The Myth of Sex Addiction

My new novel Hourglass - about biohacking, seduction, and philosophy - bears the subtitle "Not For Sex Addicts." Did I subtitle it so just to be provocative and elicit your curiosity, click, and purchase?

Well, I wouldn’t be a good seducer if I weren’t somewhat guilty of that!

But the truth is, I genuinely don’t want men with zero sexual self-control reading it (for reasons obvious to you if you read it).

The subtitle is a selective invitation. A challenge to those with some degree of sexual sovereignty - a mirror held up to their own agency: their capacity to bend the trajectory of their lives through sharper, smarter sexual choices.

The subtitle is my subtle shot across the bow of Sexaholics Anonymous and the broader psychological sphere, which, I contend, disempowers many by giving them the label “Sex Addict.”

Before I level 7 trenchant critiques, a little about the book...

When I began writing Hourglass, I didn’t set out to write a book about sex addiction. In fact, if you’re the kind of person who self-identifies as a “sex addict,” I should warn you: this book isn’t going to comfort you. Its subtitle isn't just a tease. It won’t validate your diagnosis. And it definitely won’t give you a tidy, (somewhat) socially acceptable label to hide behind. You'll set it down some nights, offended. And maybe you should just read this article.

But it might liberate you.

Let me explain.

“Sex Addiction” Is a euphemism for our collective negligence - of ourselves and each other

We live in a culture that profits immensely from sexual dysfunction — from dating apps designed to keep us swiping to the multi-billion-dollar pornography industry that hijacks your dopamine and reward circuitry. We are a culture that has forgotten that sex is for making babies. So it's no surprise that a couple of generations of men (and increasingly, women) are struggling with compulsive sexual behavior and calling it an “addiction.”

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of what gets labeled as “sex addiction” is not an uncontrollable disease. It's a self-reinforcing cycle of undisciplined behavior, cowardice, avoidance of arduous adventure, and acquiescing to orbiting around the gravity well of history - amplified by technology.

That might sound harsh, but it’s more empowering than you think. 

The flip side of that statement is: you may think you are broken in this department, but you are programmable - your body and mind are hackable.

Maybe you're not a "Sex Addict." Maybe you're just bringing the wrong weaponry - from centuries and millennia past - to the 21st-century battlefield of your mind.

And that’s where Hourglass comes in.

A novel that shows (not tells) the path to freedom

Hourglass is a cerebral, high-stakes thriller. Think Limitless meets Black Mirror meets American Psycho. It follows Xavier — a biohacker, mathematical savant, and cybercriminal — caught in a war between digital enslavement and human freedom.

Yes, there are sexy scenes. Yes, there are twins (Colombian twins). Yes, it’s seductive, dark, and deeply psychological.

But beneath the surface of its narrative, this book illustrates real tools for transformation:

• Smart Drugs and Nootropics.
• Tantric techniques for reclaiming sexual sovereignty.
• Epigenetic identity re-programming.
• Mnemonic 'Memory Palaces' that make lust - not a master - but a tool.
• Psychedelics (these have 'light' and very 'dark' sides - as you'll see in the story!)
• Frame control, seduction dynamics, and other real-life "Jedi Mind Tricks."

And a lot more - with over 100 hundred footnotes giving you link rabbit holes to learn more. Read Hourglass or read 50 non-fiction Self-Help/Biohacking books.

Hourglass

 

5.0

 

5.0 (3)

Category: Book

My first critique of the mainstream/lamestream is around labeling...

“Sex Addict”

How you label yourself becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of how you will behave. Your identity, what you think you are, will manifest in what you do habitually and what you find yourself powerless to resist. You need to be really careful about the identity labels you adopt in your own head, especially when others plaster them on you.
“Sex Addict” is a negative (or at least naughty) one. It strongly suggests an individual is out of control and unable to manage one of the most important (and delightful) parts of being human. So you’re identifying as - and vocalizing it repeatedly, in a sort of ritual, reinforced by others - a person with little free will to make good choices. Are you starting to see why so many “Sex Addicts” can’t break out of relapse cycles?

And to make matters worse, in Sexaholics Anonymous, you’re given a life sentence: “Sex Addict.” Even after years of not peeking at a pixel of porn or a quarter century of being faithful to your wife, you still bear the label. The suggestion, whether implicit or explicit, is that the addiction is in your genes; you’re stuck with this!
I’m willing to accept that this lifelong labeling may be appropriate and helpful to some of the worst cases. If there’s something so self-destructive that you become utterly powerless around, label yourself negatively if that helps. But in Sexaholics Anonymous, they’re all “Sex Addicts” - the guy who blew up his marriage because he couldn’t stop hiring prostitutes and the guy who had a porn problem that he dropped years ago. Shouldn’t there be more nuance?

I start Hourglass with the epigraph from Oscar Wilde, who famously said...

“I can resist all things, except temptation.”

THAT should give you an idea as to why traditional 12-step programs like Sexaholics Anonymous (SA), Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), and others do this negative labeling: risk mitigation. Given the significant harm that addicts do to themselves and others, avoidance of tempting vice is the answer, not resistance. The guy who has been sober for five years after his third drinking and driving arrest says to himself, “I’m an alcoholic. So, no, I can’t join friends at happy hour and just enjoy a non-alcoholic beer. It’s too risky.” And he makes the right decision.

How well do the 12-steps work?

In regards to Sex Addiction, it’s hard to get solid data from the published research, perhaps because of the slippery way Sexaholics Anonymous defines relapse - sometimes it’s a full-blown descent into past patterns, and sometimes it’s just “a slip.”

• One study reported that 87% of self-identified sex addicts indicated at least one return to their previous “bottom-line” behaviors.
• The same study found that a significant 98% of married individuals identifying as sex addicts and attending 12-step programs (though not exclusively Sexaholics Anonymous) reported experiencing at least one “slip.”
• However, the best data on sex addiction relapse comes from a study conducted by Arizona Community Physicians. It provides some valuable insights into relapse among individuals with longer durations of recovery from sex addiction. This research indicated that 64% of sex addicts who reported having at least five years in recovery also acknowledged experiencing a significant slip or relapse at some point.

But this is soft science on self-reported (in all likelihood, under-reported) data. What’s emphasized in all the literature on the topic is that “the addict” is not “out of the woods” after even a half-decade of sobriety. Sexaholics Anonymous’s 12-step program is far from a sure shot at achieving sexual sobriety (which they define rather puritanically as NOTHING other than sex between husband and wife - a solo session while thinking fondly of an ex-lover or the kind of Tantric self-cultivation I recommend for actually building sexual self-control are off the menu!)
I wonder how much more successful those in recovery would be if they were given a positive label instead of “Sex Addict.” I like sexual sovereign. One of the definitions of sovereign is: One that exercises supreme, permanent authority… That’s about a million percent more empowering. Consider adopting sexual sovereign if you once called yourself a “Sex Addict.”

As I’ve written about at length elsewhere, at the beginning of my marriage, I had a porn habit: it was a once-a-month or once-a-week thing, at most, for me. When my wife checked my browser history - without retelling the whole sordid story here - she was devastated and experienced betrayal trauma, and it made our marriage unpleasant for over a year (that was a bad year). Big screw-up on my behalf!
But I corrected it: I made amends, installed several safeguards, and rebuilt trust slowly. Today, I’m a proud, +5-year, no-fapper, and faithful husband. Porn is not a part of my life anymore and not particularly tempting. I earned the black belt. I’m a sexually sovereign man.
But if I had gone to Sexaholics Anonymous instead, I would have become a “Sex Addict” for life! Would that have helped me? I think not.

Porn Addiction ≠ Sex Addiction

It’s absurd that those with porn and masturbation addiction - who are, in many cases, virgins or celibate for many years - get categorized as “Sex Addicts.” How can you be a sex addict if you’re not even having sex?
My problem with this is that the man who makes a sticky mess watching porn daily gets to categorize himself with the likes of the alpha male executive who just can’t stop having affairs with his nubile young secretaries, the promiscuous playboy seducer who works in marketing in the nightlife business, or the celebrity who has run through half the starlets in Hollywood. This enables very passive men, utterly mired in porn addiction, to categorize themselves with the likes of famous womanizers: Russell Brand, Tiger Woods, Kanye West, Donald Trump, Connor McGregor, Casanova, etc. These famous men, who are all undeniably cool in their own way, and pop culture have made the label “Sex Addict” an almost aspirational title for a man who is merely naughty - robbing the shame from it.
Labeling and language matter - they are a huge hack for our behavior - I think it would be much more helpful to label more precisely: porn addiction, masturbation addiction, or internet addiction. Labeling this behavior as something more clearly shameful and pathetic would, I think, take away the “this is just the way men are” excuse from the porn addict who hasn’t touched a woman in years.

Naughty = Irresistible

Years ago, via the shoddy Wi-Fi connection of a cafe in a Nicaraguan surf town, I interviewed Professor Kelly Goldsmith of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who conducted a study on guilt, pleasure, and self-control. Her study validated something we’ve all experienced: that feeling guilty about a particular activity makes it more pleasurable, desirable, and harder to resist. There’s nothing sweeter than forbidden fruit.
So again, we see how the label “Sex Addict,” with all its deeply rooted moralizing undertones, might be disempowering. Resist moralizing in labeling self-destructive behavior and vice, and you’ll find yourself more empowered.
Once, I was out on the prowl with two wingmen in an Eastern European capital. We walked by a seedy strip club, and two (clothed) strippers approached us, inviting us into their club and offering free drink vouchers. One of my wingmen - a tall, sophisticated Belgian guy - looked disdainfully down at their vouchers and told them, “Strip clubs are for poor people,” as he strode off into the night.
That’s the way to re-frame temptation!

Surrender?

I also have a problem with a core part of the 12-step teachings, that of surrender. In my research for Hourglass, I read the Sexaholics Anonymous White Book; the word surrender appears in it 137 times. In fact, The first step of their recovery program is:

Admitting we are powerless over lust—that our lives had become unmanageable.

The chapter on surrender explains further…

So whenever this happens [a trigger], we simply acknowledge our powerlessness. Instead of either fighting or indulging, we surrender. We pick up the phone, we ask for help, we go to a meeting. We even admit we may not fully want victory over lust; most of us don’t have pure motives in wanting to get [sexually] sober. (p. 66)
When the craving hits again, we repeat this surrender at the very point of our terror, in the pit of our hell. For that’s where the admission of powerlessness really works, when we’re in the raw heat of temptation and craving. (p.74)
Surrender is a constant thing. Practice. Day by day, hour by hour. Put into practice so often, it becomes habitual. That’s how we get the attitude change that lets the grace of God enter to expel the obsession! (p.70)

The “Sex Addict” is urged to - instead of trying to out-muscle or outsmart temptation - surrender to a higher power. God is going to get you through this!
Surrender is not my style, and I’ve got a couple of problems with this…

1. Surrender seems the opposite of what you want to do when you need self-control. It’s an antonym of choice, decision, and agency. Again, language really matters when it comes to our behavior. Surrendering repeatedly to temptation is the reason why the addict has a problem in the first place.
2. A lot of times, surrendering doesn’t work for the addict. They just surrender to their carnal desires. And then what? They question why God isn’t helping them when they need it. Each relapse proceeded by surrendering erodes the faith they probably need in a benevolent creator with a plan for their life.
3. Surrendering to a higher power only works for those who believe in one to whom they should submit. It’s exclusionary to those, like me, with their faith and spirituality focused around the idea of free will.

Faith is an incredible source of strength and fortitude to billions of people. So, let’s not discount the power of faith. But couldn’t Sexaholics Anonymous frame this up with language that empowered the free will of those who most need it? For example: “When you’re tempted, claim the armor of the Holy Spirit.” (Or variations that would work for different religions).

Any Christian will tell you that surrendering one’s will to God - submission - is important. However, a theme that is just as strongly emphasized in the New Testament is free will, agency, and choice. My favorite Bible verse is Romans 12:2:

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

This suggests that God’s will is found by the renewing of the mind (Anakainōsis, in Greek); it suggests that God’s will may be something that we co-create by practicing our free will.

Let’s acknowledge that Sexaholics Anonymous and other 12-step organizations have liberated millions from slavery to vice and addiction. They’ve saved countless lives from descent into oblivion and are obviously doing some things right.
The one good piece of advice in the White Book is to call your sponsor or another guy in your Sexaholics Anonymous group when you’re tempted. I suspect this is so effective that it makes up for some of the more disempowering teachings.
But the absence of data on relapse rates makes me question if they might be a lot more effective if they took a more scientific, evidence-based approach of split testing interventions.
Again, in the teaching of surrender, the “Sex Addict’s” human agency is taken away.

The Solution: Prevention

In my 14 years of obsessive research of all things health-related, I’ve learned a lot about cancer. And I’ve discovered the cure to cancer: it’s prevention.
There’s a large body of high-quality science on cancer prevention, and it’s actually pretty simple to effectively prevent: Vitamin D3, fasting, red light therapy, the right antioxidants, avoiding toxic food and environment, and a few other things I’ve written about. Preventing cancer is easy and cheap, but treating and surviving cancer, if you get it, that’s another story! It’s incredibly costly, complicated, stressful, painful, draining, and fraught with mortal uncertainty - a fate worse than death in a lot of cases.
And this same principle applies to a lot of things in life. Prevention is easy, effective, and cheap, while cure is expensive, complicated, and may not work.
To my dismay, I found the word prevention does NOT appear in the +200-page Sexaholics Anonymous White Book. That was a Cntrl-F: Zero Results that I didn't expect!
Sexaholics Anonymous sells you “cure” with its surrender dogma, but I’m here to sell you prevention in the Sexual Self Control Hacks Addendum in Hourglass.

As a personal development coach for over a decade, I’ve worked with several self-identifying “Sex Addicts,” and they would relapse (always to porn and never to having an affair with a 22-year-old barista!) to their own deep self-loathing. They were all very honest, and here’s what I noted: they relapsed because they made choices to NOT guard themselves vigilantly against temptation…

• They didn’t install porn blockers on their devices.
• They didn’t uninstall the popular social media apps
• They would stay up late watching TV or mindlessly scrolling social media and then get bored.
• They wouldn’t prioritize spending time with friends or doing the work to get a girlfriend (so they had a healthy sexual outlet). They let themselves get lonely.
• They would fail to habituate the stress management practices I gave them, knowing what they’d resort to when life got overwhelming.

And their preventable behavior was as predictable as their label.

Why I Wrote Hourglass

To use Aikido on you. For your own good, I hope it works! Aikido is a Japanese martial art distinguished by its techniques wherein the practitioner uses their opponent’s momentum against them to win in a match or on the battlefield.
A win, for me, is you finishing this novel inspired to practice greater sexual self-control as a man and armed with the tools to do so.
Hourglass is my attempt to make sexual self-control sexy. In the 2010s, the pick-up artist movement (Real Social Dynamics, in particular) drew millions of young men into something young men usually aren’t so into: personal development and meditation. I met and remained friends with a number of these men, and learning game with wingmen was a huge positive influence in our lives: many ended up married and starting families, while almost none became heartless womanizers. The pick-up artist movement managed to do this because sex sells - and sex was the reward they framed up on the other side of the personal growth journey.
For millennia, moralists and Western culture have made sexual self-control about as boring and dry a topic as can be imagined. And our culture is in deep decline as a result. The Sexaholics Anonymous White Book doesn’t do a great job of selling sexual sobriety; it’s described as the most arduous Sisyphean uphill battle. Not the freedom, pride, and awesome sex life I’ve enjoyed with my wife after taking back my sexual sovereignty.

Sexual self-control has been such a lifestyle upgrade for me that I thought I’d try a change in tactic: package it under the satin folds of a short dress sitting in a Maserati.

Why include erotica

Hourglass may surprise some of my long-time readers as I’ve been publicly anti-porn for at least half a decade, yet this novel contains some rather lurid erotic scenes.
How do I reconcile this? I contend that internet porn and erotic literature are very different things. My objection to porn has long been that it’s an insidiously destructive and addictive digital drug. It has turned a great mass of men living in quiet desperation into dull zombies lurching after their next digital hit of dopamine.
I make the argument that porn is not a form of speech and barely art because almost none of us can remember anything said or communicated in a porn scene we watched. You could probably repeat dozens of moving lines from movies or song lyrics, but you couldn’t do the same with porn.
But erotica, on the other hand, is the most profound kind of art as it galvanizes you to create something vivid in your mind. It stimulates imagination like almost nothing else! I can recall several books I read as a teenager with beautifully written erotic scenes, and I did NOT have a compulsive desire to read more erotica. Those books left lasting impressions on me; they inspired me to pursue personal development toward becoming a seducer who could enjoy what I was reading about (which ultimately paid off in a 7-year happy marriage).
My aim in including these scenes was precisely that for you.
My secondary aim was to write something that would be fun to read, engrossing the reader to push on through some of the drier parts about the Goldbach Conjecture, Biohacking, or philosophy to the next time one of the twins shows up in that red Gucci dress.

The moral of the story

In Hourglass, I portray a near-future society (which eerily mirrors Atlantis, 12,800 years ago) descending into dystopia and hurtling toward its destruction because of the absence of sexual temperance. The takeaway should be clear to you by now: Individuals and society are freer when men first master lust.
We meet our protagonist, Xavier, in the midst of an odyssey of edification and re-discovery of his own free will. His faltering in the hero’s journey emphasizes the second morality lesson of the story: competence and intelligence do not make up for a fundamentally flawed moral character or failure to practice one’s own free will. And to emphasize that a mere few months of following a personal development path is insufficient to reverse course and liberate oneself from years or decades of living on autopilot.
Sometimes, you don’t need more biohacks and lifehacks; you need to be a better person.

History of Hourglass

I began writing the first chapter over a decade ago in a sunny cafe in Medellin, Colombia, a stone’s throw away from the coworking space where I worked. (One of the top Colombian modeling agencies was on the same floor, so I shared rides with some very desirable fellow vertical travelers.) I started with the working title “A Post Opp’s Devolution” and wrote the cliff-hanging Solar Flares chapter in a cafe in Berlin.
I gave up on the project for a while because I got author-banned on Amazon.com (someone there didn’t like my second book, Don’t Stick Your Dick in a Blender: How to meet a nice girl instead - from a tantric husband with a better sex life than you!), effectively excluding me from mainstream success as an author. But that’s kind of a lame excuse not to write the book you want to write, isn’t it? (Alexander Solzhenitsyn had to smuggle The Gulag Archipelago, on tiny scraps of paper, out of a Siberian concentration camp).
In 2024, a commenter on my Phenibut video reminded me to re-read the chapters that I had saved in a forlorn folder. I did, and I knew I had to finish it. But in the current year, “A Post Opp’s Devolution” sounds like something vaguely hostile to the vociferously vengeful LGBTQ crowd, which is not at all what the book is about. So, I switched the working title to “Not For Sex Addicts” - perhaps the ultimate clickable title, but I thought better of something that could so easily be misconstrued as teasing to “Sex Addicts.”
So I settled on Hourglass - a double entendre referring to the mysteries of time and the epitome of womanly beauty and fertility (which I enjoy waking up to every morning!) In my Biohacking lair/home office in Sofia, Bulgaria, rushing to finish the novel for release on my birthday in May of 2025, with the manuscript’s word counter ticking closer and closer to 150,000, I realized it was too long and decided to split it into two books. Expect the second part - The Trident, The Tachyon, and The Temptress - with an epic cinematic climax (and a couple of mind-blowing twists) in late 2025.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it! Hourglass has been a passion project: I wrote it because I had this epic story gestating in me for a decade now about a man, a troubled genius and Biohacker, who would - like me - ultimately learn that… 

The only way to defeat death and capture time is through the beauty of a woman.

And...

I anticipate that some of the Sexaholics Anonymous crowd will find this article and not love it. Read it in full, then bring cogent arguments and evidence, not insults, guys. I already know I'm cross-eyed, but I don't care because I have a hotter wife than you.