex partner, representing a good cross-section of men that view porn on a regular basis. He claims that his research shows that rather than porn hijacking men’s libidos and setting up unrealistic expectations for real-life sex, viewing more sex films is associated with a stronger sex drive, including the desire to have sex with a partner. “Sex films,” Pfaus says, “may be able to ‘stoke the fire.’” And that’s a lot of stroking going on.

Despite their study’s results backing up their hypothesis that an overindulgence in porn can turn you into a little sex machine, the pair of men in white coats acknowledged that it was possible the men in their study who watched more porn had a stronger sex drive in the first place. But that doesn’t stop them from claiming that watching porn can be good for what ails you. “The most common error of thinking with respect to men and porn is that all porn is bad for men all of the time,” Prause said. “The truth is probably that some porn is good for some men in some situations. The challenge is to identify when sex films are most likely to be helpful.” And that was a challenge my old roommate was always up for.

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Bangkok’s gay gogo bar owners want to take care of you.

Old hands and sexpats love nothing more than bitching about the high drinks cost at gogo bars on Soi Twilight. Okay, old hands and sexpats love to bitch period. But a perennial favorite is whining about how much that first drink at a Bangkok gogo bar costs. It’s around ten bucks these days. Which does sound pricey. Until you remember you are not just paying for a drink, you are paying for the treat of watching a bunch of naked dudes cavorting around the stage. Which the old hands and sexpats never seem capable of remembering. Or they wouldn’t whine so much. ‘Cuz getting to watch a bunch of naked guys do those things naked guys tend to do is priceless.

While none of those whiners actually knows what it cost to run a bar that offers hot and cold running boys in Bangkok, they will gladly tell you the exorbitant prices charged for drinks are because bar owners are greedy and care more about profits than they do about their customers. And predicting the downfall of those bars because of that greed is almost as enjoyable as bitching about how much they’re charging. Dreamboys – who tends to lead the price increase in each round – is often cited as an example of owner greed. Yet that bar has been going strong for years, with no sign its popularity is waning. Huh. So are gogo bar owners greedy bastards who deserve the bankruptcy surely headed their way? Or are they just astute businessmen who know what their product is worth?

Yup. Smells like science to me.

It turns out portraying gogo bar owners are uncaring capitalistic pigs is a disservice to the industry. ‘Cuz science says, just like the boys in their stables, bar owners’ real concern is about taking care of you. And considering what they have to work with, that ain’t no easy job. Finding boys to willingly strut their stuff on stage isn’t difficult. Enticing sex tourists into their establishment to drool over those boys isn’t much of a task either. But convincing the boys to spend a night going one-on-one with an ancient, gelatinously obese, smelly, myopic, bald, farang whose cynicism, anger and disillusionment are palpable can be a Herculean task. Unless you get them drunk first. And I don’t mean the boys.

Size always matters.

No problemo. Researchers at the University of Bristol have just discovered what Bangkok’s gogo bar owners already knew to be true. Your attractiveness increases greatly after you’ve had a shot of your favorite liquor. In the study, published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism – which wouldn’t be a bad new catch phrase for Pattaya – 40 participants were photographed three times — sober, after one glass of wine, and after two glasses of wine. Then their photos were shown to a new group of people who were asked to rate their attractiveness in side-by-side comparisons. They were either shown a participant’s sober photo nest to his one-drink shot, or his sober photo against the two-drink shot.

Invariably, participants selected the photos of those who had downed a drink as being the most attractive the majority of the time. The researchers are not sure why, but suggest it could be due to pupil dilation – which is a positive trait to viewers – or muscle relation, or rosier cheeks. In any case the results are the same. “It suggests that people are rated as more attractive once they’ve consumed a small amount of alcohol,” said the study’s senior researcher, Marcus Munafò, a professor of biological psychology. “What it means is that alcohol is sort of hijacking that mechanism, or promoting the aspects of facial features that we regard as attractive for other reasons,” he says.

The conclusion of the study was that in addition to perceiving others as more attractive, a mildly intoxicated alcohol consumer may also be perceived as more attractive by others. Which in turn may play a role in the relationship between alcohol consumption and risky sexual behavior. “You consume a drink, so you see other people as more attractive,” Munafò said. “But you also become more attractive yourself because you’ve consumed a drink.” And that’s a win-win in anyone’s book.

I’ll drink to that.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that there is a limit to how attractive booze can make you. A quick glance in the mirror should clue you into that fact. ‘Cuz while study participants found a single shot upped the attractiveness level of drinkers, drink #2 made that rating head south. After two drinks, participants found their sober photos more attractive than the high-alcohol head shots. And that’s a sobering bit of news.
The researchers did not test the attractiveness of subjects who had drank more than two shots. ‘Cuz even scientists wouldn’t attempt to float the hypothesis that anyone finds a falling-down drunk attractive. Even one with a fat wallet. Or at last call.

So despite all those nasty things you’ve been saying about Bangkok’s gogo bar owners, the truth is they know their business, they know their boys, and they care about you. Demanding that you buy a drink – which is considered a cover charge everywhere else in the world – is ‘cuz they know it will help you appear just a bit more attractive to the boys. And by pricing their drinks high, they discourage you from drinking the amount that will allow the boys to remember just how disgusting you really are. That those prices add to their bottom line is just a happy coincidence. Because what they really care about is your happy ending.

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