If You're a Sex Addict, Don't Read This One
Dear Friends:
These days, for the memoir, I’m writing about sex addiction: the myth of it, the industry that claims to treat it, the 12-step programs that welcome ‘sex addicts’ with open arms. As such, I’m quick to anger; of all the ways our thinking about sex leads to such needless ruin, ‘sex addiction’ seems easy to stop promulgating.
To believe that sex is addictive, you have to think of sex as a bad thing, or a thing you can have too much of. (This is the lie behind No Nut November.) If sex is a basic, boring good, like food or sleep, it changes the conversation when you feel you’re having too much of it.
One problem: it’s fun to be a sex addict, probably, or to be known as one. As Leo Bersani wrote 37 years ago, ‘There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it.’ Deciding you’re a sex addict, then, is like becoming some kind of outlaw. But if you asked people whether Bersani’s secret was true—i.e., ‘Do you like sex?’—most people would hear instead a very different question: ‘Do you feel the need to have sex?’
Do I like sex? I no longer even know how to answer the question, which is maybe one of the gifts writing this book has given me.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements
1. Jennifer Wilson’s ‘How Did Polyamory Become So Popular’
If you read the open-marriage slash consensual/ethical non-monogamy literature (The Ethical Slut is their bible, as Wilson points out), the writing gets quickly spiritual / polemical. Monogamy = the shackles of the patriarchy, humans share love in an abundance economy not a scarcity economy, etc etc. Monogamy isn’t for everyone, but ENM types like to believe it’s not for anyone. I’m the first to agree that compulsory monogamy can fuck up some relationships, but man can ENM’s adherents get evangelical. Wilson’s essay in the New Yorker addresses this, but where the piece shines is when she shows non-monogamy’s current moment in the culture to be classist, elitist, and mostly the domain of wealthy white women not as committed to abundance as they might think. ‘A good love affair, when you’re inside it, feels like it could change the world,’ Wilson writes. ‘But changing the world takes more than spreading the love; you have to spread the wealth, too.’
2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
My mother-in-law got me this game for Christmas, and I’ve spent the weeks since down in a hole with just me and my Switch and my headphones. I am not a gaymer. But I’ve been Avatar-ing into elf-man Link in his quest to save Princess Zelda for Jesus Christ 35 years now. Zelda is my game the way Madonna is my diva. Tears of the Kingdom is better than its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, which for a long time seemed impossible, BotW a perfect game. What ultimately makes TotK better I won’t say here, because like all Zeldas, it’s best when its gifts are revealed in time, by exploring. Everyone’s some kind of gamer, if watching people on their phones on the bus tells me anything, and most games engage you with rewards, prizes, action, missions accomplished. TotK has all those, but it engages through the vastness of its world, how you can go just anywhere—even where it’s not clear what you’re ‘supposed’ to do there. It doesn’t reward exploration so much as deeply indulge it; most of the time me-Link is climbing another mountain, or scouring lowlands, just to see what’s there. Sometimes nothing’s there, just more of the world, but I’ve found it. (I’ll resist making that a metaphor for anything.)
If You’re a ‘Sex Addict’, Don’t Read This Main Matter
Eric was a 37-year-old gay white man, single. For a while, he’d been a top employee in his division, but then his supervisor referred him to a counselor because of decreased productivity. Also, the IT department discovered he accessed gay social networking and pornography sites at work; they confronted him about it, and a notation was made in his file.
To the counselor, Eric reported difficulty concentrating and sleeping, depression, and weight loss. Asked about the reason for this change, he identified the frequency and nature of his sexual activities, acknowledging that he’d had more than 60 sexual partners over the last 2 years (the time since his most recent HIV test). He’d come out in his early 20s and reported ongoing parental conflict resulting from his sexual orientation. He called his upbringing ‘normal overall’ and cited church as being an important influence in his life. His father was a deacon.
From this input, his counselor gave Eric the diagnosis of ‘Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified’, and she planned a course of treatment.
I’m plagiarizing this material from ‘Sexual Addiction and the Gay Male Client’, a chapter in Casebook for Counseling Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons and Their Families, pub’d in 2014. The chapter’s authors, from all I can tell, are fellow queers.
Before we proceed, you should know that ‘sex addiction’ has never appeared in the DSM, the manual used by the American Psychiatric Association to diagnose all mental and behavioral disorders. Eric’s diagnosis of ‘Sexual disorder not otherwise specified’ is old, DSM-IV language; the updated DSM-5 (pub’d 2013) calls it ‘unspecified sexual dysfunction’. Sexual dysfunctions, specifically, are disorders characterized by a clinically significant disturbance in a person’s ability to respond sexually or to experience sexual pleasure.
E.D, low sex drive, pain during sex. These are things. Nymphomania? Not a thing.
To uncover the contributions to Eric’ compulsive sexual behavior, the counselor decided it was essential that he provide a detailed, written sexual history, including memories of his first experiences with masturbation, dating patterns, incidents of sexual abuse, etc., with specific attention paid to his behavior of the last 12 months, especially the types of sexual activity he engaged in. The following week, Eric called his counselor asking her whether it would be acceptable to attend their next session without having completed the assignment, but the counselor remained steadfast in reminding Eric of their mutual agreement to complete it.
His history came to 12 single-spaced pages. They went through it together, and Eric was led to see how his sexual behavior had become ‘too far out there.’ During the first session, he’d acknowledged being unfamiliar with sexual addiction, claiming not to have known anyone who self-identified as a sex addict, nor had he heard anyone else describe their sexual pursuits as problematic (‘especially among other gay men’). As a result, Eric’s counselor provided him with reading material in order to challenge his own cognitive schemas, namely Patrick Carnes’s 2001 book Out of the Shadows.
Patrick Carnes popularized the term ‘sex addiction’ in 1983, in the first edition of Out of the Shadows, the covers of which look like this:
‘A moment comes for every addict,’ begins Carnes’s introduction, ‘when the consequences are so great that the addict admits life is out of control because of his or her sexual behavior.’ Who are such people? People who are sexual with children, who visit prostitutes, who commit homosexual acts in public toilets, who have affairs. People whose spouse succeeds in being elected to public office but is forced to resign because a sheriff sting caught the addict soliciting a minor over the Internet. People ‘with AIDS [who] have unprotected anal sex with others every time [they] use cocaine and yet continue to use.’
These aren’t case studies, to be clear. They’re little shame vignettes we’re meant to be scared by and, eventually, find one to identify with. When you break off another relationship you didn’t want to be in—that’s another rock bottom moment for the addict. Carnes went on to publish a number of books to solidify and defend sex addiction as a thing, often demonstrating how our brain can get addicted to sex the same way it can get addicted to alcohol or heroin. Much of the research he and his acolytes have cited in this area has come from Aviel Goodman, author of Sexual Addiction: An Integrated Approach and numerous studies on the neuroscience of addiction.
I’ve read the studies (not the book), and the ties between chemical-style dependence from sexual arousal are thin.1 Goodman’s credentials are listed as being the head of the Minnesota Institute of Psychiatry, which seems to have been run out of his house.2 Since 2008, he’s been silent, not a single study or paper published.
Cognitive behavioral therapy follows the belief that how we think affects what we do, and vice versa; treatment involves interventions on those cognitions and behaviors. To create a list of behavioral modifications that would assist in interrupting the cycle of online sexual activity, a behavioral contract was developed and signed by both Eric and his counselor.
Eric removed his laptop from his home and turned it in to the counselor, who stored it in a locked fireproof filing cabinet. Next, Eric turned in to his IT department his cellular phone containing the application that allowed him to locate other gay men within a particular geographic distance.3 He rearranged his office so that anyone entering could see what he was viewing on his computer, and he agreed to leave his door open at all times. Finally, Eric acknowledged the importance of notifying his direct supervisor of his issues with sexual compulsivity in order to enhance accountability at his work.
‘Eric was fortunate that he was assigned an EAP counselor who had knowledge of how to work with a gay male client with issues of sexual compulsivity,’ the chapter’s authors write.
I want that counselor stripped of her credentials and thrown in jail for life.
My heart breaks (and blood boils) at the abuse he received from her treatment, the wretched luck of landing in her office, and not the office of a counselor who, in the face of hearing ‘None of the gay men I know considers themselves a sex addict,’ might instead have asked, ‘And why do you think that is?’—without already having an answer.
My working title for this Main Matter was Sexual Addiction & Straight People, but that would’ve been stupid. The counselor who sent me to Sex Addicts Anonymous was queer. The first meeting I went to was in the Castro. And as I said, I’m pretty sure Eric’s counselor was queer, and it was Eric’s queer counselor who encouraged him to attend two sex-related 12-step meetings per week, naming Sexaholics Anonymous as one option.
Sexaholics Anonymous defines ‘sexual sobriety’ as having no form of sex with yourself or with anyone other than your spouse. And in SA’s sobriety definition, the term ‘spouse’ refers to one’s partner in a marriage between a man and a woman.
Ruin. Stupid, useless ruin.
In 1982, before ‘sex addiction’ was invented, Gayle Rubin wrote about the longterm effects of Western/Christian cultures’ focus on sexual behavior as the root of virtue: ‘Although people can be intolerant, silly, or pushy about what constitutes proper diet, differences in menu rarely provoke the kinds of rage, anxiety, and sheer terror that routinely accompany differences in erotic taste. Sexual acts are thus burdened with an excess of significance.’
I think about Rubin when I think about that laptop locked up in a (fireproof!) cabinet. When I think about the counselor holding the only key. When I think what every 12-stepper is required first to admit—I am powerless—and then counseling them by not just taking away their power and agency, but making pageantry and ritual part of it all, and claiming you’ve got science backing you up.
What if sex were like plumbing? Many big changes with plumbing happened a hundred and fifty years ago (around the time ‘homosexuality’ was invented), but now it’s a basic part of everyone’s lives—both civic and private. Sometimes, our plumbing needs repair, but it would be weird to feel ashamed of that, plumbing itself neither a good thing or a bad thing. It doesn’t have to make you more or less of yourself.
And what about the ruin that Eric caused? The lost hours of workplace productivity might be a major concern to some, but not me. The hours of leisure time lost to trolling the apps likely depressed him, and there’s much to be said about the rapidness with which dopamine sex can be had, but that gets us into Internet/phone addiction (also not in the DSM-5). ‘One of the greatest myths that allows the addict to repeat sexual behaviors is that it does not adversely affect other relationships,’ Carnes warns in OotS, but Eric was single. He was a single gay man in Atlanta, with a different sexual partner every other week or so.
Somehow, this pretty normal behavior became a problem for Eric, but rather than work on what made the behavior a problem, his counselor—from whatever cognitions of her own about sex—intervened on the behavior. The burden of excess significance.
Let me end this way: Aviel Goodman, the psychiatrist whose research into the neuroscience of (sexual) addiction bolstered so many arguments for its continued treatment, was arrested in 2018 for having child pornography on his computer.
The Star Tribune reports that when the FBI SWAT team entered his home, the one on Summit Avenue in Minneapolis, home of the Minnesota Institute for Psychiatry, Goodman had a gun in his hand. Was it held to his head? Goodman pleaded guilty five months later, and surrendered his medical license.
I uncovered the end to Goodman’s story only by scouring Works Cited pages, following citations in studies of other studies, trying to find the evidence that our brains get addicted to sex, that what I went through that eventually took me to SAA meetings was an addiction I was powerless over. And when I think about Goodman’s story, all the work he did to prove sex addiction was real, only to start looking online for pics and vids of naked children—well, I don’t know what to think.
It’s so tempting to see causality here, that his attraction to children led to the addiction research, or maybe the other way around, but that’s once again requiring sex to signify our selves. However it happened, Goodman’s life as he knew it was ruined. I wish he’d found colleagues he could have better conversations with about sex.
Dr. Goodman, I wish you’d found people you could have better conversations with about sex. I don’t know where you’ve ended up, and I don’t know if they let you have access to the Internet there. And Eric: your counselor’s name was Misti Storie, if you’re searching online for yourself. Shame’s strongest force is how alone it makes us feel. When you find me, if you find me, I’m here for you.
This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store is this vintage pornography:
Yes, dopamine levels go way up when you look at porn, but they also go way up when your meal tastes good or when your jam comes on at the bar. It’s not the porn or the sex that you’re addicted to, it’s the compulsion to get another dopamine rush that’s concerning.
Incidentally, Minnesota is like the Fertile Crescent of the sex addiction mythos. Hazelden, the addiction treatment center, whose publishing arm puts out Carnes’s books, is located in Center City, and Carnes got his PhD in counselor education at the U of M. Sex Addicts Anonymous reportedly started when two Catholic therapist friends, worried about the sex they were having, took a walk around Minneapolis’s Lake Harriet.
You may know it as Grindr, but the authors don’t want to promote such dangerous things.
like always this was a good read