Monday, July 11, 2011

21 Days of Abstinence

Did you know orgasm is as addictive as heroin? Turns out it is. If you ever tried to quit porn/masturbation and it was hard, now you know why.

Why quit? Excessive exposure to sexual images and masturbation desensitizes your brain to the natural joys of life. Our brain produces a small dose of dopamine naturally to keep us motivated. An experiment on rats showed that in the absence of that dose, the rats would just lie around without wanting to do anything, not even eat. They would starve to death even if food was just inches away.

When you shower your brain receptors with excessive dopamine from watching porn, they get desensitized and you are left unable to enjoy the real world. So, if life seems pointless, makes no sense, it may be that your senses are just dulled from watching porn. The 'Your Brain on Porn' documentary talks more about this phenomena.



There is a community of people supporting each other in overcoming masturbation and porn addiction:
http://yourbrainonporn.com/

Also, you can find more testimonials at:
http://www.reuniting.info/blog

What do you have to gain? The typical male testimonial: after 21 days without masturbation or porn, women become interesting as human beings. Before, they were just the drug dealer.  I resented them every time they would play hard to get.



Tools for helping you through the withdrawal:

  • Meditation
  • Fasting

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Karezza: why orgasm is bad for you

The Chinese used to teach "sexual kung fu" to preserve and refine the energy in male sperm. 100 drops of sweat equals 1 drop of blood, 100 drops of blood equals one drop of semen, this was their creed.

The Budhist Tantra teaches maithuna, Hindu Yoga calls it Sahaja, westerners call it karezza, or coitus reservatus (coitus, "sexual intercourse, union" + reservatus, "reserved, saved") or simply sexual continence. Wikipedia says:
It's a form of sexual intercourse in which the penetrative partner does not attempt to ejaculate within the receptive partner, but instead attempts to remain at the plateau phase of intercourse for as long as possible avoiding the orgasm and seminal emission.
Note that this is different from coitus interruptus, also known as the withdrawal or the pull-out method, used as a (not too great) method of contraception. Karezza does not involve orgasm at all.

But these are just religious nut jobs

Common wisdom says sex is good for you. We now have HD porn, 3D porn and the all too helpful media telling us that if you don't have sex with a partner you'd better masturbate, otherwise you may get prostate cancer. Whoever tries to question the benefit of frequent orgasm are viewed as some kind of a religious nut jobs.


Or are they?

In her book, "Cupid's Poisoned Arrow", Marnia Robinson presents scientific research to back the theory that orgasm is bad for you. The punchline is this: evolution wants us to have as many partners as possible, for the well being of our genes. It has shaped our brains to become distanced from our partners after the seed has been delivered. In laymen terms this translates to the all too common "it just doesn't feel the same anymore" that you hear from many couples after one or two years of relationship, sometimes much sooner.

Why is this a revolutionary idea? Think about it: we pay shrinks, buy pills, seek for new ways to keep the flame going, try all the positions in the book, and yet the divorce rates are soaring. We frequently read articles like "Why Women Lose Interest in Sex -- and 10 Tips to Rekindle Desire" or"Why men lose interest in sex and 8 tips to rekindle desire" which recommend all kinds of cures from "see a specialist", "use some lubricant", or "get real, it's marriage, what did you expect". What Marnia is saying is: you don't need medicine or shrinks. You're fine. It's how you're supposed to function. Plant the seed, and move on.

But that doesn't give much hope, does it? How about long lasting, growing old together relationships. Well, there is hope: besides the evolutionary drive to switch partners we also have an evolutionary program for bonding (with our parents, friends and lovers). By emphasizing bonding over orgasm, we can keep happy relationships from disintegrating.

But still, no sex? Oh no, sex is fine. Just don't get too worked up so that you cannot stop until orgasm. The bridge or scissors positions work well for that. Read Marnia Robinson's book for more details and a fascinating new look at relationships, sex, spiritual views, orgasm and evolution

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Ejaculation and prostate cancer

There are many articles recommending men to have more ejaculations,  because of a study relating sexual activity to decreased chance of prostate cancer.

Some articles try to paint a more balanced view by looking at multiple sources of evidence. One of them is "Does Sex Increase Risk of Prostate Cancer?" from psychologytoday.com. They start by quoting 3 studies that actually indicate more sex is associated with higher risk of prostate cancer:

  • Italian researchers: compared with men who never married, those who did--and presumably had more sex--had significantly greater risk of prostate cancer. 
  •  University of Illinois: the younger the men became sexually active, the greater their risk. And the more sex partners they reported, once again, the greater their risk.
  • University of Iowa researchers found that as number of women sex partners increased, so did risk of prostate cancer, with men who reported sex more than three times a week showing the greatest risk.

But then they turn to the study everyone else is quoting which apparently shows the opposite: more ejaculations decrease your risk of prostate cancer. But is that really the case if we read the study more carefully?


The odd study

The widely cited study which looked at the connection between ejaculatory frequency and prostate cancer risk is "Ejaculation frequency and subsequent risk of prostate cancer" by Leitzmann et al.

The study has been conducted on 29 thousand US men aged 46 to 81 years. Ejaculation frequency was assessed by asking participants to report the average number of ejaculations they had per month during the ages of 20 to 29 years, 40 to 49 years, and during the past year.

Results

There was a decreased risk of prostate cancer observed for men with high ejaculatory frequency in their 20s.

One important problem is how accurately can one remember it's ejaculation frequency in his 20's if asked when he's 50 or even 80 (20 to 50 years latter!), and the authors acknowledge this.

Nonetheless, assuming the data was accurate, this result only says that a pre-existent cancer risk may be lowered by more frequent ejaculations, which does NOT imply that abstinence would cause cancer. As obvious as that may sound, some people actually understood that  men need to have frequent ejaculations otherwise they would get cancer!

The twist

More interestingly, the same study says:
We noted a suggestive decrease in risk of total and organ-confined prostate cancer among men in the lowest category of ejaculation frequency across a lifetime. The apparent decrease in risk of total and organ-confined prostate cancer among men with a low ejaculation frequency was not due to low prevalence of sexually transmitted infections among these men because adjustment for history of syphilis or gonorrhea did not alter the results.

These results are actually consistent with the other quoted at the top, which suggests that the data for ejaculation frequency which men had between 20 and 29 years old may have been biased.

Conclusions

The study quoted by most people when they recommend increased sexual activity to reduce risk of prostate cancer, actually only found a decreased risk of prostate cancer for men with high ejaculatory frequency in their 20s. The observations may be significantly unreliable given that men were asked to report this information 20 to 50 years later.

More interestingly, over a lifetime, the authors found the opposite result: a decreased risk of prostate cancer for people with low ejaculatory frequency.

Corroborating with the other 3 studies quoted at the top of this article, we conclude that the risk of prostate cancer actually decreases with more abstinence. It is unfortunate that a large part of the media promotes the exact opposite of this fact.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Sex and performance

There are several accounts from great boxers saying that they practice abstinence before a fight. Muhammad Ali would abstain for months before a big fight and said that made him invincible in the ring.

In spite of this, there is a common view that masturbation is good for sports performance because it increases testosterone levels. But is that really the case?


Testosterone and performance

According to Wikipedia, testosterone plays an important role both physically (growth of muscle mass and strength, increased bone density and strength) and mentally (attention, memory, and spatial ability are key cognitive functions affected by testosterone).

The media abounds in articles claiming that masturbation increases testosterone levels. One such article is National Geographic's "Sex and Sports: Should Athletes Abstain Before Big Events?".

Some people believe the act of ejaculation draws testosterone, the hormone of both sexual desire and aggression, from the body. "This is a really wrong idea," said Emmanuele A. Jannini of the University of L'Aquila in Italy.


Enter Emmanuele A. Jannini's study

If you track down the source quoted by most of these articles you get to the same person - Emmanuele A. Jannini which presumably said:

After three months without sex, which is not so uncommon for some athletes, testosterone dramatically drops to levels close to children's levels. Do you think this may be useful for a boxer?

A quick search on Google scholar reveals the source of the study which lead to this conclusion: "Lack of sexual activity from erectile dysfunction is associated with a reversible reduction in serum testosterone" by Emmanuele A. Jannini et al. Right from the title, we raise an eyebrow because the study is about impotent males, their low testosterone levels and how those levels can be reversed by therapy.

Impotent males are by definition abstinent. Their low level of testosterone is probably caused by whatever dysfunction is also causing their impotence. The authors acknowledge this fact: "... our findings are consistent with the opposite hypothesis: impotence is the cause of reduced testosterone levels."

However, after they claim that impotence causes low testosterone, they go ahead and say that abstinence actually causes low testosterone:

In line with these observations, our data suggest that sexual activity per se can affect testosterone levels. In fact, we show that the loss of sexual activity of impotent patients is characterized by moderately but significantly reduced testosterone levels, while, when sexual activity is started anew – no matter what is the cause and how the impotence is treated – the androgen levels rise.

So they say that since low testosterone is correlated with abstinence (in impotent males), it probably is also caused by abstinence, and the rule can then be applied to all males. So the root of all those articles recommending masturbation comes from a researcher's apparent error in logic


What other researchers say

In "Endocrine response to masturbation-induced orgasm in healthy men following a 3-week sexual abstinence" by Exton MS et al. the authors conclude:

...although plasma testosterone was unaltered by orgasm, higher testosterone concentrations were observed following the period of abstinence. These data demonstrate that acute abstinence does not change the neuroendocrine response to orgasm but does produce elevated levels of testosterone in males.

More interestingly, in "Orgasmic frequency and plasma testosterone levels in normal human males" Helena C. Kraemer et al. say:

Twenty males participated in a 2-month study examining the relationship between 8 a.m. plasma testosterone levels and orgasmic frequency. Within subjects, higher levels of testosterone are associated with periods of sexual activity. Over subjects, however, the direction of the relationship is reversed. Mean testoster-one levels were higher for sexually less active individuals.

In other words, if you take people that masturbate often, they have a relatively low level of testosterone, which increases through masturbation. However, even after the increase, their testosterone level is still lower than that of abstinent males.


Back to athletes

From Sex And Training: Tips From Boxing

iconic fighter Rocky Marciano would excuse himself from the marital bed for months before a bout. Marciano was the only heavyweight boxer to retire undefeated.

legendary boxer Muhammad Ali reportedly went two months without sex before a big fight, claiming it made him unbeatable in the ring. Ali is considered one of the best fighters of all time; his record stands at an impressive 56 wins in 61 fights, with 37 knockouts.

Manny Pacquiao has stated publicly that he separates himself from his wife when he trains for a fight. He only has contact with his wife during chaperoned visits. Pacquiao is considered by many in the sport as the best welterweight fighter of all time.

The exception confirming the rule

Oscar De La Hoya is one of the most successful athletes to ever enter the ring. "De La Hoya confessed to HBO Boxing that at the beginning of his professional career, he had sex with his girlfriend the night before a fight. While the Golden Boy says he fought the best fight of his career that night, he does admit it was a mistake on his part.

Given that it was at the beginning of the professional career of a very talented boxer, it's probably irrelevant whether he had sex the night before or not.


Conclusion and where to go from here

It seems that we have debunked a very popular myth. Masturbation does not increase testosterone levels so it doesn't increase mental and physical performance. Abstinence does increase testosterone level and thus performance.

Lots of articles also recommend masturbation as a general healthy habit for "cleaning the pipes". Some go as far as saying that otherwise you can get prostate cancer. We'll look at that hypothesis in a future post.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

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