Stripchat Partners with Psychologist to Crush Anti-Masturbation Shame

An initiative to combat sexual repression and promote self-love.

Adult cam site Stripchat [NSFW] has partnered with the Sexual Health Alliance (SHA) to offer live and private virtual counseling sessions to cam viewers concerned about their consumption of adult entertainment.

The ultimate goal of Stripchat and the SHA’s Dr. David Ley is to ease the greater awareness and acceptance of sexual freedom

During a phone interview with Ley, he spoke about the quick negative judgments some people make against viewing adult content:

[The idea of] too much of a good thing is relative. It all starts with context. The danger is, because of how we stigmatize sexuality and pornography, it leads to knee-jerk assumptions without considering context first.

“A huge percentage of people who watch pornography or use webcams do it for 10-15 minutes, once or twice a week. Even further, ‘extreme’ pornography use is classified as anything above 17 minutes a week,” he added.

By comparison, the average American watches television for five hours per day. Of course, the amount of stigma associated with participating in some “Netflix and Chill” pales in comparison to watching “extreme” amounts of pornography at a rate of 95% less time. 

“When it comes to sex, we oftentimes get caught in ‘sexy shiny object syndrome,’ where we get distracted by sexual ideas,” said. 

For as much as logic applies, our preconceived triggers—especially as they relate to sex—often matter more.

Deconstructing these notions is the ideal goal of what Dr. Ley, Stripchat [NSFW], and the Sexual Health Alliance intend to accomplish.

Instant online access

When noting the modern era’s ease of access to adult video clips, subscription services, streaming sites, and live cam sessions, the tenor of the conversation changes.

Recent Stripchat [NSFW] polling data notes that 42% of all cam users have experienced anxiety about their cam habits—with 11% reporting frequent or constant anxiety. 

As well, 31% of married cam users said cam watching had caused conflicts in their relationship. Finally, 24% of married cam users said they had fallen in love with a cam performer. Having anxiety, couples’ quarrels, and lust in one’s heart are all troubling to varying degrees. 

However, via counseling programs from portals like Stripchat, the ability to assess these behaviors before they become truly troublesome is ideal. 

“Providing people a real-world understanding of what sexuality looks like is important because it removes guilt and shame,” Ley said. 

Moreover, Stripchat’s Max Bennet told Future of Sex:

We have a lot of people coming to a site like Stripchat from all over the world, wondering if they’re sinning, or if they’re normal, or if they’re doing something negative for their health. Both as a broadcast platform and a company, we wanted to address that. We don’t just want to be a sex outlet. We want to be a sex authority.

The democratization of access to pornography is an issue of intrigue, too.

“Access to pornographic material has typically been restricted to wealthy, powerful men. However, advances in technology offer greater access from more classes of people, to sexual material. Traditionally, society has liked it when very few people had access to this information,” said Ley. 

Stripchat’s Bennet also feels that the democratization of access to pornography is significant, but offers metaphorical bridges necessary for crossing. 

The widening of access means that people with very little context for adult content can now access it…we have people worldwide without adequate sex education. And even in places with relatively decent sex education, we teach mostly about fear and danger when it comes to sex.

However, Ley pointed out there are often overlooked positives to the rise of easily accessible and diverse adult content:

Now, we’re seeing the benefits of watching porn [for all people. These include] being more open-minded about sex, developing egalitarian values towards women and female sexuality, plus being more accepting of sexual diversity and LGBTQ issues.

“There’s a distilling of the anti-porn institutions happening,” Ley added, seeming hopeful for the future. 

They are losing people who have a middle ground on this issue and can see both sides. What is left are the hyperbolic, vitriolic and extreme folks who take the most polarized positions. The arguments are getting louder because these people are growing desperate.

Bennet also remains cautiously optimistic about where this conversation is headed: 

It’s only in the past fifty years that we’ve brought discussions of sex into the scientific realm—it was almost entirely relegated to moral and religious spaces prior. It’s hard for us to throw off that legacy.

Yet Ley, in a positive addition of empirical evidence, added, “On the general population level, what we are seeing are more people who view porn use as a healthy part of their sexuality and life.”

Image sources: Stripchat [NSFW]