It’s 3 am and a man is butt-naked at a no-holds-barred gangbang in a secluded section of Central Park. Across the street in a Park Avenue high rise, another man is having sex with his wife of 20 years. Which one is—or is likely to become—a sex addict? The first one, right?
Comparing these two scenarios raises the question: Is the type of sex you engage in indicative of sex addiction? Is an unconventional erotic life—such as public sex with multiple anonymous partners, say, or barebacking, turning tricks or getting your ass paddled—sufficient for the label of sex addict?
Sex sells, of course, and popular culture has bought into the label of sex addiction in a big way. Yet the term, invented in the late ’60s and lately in vogue via media hype over celebrities like Tiger Woods, is not currently listed in the DSM-IV, the standard diagnostic manual for psychiatric disorders. According to the DSM, addiction has to be to a substance, such as an alcoholic craving booze or a drug addict jonesing for heroin. (However, the newly revised DSM-V, due out next spring, is expected to include gambling—and possibly sex—among addiction diagnoses.)
Many therapists, addiction specialists and other practitioners strongly support the revision. Says Robert Weiss, founding director of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles: “Addiction is addiction, whether substance based [such as alcohol or other drugs] or process based [like, gambling or sex].”
“Higher-risk and higher-intensity sex means a bigger ‘fix’ and sex addicts like to fix.”
The DSM-IV includes a miscellaneous diagnosis called Sexual Disorders Not Otherwise Specified, whose main symptom is “distress about a pattern of repeated sexual relationships involving a succession of lovers who are experienced by the individual only as things to be used.” Even this diagnosis does not mention sex addiction—let alone promiscuity or particular practices—but focuses on the distress experienced by the person and caused by sexual behavior. Nonetheless, the definition’s implicit value judgment equating sexual health with intimacy is plain enough—intimacy being the opposite of treating a partner “as a thing to be used.”
Despite the lack of a current official disease label for sex addiction, there are scores of 12-step meetings for sex addicts in New York City and nationwide, and rehabs for sex addiction are an exploding industry. So do sexperts and self-identified addicts assume that wild sex can lead to addiction (or is itself a disorder)?
Jeff Schultz, a sex addiction counselor and founder of the Sonoran Healing Center in Phoenix, says that while these behaviors don’t necessarily result in addiction, fringe sex may draw an addict closer to the flame. “They are behaviors that include little if any intimate connection and are primarily about intensity, arousal and orgasm. Not many people find love in a gangbang,” he says. “For the sex addict, the ‘fix’ is the arousal—and ‘more’ is always better than less. Generally, higher-risk and higher-intensity sex means a bigger ‘fix’ and sex addicts like to fix.”
According to Schultz, while occasional high-intensity sex doesn’t a sex addict make, a pattern of consistent sex (whether wild or mild) that causes problems in your life, that leaves you preoccupied and wanting more and that causes feelings of shame definitely point to a sex addiction.
Weiss agrees that there is no absolute correlation between high-kink sex and addiction. He does, however, think that wilder behavior can be part of the sex addict’s hunt—and its attendant dopamine spurts—while chasing a more intense high. “Just as the drug addict’s brain can crave more and more addictive substances, the brain can crave more and more intensity around behavior addiction,” he says. “Some sex addicts will turn to fetish behavior as a means to escalate. It’s a higher high.”
Being constantly surrounded by sexual triggers or living in a culture that embraces high-quantity sex can also be a factor in increasing the likelihood of addiction. “Gay men, for example, are more likely to have higher rates of sex addiction because they live in a community that is much more accepting of having a lot of sex with a lot of different people than your average heterosexual community,” Weiss says.
(As is obvious to anyone, hetero sexual imagery is everywhere in popular culture, media and advertising, while homo sexual imagery is comparatively rare and considered “controversial.” At the same time, the gay movement’s drive for same-sex marriage is likely, however gradually, to decrease the acceptance of experimentation with promiscuity. Of course, gay marriages may not have a lower rate of “cheating” and divorce than straight ones.)
“I believe having sex with one partner could help stop or alleviate sex addiction.”
Sex addiction is mostly about the chase, Weiss adds, “it’s about the hunt, the chasing. What we call a process addiction. It’s about the three hours the person is on Grindr [the gay ‘dating’ GPS app’].”
Monogamy does not preclude sex addiction—as Tiger Woods so spectacularly illustrated. Weiss has clients in committed relationships who masturbate compulsively, say, or have sex several times a day or achieve arousal only by treating their partners like a sex object or prostitute.
Turning to the uber-popular gay male hook up app Grindr, and reaching out to a few friendly users, the consensus is that increasingly wild behavior could indeed lead to serious “distress.” Interestingly, it is less the amount of time spent trawling for potential partners, and the emotional highs and lows, than the kinkiness of the sex that seems most symptomatic to them.
Chad, a 20-something who says he is “not a sex addict yet,” but confesses to wanting to try water sports and loves three-ways, feels strongly that engaging in too much kinky sex could ultimately lead to his becoming a raging sexaholic. “I feel someone is more likely to become a sex addict if they get into gangbangs and crazy stuff all the time,” he says. “I also believe having sex with one partner could help stop or alleviate sex addiction.”
Another Grindr user named Philip, who recently deleted the app after finding a boyfriend on it, says that he is not a sex addict, but believes if he had stayed on Grindr, kept hunting men and engaging in more fringe behavior, he could become one in short order. “In my brief time online and getting into anonymous sex, I have come to believe that for people who like more unusual kinds of sex activity, there would be a higher proportion of sexual addiction. I think it can lead to that,” he says.
Philip adds that he has had a fairly vanilla sex life and was experimenting with the anonymous hook-up shuffle for about six weeks. In that time, however, he gradually began to do things that he enjoyed—but had never previously imagined himself engaging in—like hanging out with a man whose fetish involved ejaculating into glass containers. He also confessed his fear of sliding toward addictive behavior if he were to start using Grindr again.
Anthony, a single man who identifies as a sex addict and has been attending an SCA 12-step group in New York City for four years, takes a less fraught view. For him, it’s not about the type of sex, but how a person balances orgasm with intimacy. “Wild sex, with a safe partner or fuck buddy, can be wonderful,” he says. “But I think the more you engage in wild sex, without a balance of intimacy and tender moments—it can lead to trouble down the road. There is always that dangerous line you can cross from being extremely sexually active to becoming full-fledged sex addicts.”
“If a person engages in exploratory ‘wild’ sex, they are more likely to understand their sexual desires.”
Yin Quam, a former dominatrix who is now a BDSM (bondage/discipline/sadism/masochism) educator and writer, disagrees with the whole “wild sex leads to addiction” theory. While she feels that sex addicts might be attracted to fringe sex for the sake of variety within the sexual high, just as drug addicts are likely to try different and harder drugs than the normal recreational drug user, she believes that fringe sex does not in itself lead to sex addiction.
“I actually believe the opposite—that if a person who is not an addict has the opportunity to engage in exploratory ‘wild’ sex, they are more likely to understand their sexual desires and decide which ones are of true interest and which were fun for the sake of experience,” Quan says. “There are many people who try orgies, kink and swinger parties to fulfill a fantasy and, though they may enjoy it, opt to not participate in it as a lifestyle.”
Quan adds that she sees a marked difference between people who are involved in a lifestyle of sexually alternative activity and sex addicts: “I think that sex addicts may be more visible in these communities because they are allowed to be out about their activities. Sex addicts who stay within the perimeters of the vanilla world are less likely to talk about their sexual activities.”
Writer Marten Weber, whose novels include Bendetto Casanova, a fictional account of the gay brother of the great lover Casanova, says sex itself cannot be an addiction because it’s about the human need to be desired. “Addiction to sex is no more about sex than hunting is about the prey. It’s about the thrill of the chase and affirmation of your own attractiveness and skills,” Weber says. “Just like accomplished hunters move from easy prey to ferocious beasts, new, unconventional sex, like online hook-ups, sets new challenges for the hunter. The type of sex is irrelevant. People don’t get addicted to sex, but to the feeling of being desirable and ‘needed.’”
It’s clear that opinions about the status of kinky sex, sex addiction and the link between the two are all over the map—not surprisingly, given the many meanings that sex has for each of us over the course of our lives. Sex is at once an animal drive and an extremely complex aspect of identity and relationships. Psychotherapists and other professional practitioners seem to be on solid ground claiming that “treating a person as a thing” is a symptom of a disorder, whether in sex or in other ways of relating. Yet addiction is typically framed less in terms a psychological mechanism than in terms of compulsivity and uncontrollable cravings, not to mention frequency of fixes, time spent pursuing them and, above all, the negative consequences on your life.
The one point on which everyone appears to agree is that if your sex life is entirely devoid of intimacy—and this makes you suffer—then you have a problem. Whether that problem is rightly called an addiction remains an open question.
The prevalence of sex addiction as a label, whatever its benefits, presents certain risks. Society has always tried to control and limit people’s erotic possibilities, and pathologizing sex as another type of addiction can certainly serve that purpose. Extreme sex is so widely stigmatized that even young gay men who are discovering pleasure in novelty and diversity harbor a fear that they are wading out into dangerous “addiction” waters, despite the fact that openness to new and different experiences (cuisines, for example) is typically valued. Variety is, after all, the spice of life, even—perhaps especially—when it comes to sex.
Scott Alexander Hess published his first novel, Diary of a Sex Addict, last August and has just completed a new novel, The Jockey, set in prohibition-era New York City. He blogs for the Huffington Post Books Section.
