The Guide to Getting It On (80 page)

Is there much relationship drama on base?

Good God yes. Guys aren’t used to women being trained soldiers, and some of these women won’t hesitate to hurt you physically, and I mean hit you, pull a knife on you, and even shoot you. Everything is turned up on a base in a war zone, including the drama.

How are women treated on the bases?

Terribly. A woman who is in the military needs to have seriously thick skin. Guys are going to be talking trash to her from morning to night, “Bend over and let’s see what you’ve got...” kind of stuff. A woman needs to be tough and able to ignore it. Guys will behave when a commanding officer is around, but the minute he or she is gone...

If the women have sex with the women, do male soldiers have sex with other male soldiers?

Before I went on leave, a friend who I’ve been in combat with was beating himself up because he’d had sex with another male soldier. But I don’t think it’s that uncommon. You suit up every morning expecting to get shot at and to lay down your life for the guy next to you. And you expect him to do the same for you. You share emotions together that a lot of husbands and wives don’t share. You’re in a foreign and hostile environment, and there are five or ten men to every woman.

And people are surprised that male soldiers have sex with male soldiers? They should get over it. No one has problems if two female soldiers get it on. Keep it to yourself, and that’s that. What you do with your body when the enemy isn’t trying to vaporize it is up to you.

What about threesomes?

I’d say there’s a lot of that. Two guys and a girl. And there are times the guys will be getting each other off in addition to her. But with so many men, any woman who wants two guys at once gets two guys at once.

Sex after Combat

Thanks to better armor and more immediate medical attention, fewer soldiers are being killed in battle, but more are returning home with injuries. Some of the most common problems include traumatic brain injury (TBI), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), burns, amputations and trauma to different parts of the body including the crotch. Many of these injuries are caused by blasts from IEDs.

Unfortunately, the VA does not want to hear about combat-related sex and relationship problems, especially those that can’t be treated with pills like Viagra or Prozac.

While the discussion that follows is a brief summary, we have more information at
www.Guide2Getting.com
. It’s free and has the latest on sex after combat for both the vet and his or her partner.

More than 10% of combat vets are returning with PTSD, which tends to keep the body in a hyper state of alertness. This can seriously disrupt your sex life, given that the adrenaline that’s surging through your system can make it difficult to kick back and feel like getting it on. Your body is in a permanent “fight or flight” mode, with sex taking a back seat to worries that bad things might happen. Just letting your guard down enough to talk about your feelings can be frightening. Plus, the sounds and sensations that happen during sex can become flashback triggers. Even the way we describe what sex feels like often includes combat imagery, “I started coming so hard it felt like an explosion...” or “There was this blast of light and energy...” Also, the sounds people make at the height of sexual passion often sound like cries of pain.

Fortunately, there are cutting-edge treatments for PTSD. Early reports indicate that they are effective. Since the studies are still being done, we will provide more information about this and other PTSD treatments on our website as the reports become available.

Just under 20% of returning combat vets are showing signs of traumatic brain injury. TBI can impact your ability to connect the dots in every-day life. Things that you used to take for granted can become head-scratchers, especially in relationships. And while it’s highly unlikely that TBI is making you more horny, it could be making it difficult to know the appropriate time and place to masturbate, or who to have sex with and when or where.

Even though you seem perfectly normal on the outside, a brain injury could be impacting your judgement. While some of you might be thinking, “Finally, an excuse for some of the dumb things I do anyway,” this would not be what you’d think if your brain really was compromised. More likely, you would be having problems expressing emotions and processing feelings.

TBI can be confusing for everyone, especially the people around you who expect you to be the person you were before combat concussed your cabeza. Like any of us, you might be trying to fake it or cover things up if you can. But you probably wouldn’t know how to put what’s going on into words anyway.

When possible, it’s important to sort out traumatic brain injury from PTSD, as TBI symptoms can often look like those of PTSD. A great resource for learning more about TBI is a book written by Bob and Lee Woodruff:
In an Instant: A Family’s Journey of Love and Healing.
Mr. Woodruff is a journalist who suffered an extensive TBI as a result of a war-related explosion.

As for burns and other tissue trauma, these can result in skin that is numb or painfully sensitive. Combat-related amputations are common and require huge adjustments to life in general, not to mention problems with keeping your balance during intercourse and having difficulty with thrusting. It’s not like TV talk shows are going to have on the best-selling author of a book on
intercourse positions for the returning vet who has a double amputation.
The good news is, you might actually be able to get into positions that your able-bodied self could never fathom, but there will be a learning curve.

Always lurking behind any disfiguring injuries are problems with how you feel about your body, aka “body image” and “self-esteem.” How is your partner going to respond? And if you don’t have a partner, how will you find someone who wants to have sex with you? Not only will you need to heal physically, but you’ll need to become comfortable with yourself. While you will probably want and need some alone time, isolation can be a devil of its own making.

Of course, to compound all of these problems, the medications used to treat depression and pain can bring their own sexual side effects.

We are just beginning to understand some of the unique problems that today’s vets are bringing home with them. You’ll need to be vigilant in your search for helpful information. Do regular browser searches, and stay connected to the various veteran and military related blogs. If you or your partner have a combat related disability, do regular searches for sex and the specific type of disability.

A Special Salute
to MSgt. Glenn B. Knight, USAF Retired for advice & research. Glenn proved just how thoughtful, intelligent and perceptive soldiers can be. Special thanks also to the active military who participated our surveys!

CHAPTER

38

Online Sexual Addiction—Really?

J
oe’s wife spends four hours a night watching television and one hour during the day watching her favorite talk show. Joe spends one hour a night looking at porn on the Internet.

Joe’s wife is normal, while Joe is addicted to porn on the Internet. Or that’s what Joe’s wife’s therapist tells her about any man who spends an hour a day looking at porn online. And heaven help the poor pervert who spends two hours on Sunday afternoon looking at porn as opposed to his upstanding co-worker who comes home from church and spends the rest of the afternoon screaming in front of the television while the Browns get clobbered by the Bears. If the ESPN maniac masturbates later that night, he’s normal. But if the porn-watching guy jerks off to what’s online, he’s got OSA—Online Sexual Addiction.

When researchers have tried to validate the claims that mental health experts have made about how the Internet “is a powerful medium for OSA,” the claims have proven to be invalid. (As you’ll see from reading Chapters 29 and 30 on porn, this book doesn’t exactly sing the praises of porn. But the sad excesses of porn do not justify the creation of voodoo psychology.)

Fears about new technologies aren’t new. In the 1800s, when printing technologies improved, there was concern that people would stay at home reading newspapers and books instead of gathering in town for their news and gossip. In 1922, the
New York American
reported that “the pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music of jazz orchestras led to the fall of 1,000 girls in the last two years.”

In the 1930s, there was concern that teenagers were imitating the sex they were seeing in the movies. Girls were adopting the flirtatious personas of actresses, and after seeing romantic movies, women felt compelled to find men for sex. Boys were learning how to kiss and make love from the movies. Men claimed that the movies of the 1930s had driven them to commit rape.

In the 1950s, it was reported that the new medium of television was leading young men to commit sex crimes. Blame
Lassie, The Three Stooges,
and
I Love Lucy.
So we shouldn’t be surprised when today’s psychologists warn about the “isolation,” “alienation” and “depersonalization” that results from Internet addiction. Of course, none of that happens if you are sitting in front of your television watching crime-show reruns and the latest reality TV series.

New technology has always had a way of bringing fear. So has sex. But technology has not made us any more alienated, isolated, sad, happy, loving or lonely. These are the things we bring to technology, not things that technology creates within us.

The Internet does not give people psychological problems, nor is the ability to sit anonymously in front of it a lightning rod for mental instability. People bring their problems and bad behaviors with them whether they are on the Internet or on the phone.

The phone made it possible for people who have never met in person to engage with each other in rich and productive ways, so has the Internet. The phone helped adulterous couples to arrange liaisons that wouldn’t have occurred without it, and the Internet has allowed for chat room sex with cam whores and an unfortunate excess of porn that is often degrading to women. But is this content any more damaging than the early silent films which experts claimed were causing the ruin of young women and men, or any more ruinous than the early television shows that we now call classics?

Granted, we never saw Lassie humping June Lockhart, and Ricky and Lucy never had group sex with Fred and Ethel, but would our country be any worse off today if our grandparents had seen those things?

There would be no protest from this book’s author if people did something better with their time than jerking off to porn on a computer. And there’s no question that some people have psychological conditions that result in sexual behaviors that are out of control. Other people have problems sustaining relationships. But that’s been the case long before the Internet ever existed.

Thanks to Steven Stern and Alysia Handel for their excellent paper “Sexuality and Mass Media: the Historical Context of Psychology’s Reaction to Sexuality on the Internet,” Journal of Sex Research, 38, 283-291 (2001).