“Run Away, Run Away!” From The Sex Addiction Mafia
I want to share this article by Dr. Marty Klein, who continues to hold the line against the “sex addiction” bogosity.
I don’t treat sex addiction. The concept is superficial. It isn’t clearly defined or clinically validated, and it’s completely pathology-oriented. It presents no healthy model of non-monogamy, pornography use, or stuff like S/M. Some programs eliminate masturbation, which is inhumane, naïve, and crazy.
Oh, I observe people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and a few other exotic states. That accounts for some of what laypeople call “sex addiction.”
What I mostly see instead of “sex addicts” is people who are neurotic or narcissistic. They can’t quite believe that the normal rules of life (“tell the truth,” “all behavior has consequences”) apply to them. They make promises they intend to keep–but then they want relief from frustration, or loneliness, or anxiety so much, they are unwilling to keep their promises, even promises to themselves. And some “sex addicts” just can’t come to terms with having one, relatively brief, life. They want several lives, so they can have everything.
Solid sane stuff. But, to be honest, my attention was more captured by the dude who featured in the intro to Dr. Klein’s piece:
Before he even sat down, my new patient blurted out why he had come. “My wife says I’m a sex addict, and she demands I get treated immediately,” he said.
No further than this did I read, before two pertinent memes with a common soul began warring within my breast. In the order they burst into my mind, they were 1) DTMFA! followed briskly by 2) “Run away! Run away!”
Lest there be any mistake, my sympathies are with this dude. There’s a frequent belief, among monogamy-minded wives, that their wifely prerogatives include not just the right to demand their husband’s exclusive sexual attention, but also the right to demand his lack of sexual attention — to, if they so choose, stop having sex with him while simultaneously expecting him to remain faithful and even refrain from porn and masturbation. It’s selfish, unrealistic, and disturbingly common. (And, yes, sometimes you can flip the genders and get the same story — not as often, but it happens.)
I myself am with the comedian who once said “I’m a pretty good dog, when you get down to it. But if you don’t scratch me once in a while, it’s going to be hard to keep me on the porch.”
So, back to our protagonist. It’s a lead pipe cinch that he’s guilty of some sort of sexual misconduct, if his wife claims he’s a sex addict. So, what turns out to be his special flavory of dickery?
Well, getting handjobs at massage parlors, which I myself consider a bit inappropriate for a married man. So, no “Husband of The Year” award for him. But the context? Exactly as I suspected upon reading the opening sentence:
The poor guy looked like a lot of Silicon Valley engineers: light blue button-down shirt, khaki pants, shoes that desperately needed a shine. He had started going to a massage parlor a few months after his baby was born. After about eight or nine desultory hand jobs in the course of a year, he’d confessed to his wife.
I told him I might work with him, but why did he need this specific approach?
“Because Maria said that either I’m a sex addict and I couldn’t help it and I need treatment, or I’m just a selfish bastard and she wants a divorce.”
He wanted to keep his marriage and kid. To do so, he had to admit he had a disease and get it treated. He was desperate. He would do anything. I told him I might be able to help him deal with the power struggle in his marriage, and help him stop avoiding conflict (his wife happily abandoned him when she had the much-wanted baby, then unilaterally invited her mother to move in with them for a year–and he couldn’t confront her because “I love her so much”). I said I could probably help him feel better about himself, and help him feel less guilty about masturbating.
But I couldn’t treat his sex addiction because I didn’t believe he had such an ailment. In tears, he left. The town’s best-known sex therapist had failed him.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=4816
Been there myself. Escaped! And have a much better life.
I might have recommended “This problem is systemic and involves both of you. You cannot be treated for this by yourself, what you require is marriage counseling”.
Speaking as a mother, anyone who manipulates people through sex or manipulates the welfare of children as financial bargaining chips make me sick to my stomach. -_-
Marty is heroic in continuing to speak sanity, my hat’s off to him.
I feel like most of the therapeutical community is giving up, running away, closing their eyes, and ceding the ENTIRE subject to the latest Dr. Drew reality show.
You have me, Marty, Petra Boynton, Cory Silverberg, Betty Dodson…. um um um… who else is calling bullshit? I feel like I’m screaming in the tabloid wilderness
Every seriously trained clinical therapist knows “sex addiction” is b.s. But their prospective clients watch Oprah! and come in and demand to be treated and they just “pretend” to go along with it, or worse, try to take it seriously. They are adding “hypersexuality” to their precious DRM manual. The 12-Steppers demand it.
The thing is, I don’t’ want to make it my life’s work to debunk the sex addiction addicts. I resent the TV shows who call me up and want me to be the freak who’ll argue against it. This is ratings to them, not therapy. None of the fuckers who exploit this give A HOOT about anyone’s mental health.
Their whole premise is boring. Does masturbation cause your palms to grow hair? We’ve HEARD ALL THIS BEFORE. Having these kind of endless loops stops smart therapists from moving onto more fruitful thoughts. Marty and others like him could be blowing our minds if they didn’t have to spend every night arguing with these clowns.
Should we just let the “sex addicts” take their little clown car and follow their trend to its extinction? I am at the end of my tether.
Susie, I’ve been trying to write a piece on the whole topic for a year, and every time, I wind up abandoning it, frustrated by the stupidity of the entire thing. I wind up with the written equivalent to screaming at the walls, and I abandon it.
The one thing that may come out of the media’s current obsession with the idea (thanks to people like tiger woods and jesse james) is that it’s inspiring people with a clue to actually say “wait hang on, that’s not real.”
The media focus on the topic, while currently destructive, may eventually raise the general visibility of the clinical consensus that sex addiction doesn’t actually exist.
Ok, maybe that’s wishful thinking, but one has to hope for some forward movement in enlightenment, even in the face of waves of puritan nonsense in the dime-store media.
I’m just really happy to see coherent, well-written pieces like Dr Klein’s getting some attention.
If there is indeed a legit “sex addiction” problem out there, my guess is that it’s only suffered by a microscopic percentage of the people who are accused of it or claiming to suffer from it.
Just like to fireman, who’s called to get the old lady’s cat out of the tree, replies, “Lady we don’t do that anymore. He’ll come down on his own. After all, have you ever seen a skeleton of a cat up in a tree?”, personally, I’ve never heard of a sex addict who starved himself to death, because he couldn’t stop having sex.
I think it’s mostly heard when publicists or public relations people are using it to try to spin some controversial behavior by those who’s lives are in the public eye.
If were going to start labeling sexual frequency then we may have to bring back the idea of the frigid wife. It’s just as fair to pin the problem on her. The name-calling is pretty much counter-productive.
The couple is most likely suffering from a mere difference in desire. To roughly paraphrase another comedian: “Anyone who’s on the highway and drives slower than me, is a proverbial “little old lady” out for a Sunday drive, an unskilled driver who should have stayed home, rather than make me curse at them on the road. Anyone who drives faster than me is a speed demon and a menace on the highway who’s license should be yanked!” Who’s really got the problem here?
What we often have here is a manifestation of some other problem in the relationship, or else a poorly matched couple to begin with.
Note to Susie Bright: Oprah, by the way, has her OWN agenda, but then I’m sure you already know that. It would however, do her followers good to realize this, and keep that concept in mind…
Susie, I see a deeper layer to the problem, also; it’s not just that it’s BS and media-trendy. A deeper issue with the “sex addiction” meme is that it’s an attempt to medically pathologize a wide range of normal sexual behavior. I see it as a back-door attack on sex-positive people generally; anybody who has anything positive to say about porn, masturbation, open marriage, or hell, even having sex more often than your typical married couple, can be attacked as “suffering from addiction” — which is a really difficult charge to refute.
It gives a handy toolbox to the sex-negative types — the same folks who, as you mention, used to spread lies about hair palms.
I agree with Karl and Susie,
I think the sex addiction mantra will eventually go the way of abstinence education and the intelligent design thrust; they just cannot exist in our oxygen rich atmosphere. None of these attempts at policy change could stand against neither rational thought, nor the test of time and eventually fell to the way side and inevitably failure.
Those that are trapped in the idea that they have a problem will feel something is wrong with their treatment (since it is not addressing any real issues) and will sabotage either their relationships or their therapy; something will have to give. That combined with a power struggle over letting sex addiction into the books (if it even makes it that far), I don’t see it surviving long.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t speak out any time we see an injustice, I just see this problem addressing itself. It’s hard to see when personalities like Tyra Banks and Opera are acting like nothing is out of the ordinary when it comes to this. I personally think it’s irresponsible of them; they should be asking tougher questions.
y’all need to go over here and comment on the ideas of “sex addiction” and “porn addiction”.
“it’s an attempt to medically pathologize a wide range of normal sexual behavior.”
Nailed. Or as we gun-clingers call it, ‘dead right there.’
In light of this observation, how often will you use the term ‘vanilla’ in the future?
First, some context for my comments: I’m single, never had much interest in porn, have 2 friends who used to be in the sex industry, and I’ve studied psychology in college. I have a different, sort of practical definition for addictions. My definition is that you have an addiction when you use something to numb you out and to avoid dealing with some part of your life (past or present) that has problems. I’ve seen friends use shopping as an addiction (most noticeable when they do it and are burying themselves with credit card debt). I’ve seen friends use pot this way – spending their evenings getting high & watching tv while bitching about their jobs or life, and doing nothing to change their situation. And I’ve got a sister who overeats when she’s stressed and can’t deal with the situation. Obviously, lots of people shop and aren’t addicted,lots of people can smoke dope without being addicted, and lots of people don’t eat so much that it’s getting to be a health problem.
Then there was this guy I dated for a while, and it’s the only relationship I’ve ever had the problem of not enough sex for me. By the end of the relationship I’d found out he was an alcoholic, smoked a lot of pot (never around me – one of his best friends told me) and he masturbated an average of 3 times a day. Given some of what I know was going on in his life – which he wasn’t dealing with – I think he was addicted to the alcohol, pot and masturbation as a way to ignore his problems (mainly financial and health). If he’d been taking care of these issues in his life, the alcohol, pot and masturbation wouldn’t appear to be addictions, to me at least.
Anything can become an addiction, and for me, knowing if I’ve crossed the line from “normal” to “addicted” ins only known in the context of what’s going on in my life and if I’m avoiding or dealing with whatever challenges I have going on.