Almost constantly the news media is bombarding us with stories about men in positions of power who get caught acting out sexually. Whether they are sports heroes, politicians, executives, or whatever, the general public often wonders: What were they thinking? They had so much to lose and hardly anything to gain.
Continued from Intensity vs. Intimacy Part 1
As a 42-year-old wife and mother of two, Rachel appeared to have everything going for her. She and her husband owned a sought-after apartment in the city and her youngest went to an elite prep school while her oldest attended Princeton. With her husband working nearly 70 hours per week, she was virtually free—to spend and do as she wanted. While Rachel recognized on some level that most Americans had no idea what it was like to live with so much access, she was still overwhelmed with frustration and sometimes, depression. She despised her husband; they rarely spoke. Her daughter, the youngest, came and went as she pleased and spoke to her mother rarely. When she did, it was in an accusatory or dismissive tone—the same one she used to speak to her husband. And her son, the Princeton boy, was too consumed in his world of subatomic physics to speak unambiguously to anyone.
Rachel had few girlfriends she’d kept in touch with after her husband’s company had moved them from Chicago, and now on her own, she spent her days shopping, at the salon or in a new gym she’d discovered. She’d grown more than fond of a spin class instructor. It felt like he saw her as she was in her 20s—beautiful and wild, willing to do anything. She became embroiled in an intense affair with the man, but when his attention roamed elsewhere, she became enraged and cut all contact.
Ken is a 42-year-old divorced, straight male. He picks up women online — using dating websites like hook-up sites, baiting women with his humor and photos of his adorable daughter. Midway through a first date, he moves in for a kiss. If a date doesn’t respond sexually, he moves on—instantly. He will only spend time with a woman who will sleep with him right away and elects to keep several sexual relationships going at a time, though none of the women are aware of the others. These relationships are not serious for Ken, although some are for the women he sees. He withholds the facts, lies directly and never shares emotional truths.
His last serious relationship ended after he was fired from the community center where he taught yoga classes in the evenings and on weekends. Two women came forward to complain that Ken had touched them inappropriately and aggressively. This hadn’t been the first time Ken had been accused of sexual misconduct; his wife took custody of their daughter.
There is a great deal of confusion, even within the therapeutic community, about what constitutes sexual addiction, what constitute paraphilic behavior, and what constitutes sexual offending. In an attempt to clarify, we provide below basic definitions of these three concepts.
McKenna met her partner, Dan, in graduate school at Kent State where they were both sociology students. It was his particular attention to analysis that appealed to her; anyone who loved pouring over the data as much as she did was special. They stayed up until morning on many occasions, talking theory over cheap beer and pizza, and the sex was amazing. When they were both offered positions in research at UCLA it felt like destiny—if McKenna had believed in destiny. What Dan didn’t know about McKenna was that before their stint in graduate school, she’d been considered promiscuous. She wouldn’t have called it that, however; such labels were applied to women’s behavior though never to men’s, which made it yet another unfair double standard in McKenna’s mind. Still, her sexual behavior had caused her problems—social and academic—and she had felt shame about it even though she didn’t believe she should have to.
After the recently released and quite good sex addiction themed film Thanks for Sharing, there was a lot of hope that the even more recently released porn addiction themed film Don Jon would be equally accurate and compelling. Unfortunately, it is not.
The film’s main character, Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is a Jersey Shore wannabe obsessed with his car, his pad, his male friends, his body, his religion, and porn. He masturbates to porn multiple times each day, even though he consistently picks up hot women for casual sex. In fact, he is so successful scoring with “dimes,” as he and his friends call attractive women, that his buddies have nicknamed him “Don Jon.” (Many scenes will be triggering for sex and porn addicts, so the film should be viewed with extreme caution.) Unfortunately, Jon’s in-person sexual encounters are far from mind-blowing, and as soon as whatever woman he is with has fallen asleep, he is out of bed, logging onto his laptop for the fix he finds online. At several points during the film he readily, even gleefully, admits that he prefers porn to the real thing.
