ADDICTION ROUNDUP

Question of the night:

What happens, exactly, in a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting?

OK, you could be sitting in an AA meeting, and someone might perhaps tell a story about how they were cracking up one night, HALT and all that, went out and bought a bottle of whisky, had one glass and then felt so terrible about it that they chucked the rest of it down the sink. But how would a sex addict tell the same story?

Does some guy really stand up and talk about how he'd given up doing the cleaning lady three months ago, but then the other afternoon she was doing the bath and he just couldn't stop himself, and was half way inside her when he suddenly saw the error of his ways and sent her home early with double pay?

Surely not. There's a pornography of booze and drugs, sure, but there's no obliging interface here, no conceptual buffer. A shag story's a shag story, really. Fascinating stuff.

Here's one of my Time Out problem page columns, from a couple of years ago. They never got onto the web the first time round, but later on this year I should be getting a website up and running, and some of them will live on. As always, enjoy...

SEX ADDICTION – FACT OR FICTION?

A mate of mine just got his car scratched up for the third time in a year. He jokes about ‘new bird – new paint job’ because he can’t stay faithful to a woman for more than a few days. I almost admire him for his shagging habits – where he finds the energy I just don’t know. But does he have a problem? Does this mean he’s a ‘sex addict’?
Tony

Tony, my love, didn’t you realise? We’re All Addicts Now. In a society where you can go to a clinic and be treated for too much text-messaging, rest assured that your fondness for collecting foreign fag packets, or walking the same route to work every day, will soon have a medical name, and a billable therapy session available to correct it.

Looking back, I’ve met a lot of people (mainly men) who would qualify as sex addicts. They showed all the symptoms: relentless lying about their whereabouts; well-practised methods of telling you that ‘you’re the one with the problem’ if you don’t believe their stories; astonishing manipulation techniques when unmasked; and theatrical helplessness in the face of their ‘needs’. But no-one would have suggested they went to therapy. They’d more likely be given a pat on the back, while the women snarled in a corner, ignoring each other’s advice.

I actually find the concept of sex addiction pretty creepy. It’s one thing using a substance to take yourself away from reality for a while, but using another person is something else. It‘s not about orgasms, or real desire, but about power and insecurity. Your friend is quite clearly trying to fill a hole, if you’ll forgive the analogy. But unless a rejected lady takes him hostage at gunpoint, he may never get the shock he needs to stop messing around.

A sexual compulsion as strong as this can be seen as an illness, particularly when others are getting hurt. But call it an addiction as well, and everyone wants one: it’s increasingly fashionable to define yourself as helpless in the face of your body chemistry. ‘My illness made me do it’ is becoming more popular as an excuse for all kinds of behaviour. Willpower alone cannot cure cancer, so why should it cure the urge to fuck everything in sight? And it’s far safer to admit to an addiction, which still seems ‘cool’, than to admit to the mental disturbance that underlies it. Ruby Wax, in her autobiography How Do You Want Me?, notes that in the smart clinic she attended, the addicts looked down on the mere depressives as pathetic.

You don’t mention whether your friend has a wife and kids. If he’s officially single, you could argue that he’s just doing what he feels like, and caveat emptor to any woman who things she can ‘change him’. Also, what happened to free love? A lot of women dream of having several men in their lives, one for security and niceness, and one for hot sex. This guy might have an important role to play, somewhere. He could even start charging. But, to get out of fantasyland for a minute, until your he realises he’s got a problem, there’s nothing you can do except keep your girlfriends away from him. And were he to become a Recovery Bore, you might well start to miss his Casanova side.

As an aside, it’s funny how women who publicly declare their sexual freedom, such as Anais Nin, get held up as underground heroines. But not by those who knew them personally, it has to be said.

We'll be back in the studio on February 12th. Happy Trying To Ignore The Two-Week Build-Up To Valentine's Day.

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