Every couple of years, when a celebrity actor goes to sex addiction treatment or a celebrity golfer sleeps with dozens of women who are not his beautiful model wife, the media “rediscovers” sex addiction. Predictable questions are bandied about: Is sex addiction real? Can someone be addicted without a substance? Isn’t sex addiction just a clever excuse for whoring around/irresponsible behavior? What’s next—an addiction to reading blogs?
In recent days, Salon and Slate—online magazines that I’ve contributed to—have entered the fray. Slate published a piece that covers familiar ground, arguing that “our enthusiasm for labeling new forms of addictions seems to have arisen from a perfect storm of pop medicine, pseudo-neuroscience, and misplaced sympathy for the miserable.” Salon’s story, which quotes me, strives for some pseudo-balance but is still deeply unsatisfying.
There have been many articles/television segments about Tiger Woods/sex addiction in the last week, but one man can only take so much lazy, knee-jerk journalism. For the sake of time, I’m restricting my analysis to the the Salon piece, which is far from the worst but which quotes several anti-sex addiction “experts” who don’t know what they’re talking about (on this issue, at least). In bold are portions of the story, followed by my analysis.
Salon: Is Sex Addiction Real? By Tracy Clark-Flory
Since the term was coined in 1983, “sex addiction” has become so embroidered in our self-help vocabulary that most of us stopped questioning it. Wrong. We’ve been questioning it relentlessly since then, and we continue to do so. Hence, the Salon article, Is Sex Addiction Real?
“People can behave in compulsive, self-destructive ways,” popular Savage Love columnist Dan Savage writes in an e-mail. “It is possible to fuck too much, or fuck too many people, or fuck your life up fucking. But sex isn’t a chemical substance. It’s not a drug.” Dan, I love you man, but gambling isn’t a substance, either. Does gambling addiction not exist?
Addiction experts argue it’s the hit of dopamine delivered during orgasm that is abused. (Similar arguments are used to explain gambling and shopping addictions.) But equating those “powerful hoo-haa endorphins,” as Savage puts it, with harder substances like crack is “just ye olde sex negativity on display”… The truth, says Savage, is that “sex addiction” is merely a clinical euphemism for “sex they disapprove of for moral reasons.” As Dr. Marty Klein, a sex therapist and the author of “America’s War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust and Liberty,” once wrote: “These people are missionaries who want to put everyone in the missionary position.” Dan’s primary beef with sex addiction—shared by plenty of others—is that it is a construct we came up with because we have too much shame and misplaced morality around sex. But two things can be true at once, and in this case they are: We indeed have too much shame and misplaced morality in this country around sex. And sex can be addictive for some people. The presence of one does not nullify the other. Those of us who struggle with sex addiction are not engaged in recovery because we hate sex, or because we want to tell other people what kind of sex they should be having. (In fact, some of us are kind of envious of people who can have lots of fun, uninhibited sex without it taking over their lives.) We are in recovery because we had lost the ability to regulate and control our sexual behavior. Sex had ceased to be fun. We weren’t occasionally reckless, nor were we simply “really horny.” We were out of control, in whatever form that took, and our behavior was negatively impacting our lives—friendships, romantic relationships, work. Is there an occasional person (about 1 out of 100, in my experience) who comes into sex addiction treatment because he/she has misplaced shame about sexual behavior that isn’t all that destructive? Yes. Does that mean that sex addiction is a misplaced response to our cultural fucked-upness around sex? Nope.
Dr. Klein’s quote, “These people are missionaries who want to put everyone in the missionary position,” is clever but wrong. I’m not sure who Dr. Klein means when he says “these people,” but the beauty of 12 Step sex addiction recovery fellowships—the primary way that people get help for sex addiction in this country—is that these groups have no leaders or “missionaries.” Nor do these groups have a political or moral agenda. The same can’t be said of Mr. Klein.
Says Savage, “We live in a culture that’s torn between titillation and condemnation—that’s Dr. Drew’s whole shtick, actually. Titillate and condemn, condemn and titillate.” Dan, I get what you’re saying here, although I have yet to see Dr. Drew “condemn” anyone. I must confess to kind of liking Dr. Drew. Though his show, Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, is flawed, to his credit he’s not out to make fun of sex addiction, nor does he misrepresent what the addiction is about. This is an achievement in itself. The vast majority of television shows and movies that depict recovering sex addicts get just about everything wrong. The most annoying of these let’s-make-shit-up-so-we-can-get-a-cheap-laugh is the common depiction of a 12 Step sex addiction meeting as an orgy waiting to happen. Sex addiction 12 Step meetings are actually the least flirtatious of all recovery fellowships, precisely because everyone is there to work on that issue. (If you want to see flirtation and “13th Stepping,” the practice of a more experiences person in recovery hitting on a newcomer, check out some AA meetings.)
There is a staunchly religious and traditional fringe of the sex addiction community, though. Many conservative Christian counselors and organizations, including Focus on the Family, provide “treatment” for both sex addiction and homosexuality, often conflating the two. True. And those people are morons.
(Sex addiction) has spawned a VH1 show and an excuse for Tiger Woods: Tiger hasn’t even gone to sex rehab yet, and he’s already made an excuse? Whatever his decision (go to treatment, or don’t go to treatment), he’s likely to get blasted for it. If he goes, it’s a publicity stunt, an “excuse,” a way to save face. Even if he tries to go without anyone knowing, someone in treatment with him will spill the beans to their mother back in Arkansas, and before long television vans will be camped outside, and everyone will be sure that Tiger is just making an excuse for his behavior. If Tiger doesn’t go to treatment, he won’t be getting the help he probably needs. When I wrote about my sex addiction in The New York Times and in my book, America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life, some people wondered if I wasn’t using addiction as a was to absolve myself of responsibility for my behavior. Yeah, because coming out as a sex addict in The New York Times and in a book is the first excuse that jumps to mind!?
