The pressure about keeping a hard on? Yeah. It just happened today. Yes, I do feel a lot of pressure to maintain an erection on camera. Yeah, I feel pressure every time that I shoot, but I feel like the longer that I've done it the more, like, confident I am that I can get the job done, you know? Performance might not be everything, but at least in the world of gay porn, keeping a boner is. And as any model will tell you, what you see is not always real. Guys, I think we need a minute it's just feeling not natural if that's cool. If you enjoy gay porn and don't want to know the hard truth, pun intended, then stop watching right now because I'm about to show you how the sausage is made and it is not always pretty. Oh, am I allowed to-- Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I can talk about pharmaceuticals? Okay. Okay. I know a lot of the other guys, they use some, like, extreme measures, like Trimix and injections like that For studio work I take Cialis quite often because it's long days, long hours. It felt like just pure pain when they inject it because it’s like a needle like that long. And it's not just in porn. People around the world are feeling the pressure to get hard and stay hard. It's no wonder that treatments like Viagra, Cialis and Trimix are fueling a $2.5 billion industry. No matter how you look at it, boners are complicated. Today I'm reclaiming my right to be present. Do you feel pressure from maintaining an erection on camera? Hmm. Yes. It's what's expected. This is what the porn consumer wants. Yes. That is very much the reality of doing studio porn. Softness and seminess is associated with not being into it or not being sexually motivated or not attracted to the other person. I'd say that it's important to back off of your penis. You know, one of the worst things you can do is apply more pressure. That's Dr. Chris Donahue, a relationship and sex therapist in Los Angeles. I think culturally we're living in a time and we always have where we're all about bigger, louder, faster, harder, more. And I think historically, our relationship to sexual body parts has really kind of internalized some of that. You know, we look at history, we see the way that sexuality has existed and everything was dramatized, everything was made larger. And that was really just to highlight the importance of something. But I think we literalized that and we started to believe that if something isn't big, loud and fast and hard, that it has less importance. And I think also with men, masculinity is also very much tied to that. Many in the porn industry are well aware of our obsession with boners and have gone to great lengths to achieve perfection. Trimix is a type of drug you inject by needle in your dick and it closes off the blood vessels that allow the escape of the blood. It's a mixture of three different medications. They’re long chemical names so I don't remember the exact names of the medications, but you just inject a very small amount. A lot of people are not super comfortable doing this but, you know, I have had a prescription for three years and it's almost second nature for me. Erectile dysfunction. Let's let's recast this. So we call it unreliable erections. Try to use language around this condition that people experience that doesn't necessitate that it's always and forever or that’s something broken about my penis. So we look at something like Viagra that was created initially in order to help people with other heart and vascular issues. They realized huh, it actually is doing a lot more for erections. In the beginning I was really nervous. I would take like a Viagra or something, but I hated the way it made me feel. So I just decided that's not something that I want to do anymore. A lot of times when I know that I'm going to be on set for days on end, I'll take a Cialis like a couple of days before I start shooting, and then I will take like one every day up through the end of the shoot. Viagra’s great. I get jealous of seeing other guys who take Viagra and just have raging hard-ons. I cannot take it. It does not react well with me. I started using Viagra really young, like my first porn scene, I was like 19. I've used Cialis, Viagra, Trimix for a lot of studios, some pretty popular studios. Have you had any like, negative reactions to doing any of these? Oh. There are a few negative side effects of Trimix. I mean, if you don't dose it right, you can, you know, cause your erection to stay there for quite some time. Keeping a boner for that long period of time. It hurts. I had some Trimix for a scene that I did. It was more than I probably should have had. My boner wouldn’t go down. It really hurt after a while. That erection probably lasted a good 8 hours. So we live in a culture where our self-esteem is very tied to our sexuality. Our culture puts a lot of emphasis on bodies and bodies operating at an optimal level. We always go for perfection, and I think sometimes it does it to our detriment. Majority of the guys surprisingly are straight, like their managers would give them like a Trimix injection in their dick, which I had no idea what that was. They would take a syringe, fill it with like fake cum and then they put like the very like end of a syringe, like in their dick hole and inject all of the fake cum. And then they put their thumb over their dick hole and run over and just piss it out on your face. With the rise of social media marketing, pharmaceutical companies have found new ways to capitalize on society's obsession with boners, and demand is growing. The industry isn't very favorable to the average dick size, which is I think, really sad. Seeing massive, massive dicks over and over again in porn serves a couple of things. On the upside of that it gives people access to a kind of projection that we assume to be power. Everything that we are attracted to has something to do with our relationship to power in some kind of way. And downside of it, what it does is it normalizes this like particular static image essentially of this is where that power lives. And if I don't have that or if I don't, you know, acquire that in some way, I'm going to miss out or I don't have what I need or want. Porn can set unrealistic ideals about boners. And this creates an environment that is just ripe with self judgment and anxiety, transforming what is a natural physiological process into a perceived measure of self-worth. Does porn set unrealistic expectations for gay men? Short answer, definitely. But there's also so many different kinds of porn. It's not a black and white answer or topic. A person watches porn all the time and they’re like, These guys are hard all the time. And then as soon as you get into your head and you're like, thinking about it and you're like, Oh my God, I need to perform. I need to perform. This sounds like ironic coming from a porn star, but I've actually cut out all porn. I don't watch porn all that. I've been subject to the influences of porn myself, where I think that in order to to have sex, in order to be masculine, to have that strength, you need to be hard all the time. I think that, you know, pornography is something just like all other forms of media and the conversations were part of or we’re around, we internalize that. And our worth, our sexual esteem, our self esteem becomes dependent upon that. The hard truth is consumers are demanding it, porn is perpetuating it, and pharma is capitalizing on it. We are all complicit. So the big question is how are you participating in the cycle? And more importantly, how do you break it? So what I'm seeing is a lot of people coming into my practice thinking that they have erectile dysfunction, what they might have is what we call like erectile dysphoria. I don't feel great about the way my erections functioning or what I've coined is more of erectile disappointment. So I tell people porn is great, but diversify the kind you're watching. Not only diversify the kind you're watching in terms of what they're doing and the body shapes and sizes, but also watch porn that mimics and mirrors who you are and how you look so as to become more familiar, to see that kind of body shape and size, receiving pleasure and to be desired because that's also going to help you. So be thoughtful about what you're watching and how it's making you feel. You want to say hi Apollo? Say hi, say hi. Yes.