Ok, the idea, that the existing problem doesn't imply the existence of an immediate solution, is very insightful. Thank you for writing all this.

Too bad I don't know much modern cognitive and social psychology to confidently state why I believe that sexual deprivation might not have real psychological effects (under certain conditions) or that these effects may be overcome. So let's have this conversation again in a year or two. :)

What I base my current beliefs about “sex is not a need” is mostly CBT. CBT's core idea is the “cognitive model”, the statement that many of our moods and behaviors are influenced by the beliefs we have. For example, you believe that you're a horrible person, a loser, therefore you feel depressed and unmotivated. You believe that you were responsible for some bad event, therefore you feel guilty and ashamed. You believe that somebody or the world itself was unfair to you, therefore you feel angry and betrayed.

Moreover, the beliefs that cause destructive feelings and behaviors happen to be irrational in one way or another. They may be positivistically meaningless, overgeneralizing, vague, emotionally loaded, arbitrarily judgemental, black-and-white, not supported by evidence and so on. So what CBT researchers found out is that most of the time when people are depressed, anxious, insecure, compulsive and so on, they have corresponding irrational beliefs. But when they are productive and have healthy joy, sadness or remorse, their beliefs happen to be rather rational and grounded in reality.

And CBT works, it treats depression, anxiety, marital problems, drug addiction and many other things. Yes, it doesn't treat them well enough, otherwise we would make people superhuman on a daily basis. And I don't know why it doesn't work fanstastically yet, although I have some hypotheses. But it works somewhat well for some people.

What I hate is that we still treat human psyche as a black box, as magic. Why lack of sex causes psychological problems? Nobody knows, but people treat it as a simple one-step causation: less sex -> more problems. But “lack of sex causes psychological problems” becomes a sort of mysterious answer to mysterious question. Therefore instead of trying to reduce human psyche into smaller blocks and finding the root cause of psychological problem, we just conclude that people must have more sex.

CBT is an attempt at reducing human moods and behaviors. It lays out a causal network. It explains which beliefs cause which moods and actions, what is wrong with these beliefs, how to change them. And suddenly it works, to some extent, in some people.

Allen Carr's quitting smoking method is a good example: it's pure CBT and it demonstrably effective. When you read academic literature on smoking, there's lots of mysterious answers, high-level observations with no causality. Stuff like “when people quit smoking, they experience anxiety, agitation, heartbeat, digestive problems, nausea, etc”. Yes, they do, I don't argue with that. But the same people, who quit smoking using Carr's method, don't experience this. Not all, but many. So there are more factors at work that previously weren't understood. People do feel certain way under certain conditions, but don't under others.

So let me make myself clear. I don't necessarily know the perfect way to make a sexually deprived person fully psychologically healthy, nor do I think that if this way exist it's easy. Except, I can point to a CBT book and promise a significant probability of it helping.

But due to CBT I strongly believe that for people, who hold certain beliefs about women or sex, the best step is to rationally combat their beliefs, not to have more sex. It has much better chance of working, because it already has precedents.

How is this relevant to sexual deprivation? Because CBT works for it too. It worked for me, some people I know, and its underlying mechanism makes sense. It's convincing. Can I point to an authoritative peer-reviewed study that confirms my point? Not yet. Can I at least provide a more complex causal explanation, as to convince you as I am convinced? Probably not until I understand CBT and psychology in general better. So yeah, we can all just agree that we can admit it's all sad without implying any sexual obligation. And hope that science would solve this problem one day.

But yeah, sexual obligation is just wrong, and this idea should be explicit.