Female Sex Addiction and Cultural Messages

If you have ever violated your values and ignored responsibilities to pursue and overwhelming desire,

 then you understand the feeling of addiction. -Charlotte S. Kasl

 Have you ever noticed how the media likes to portray women as saintly mothers, vulnerable victims or manipulating villains, but rarely a realistic blend of qualities you can actually relate to — particularly around sexuality? A woman depicted in the media or rumored about in schools and workplaces is either all about the sex or “frigid” and closed to closeness of any kind. It would seem that culturally, we haven’t quite learned how to talk about women and sex in a way that is reflective of actual experience — instead, casting women into one or the other side of the rigid virgin/whore dichotomy without their say so. Still, women have sexual lives just as real and complicated and tricky as men, and whether we’re able to admit it or not, this means women experience sexual addiction too. Because female sex addiction is so infrequently discussed, it remains not well understood, not even by many women living with it.

If asked, most people would probably guess that women are more likely to experience love addiction than simply sex addiction. It’s a Hallmark idea we have about the ladies, and just as many women would be answering this way too. But more women than any other group are now checking themselves into treatment for the problem of sex addiction—an issue that can destroy lives as powerfully as alcoholism can. How’s that, you ask? Alcoholism can actually kill someone, you argue. But so can unprotected sex in high-risk environments. It would make tabloid headlines for a well-known woman to get caught having sex with prostitutes (it happens to politicians all the time), but the truth is, some female sex addicts do have sex with prostitutes. We just aren’t hearing about it, and maybe that’s because our eyes aren’t open to the full spectrum of women and sex, much less women and sexual addiction.

Female Sex Addiction Behaviors

Confronting cultural stereotypes about women and sex must be done in order for us to see the reality of sex addiction in the lives of women, the particular ways it may manifest for them and the harm it can create in their lives. While we may be able to conjure images of men unhappily hooked on masturbation and pornography, it’s not as easy to imagine women with the same troubles, but they are out there. Opening our minds to them is just one step we must take to aid in eliminating the stigma around women and sexual addiction.

According to expert Patrick Carnes, Ph.D., author of Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction, women experience sexual addiction with the same 11 behavioral patterns men do, although certain gender differences may apply among them. Those behavior patterns are:

1. Fantasy Sex—Sexual fantasies, situations and relationships
2. Seduction Sex—Seducing partners more thrilling than any other component
3. Anonymous Sex—High-risk sex with strangers
4. Paying for Sex—Paying for sex or sexual services
5. Trading for Sex—Selling or bartering sex for power
6. Voyeuristic Sex—Arousal from watching others engaged in sex
7. Exhibitionist Sex—Arousal from being watched while engaged in sex, or attracting sexual attention to one’s body
8. Intrusive Sex—Violating another’s boundaries without being discovered
9. Pain/Power Exchange—Sexual arousal as a result of being physically hurt or humiliated
10. Object Sex—Masturbation with objects
11. Exploitive Sex—Sexual exploitation of vulnerable others

While women are just as capable of experiencing each of these types of sexual addiction as men, there may be certain gender differences. For example, women are more likely to engage in exhibitionist sex than voyeuristic sex. This does not mean there are no women who engage in voyeuristic sex addiction, just that many more engage in an exhibitionist variety. In regard to exploitive sex, the numbers indicate that the majority of pedophiles, for example, are men, but there are women who sexually exploit minors. Recognizing their existence is necessary in order to help victims, as much as to find ways of turning the tides in sexual addiction.

The Root of the Matter

In her book, Women, Sex, and Addiction: A Search for Love and Power, Charlotte S. Kasl, Ph.D., wrote:

There is an exquisite interconnection between culture, family, and inborn individual traits that lead to sex addiction, sexual codependence, and recovery. Despite the very different forces shaping gender and socialization, men and women do not exist in separate worlds, entirely apart from one another. The culture that fosters an expectation that men be tough and never cry is the same culture that denies men’s emotional lives and the vulnerability required to be truly intimate. And it is the same culture that tells us women must be “pure” but not frigid, that when women choose sexual freedom, they become “sluts.” The double standards exist on both sides of the gender equation, and both women and men are harmed by them.

Sex addiction, at base, is a problem of intimacy—being unable to deeply connect with another. Both men and women experience the effects of such a painful problem, and either can turn to sex as a means of coping. Awareness of the possibilities allows us to begin to fight the stigma of female sex addiction, and it can open the doors to newer and better treatments for all of us.