Sex addiction – is it really just a myth?
Is uncontrollable lust a modern malaise on the rise, or are we just conning ourselves, asks
Professor Barry Reay is in his late 40s. He belongs to a generation that grew up in a time when sex addiction didn’t exist. Until the very late 1970s, he remembers, it remained an amusing, mildly titillating fictional concept that cropped up in bad novels. Nobody thought of it as real. By the 1990s, though, as Reay tells me in the irritated tone he uses whenever the words sex addiction come up, the term had become commonplace. This was after a newspaper reported that the American actor Michael Douglas was receiving treatment at a rehab facility for ‘‘sex addiction’’, although years later it emerged the story had been made up.
Reay recalls that by the end of that decade glamorous male leads were being described as sex addicts by the press, their political or professional foes and a growing body of psychological experts. They included Rob Lowe, who had become embroiled in another new concept, a ‘‘sex-tape scandal’’, and Bill Clinton when in 1998 it was used to explain the married American president’s cigar moment with a female intern.
In 2009, Tiger Woods checked into the Gentle Path programme at Pine Grove Behavioural Health & Addiction Services, Mississippi, to treat his sex addiction, it was alleged, although this was never confirmed by the golfer. Benoit Denizet-Lewis had claimed he had attended sex addiction meetings with Woods at the clinic. DenizetLewis is a journalist. He’s become a bestselling author, partly through restyling himself as a ‘‘famous’’ sex addict.
But what, actually, is sex addiction? A dangerous psychological pathology? A throwaway shorthand expression for . . . what, exactly? Reay doesn’t think sex addiction exists. We’re conning ourselves, he says. So he’s written a furious book explaining why.
I talk to him on Skype. He’s a history professor at Auckland University. It explains why his book, Sex Addiction, a Critical History, has such a sober title. Reay’s specialist subject is sex. He has written books on what sex was like and how it has been viewed at almost every period since medieval times. Skype is a favourite tool of the sex addict, but the expression on Reay’s face is contemptuous exasperation.
Reading his book, I couldn’t help but notice his sneering tone. It feels as if he decided to write it because of a personal gripe. It all started one day at work, Reay tells me. ‘‘I was teaching a course on the history of sex. We were talking about how notions of heterosexuality have changed over time and how many of them are culturally constructed. Then we got on to sex addiction. I’ve always thought of ‘sex addiction’ as very much part of pop culture, but I was astonished as none of my students thought so.’’
Reay told his students that in his view sex addiction was ‘‘some mythological thing’’. They were shocked: had he gone insane?
‘‘That really intrigued me. They are used to hearing about celebrities who are sex addicts. And it was: ‘What about my friend who’s had sex with 15 boys in the past week?’, and all this sort of stuff, which is the argument that’s been used more widely anyway, seizing on extreme examples which are not explained by sex addiction. I don’t think labelling someone a sex addict explains anything. In popular culture it is used as a short-hand term to explain nothing.’’
The problem is academics, he says. ‘‘They’ve devised all these intricate measures of sex addiction without actually interrogating whether this thing they are measuring is a viable concept in the first place.’’
Worse are all the therapists who make a living on the back of the concept. Actually, there are therapists who don’t ‘‘believe in’’ sex addiction, he says: ‘‘They’re facing patients who are convinced they are sex addicts and trying to explain to them that they’re not.’’
A potted history of sex addiction, care of Professor Reay: sex addiction first emerged in the late 1950s in pulp fiction. It began to gain traction as a serious idea when the self-help culture of 1970s America got hold of it. In 1981 a sex therapist from New York, Avodah Offit, cited a link between sex and the release of endorphins. The main culprit, grumbles Reay, is an American psychologist, Patrick Carnes, who in 1983 published Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction.
By 1985 sex addiction had appeared in the ‘‘current trends’’ section of the journal Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality. It was included in the American Psychiatric Association’s third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1987 but has never gone back in. ‘‘Hyper sexual desire’’ was promoted for the most recent edition, DSM 5, but was voted down. DSM 5 does include gambling. If Reay were editing the DSM, I can imagine he’d have vetoed that entry. ‘‘I guess, if I was being honest, I tend to be quite sceptical, generally, about the medicalisation of society.’’
Until 1974, the DSM held that homosexuality was a medical disorder – which shows how subjective diagnoses are, Reay says.
His view is that sex addiction is a monster constructed partly by the conservative right to pathologise sexual behaviour that strays from the Christian model of monogamous marriage. Diagnosing people with it is also a good way for shrinks to make a living, he adds. Sexual addiction, warned the bestselling therapist Anne Wilson Schaef, ‘‘is a progressive disease and results in destruction and early death for addicts and often those with whom they are involved’’.
Now librarians are taking things to another level. The American Library of Congress Classification system files both Nabokov’s Lolita and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, under the subject heading sex addiction.
If you look up sex addiction on the internet, you’ll find a hundred definitions, but most proponents agree it involves the addictive process being expressed through sex with compulsive dependence on sexual behaviours being a means to regulate one’s feelings and sense of self.
‘‘What is wrong,’’ says Reay, ‘‘with using sex as a way of coping with the stresses of everyday life? Why is time spent on sexual matters necessarily unproductive?’’
One of the experts Reay blames for this is a British woman called Paula Hall. Having begun her career by treating drug addicts, she trained with Patrick Carnes. She is quoted at the top of chapter two of Reay’s book: ‘‘Although sex addiction has undoubtedly been around for centuries, it is only over the past few years that we have started to fully understand it.’’
Hall seems to have become Britain’s go-to sex addiction expert. She has founded and runs treatment facilities for sex and porn addiction around the UK and is training therapists in a special diploma she has created.
‘‘I saw the book,’’ Hall tells me in an amused tone as if to say: that old chestnut. ‘‘The critics say sex addiction is made up by therapists like me to make money – we are creating illness to create a cure. But that doesn’t explain the thousands and thousands of people on sex addiction forums. And the demand for sex and porn addiction is getting bigger and bigger.’’
Hall talks about the people who come to see her. They’re mostly men. ‘‘If you’re a single sex addict you may not be experiencing negative consequences – you are just enjoying having lots of partners. You only recognise you have an addiction when you have a girlfriend you really care about but are still doing all the stuff you did when you were single, and you are starting to feel the consequences.
‘‘When someone is at university and drinks a lot, we don’t tend to call them an alcoholic. It’s the same with sex. It’s if they continue with the excess, to detrimental effect – if they’ve been caught by their partner, or are facing disciplinary action at work, or just hate what they’re doing and can’t stop.’’ Hall’s free kickstart recovery kit has been downloaded from her website 12,095 times.
One of Reay’s many quibbles is that there is no concrete definition of sex addiction or a biological test for it. ‘‘That’s like saying: ‘How do you prove that somebody is suffering from depression or anxiety?’’’ says Hall. ‘‘The problem is that the definition of addiction is very changed. Once we talked about it as moral weakness or failing. Then we thought of it as a disease. I think it’s progressive, in terms of the lengths you will go to to continue your addiction, but it’s not a disease, no. Now we’re more focused on the impact repetitive behaviours have on the brain, how addictive behaviours change the brain.’’
She says 20 per cent of the people she treats tell her their behaviour made them feel suicidal. ‘‘These are intelligent, loving, caring people.’’
There must be some sex addicts who are uncaring or nasty, I say. ‘‘Sex addiction’’ always carries mildly glamorous and erotic connotations. It’s a syndrome that seems to affect only powerful, attractive, ambitious, famous men – not grubby anonymous sex offenders, for example.
‘‘There are some sex addicts who have committed sex offences and certainly there must be some sex offenders who have sex addiction as well, but in most cases sex offenders are sex offenders because they lack a conscience. It’s about power or control, not craving. It’s this craving that defines addiction. You can’t choose not to crave. But ultimately the behaviour is a choice. The common factor with addiction is dopamine.’’
None of what Hall tells me convinces Reay. ‘‘Your behaviour could be explained by anything – childhood abuse, narcissism,’’ he says. Couldn’t you say the same thing about alcoholism? ‘‘You could, but I’m not going to be drawn on that.’’
Maybe everyone needs a disorder these days, I say, to provide a sense of identity: ‘‘I’m a sex addict: therefore I exist.’’
‘‘I know,’’ grumbles Reay, ‘‘It’s crazy.’’
People who have lots of sex might be crazy too, he says, but that doesn’t mean they’re addicts.
Sex Addiction, a Critical History by Barry Reay is published by Polity Press