Declan Lynch
Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction
On sex addiction
In all the things I have written about addiction, I am acutely aware of the fact that the dark forces of Prohibition are never too far away from us. That there are certain people who are temperamentally opposed to most forms of human enjoyment in any circumstances, and who have always been quick to turn this into some kind of a moralistic argument.
Addiction for them is the new Sin, and, indeed, the various religions have a lot of form in this area. It is now widely understood that there is a certain spiritual dimension to addiction and recovery — and obviously this would have attracted the attention of organisations whose mission in life was to gain ownership of everything that moved in that dimension.
Thus, at your Confirmation, you ‘took the pledge’, but generally that didn’t work very well — then again, these measures were never really meant to work for the congregation, as such; they were meant to work for the administration, to reinforce their sense of ownership of the higher aspirations of the multitudes.
Therefore, in writing about addiction, I have always tried to allude to the enjoyment that people get from it, not just to get away from that moralistic position, but in the interests of accuracy — if you are not mentioning the upside, not only are you basically wrong, the people who need to be paying attention to what you’re saying will just not believe you.
And when you get to the subject of sex addiction, you are in the territory which the moralists have always claimed most fiercely for themselves — which is, perhaps, why a lot of people instinctively object to the idea that there is any such thing as sex addiction. They regard it as a damage-limitation statement put out by famous people whose lives are unravelling because they have screwed up so many others with their incessant, well, screwing.
And there’s also this human-nature issue, this question to which most of us will never know the answer — if everyone had the opportunities that are presented to the average movie star, and took them, would that be a case of sex addiction, or would it be just a perfectly understandable reaction in this rarefied environment?
Certainly, compared to the regular addictions to drink or drugs or gambling or food or shopping, we see sex addiction as something that concerns Michael Douglas, but not the likes of us, because we are not Michael Douglas, and we never will be.
And yet, in what we choose to call ‘ordinary life’, we do encounter these individuals who seem to be obsessed with sex to an unusual degree, or at least have found ways of turning that common obsession into actual sex. In colloquial terms, such people were given funny titles — ‘hammer man’ was the most popular Irish version — suggesting that this was an essentially mischievous, even an admirable state of being, rather than a potentially damaging compulsion. One of the most prolific ‘hammer men’ I ever encountered was, indeed, an actor, but not of the Hollywood variety; just… an actor. Not only was he not famous, he wasn’t even that attractive in any regular sense, yet he clearly had this magnetism which worked for him, and, apparently, for every woman who found herself connecting with it on any level.
Fascinating though it was to observe, and tremendously successful though he was in his chosen ‘career’, you would, at times, wonder if he could ever maintain a relationship on a more long-term basis, in the unlikely event that some day he might want that for himself.
He was obviously enjoying it all too much to be called a sex addict or anything so pejorative, but like I said, addiction is always working well for you at some stage — you just don’t want to become a victim of your own success.
“We see sex addiction as something that concerns Michael Douglas, but not the likes of us”