Healing Female Sexual Addiction in a Culture of Shame
We don’t have sufficient data on the precise number of female sex addicts seeking treatment for hypersexuality or pornography addiction, but the number of women falling into this group is believed to be growing. As more is learned about female sex addiction and the needs of female addicts seeking treatment, more women are coming forward.
Patrick Carnes, PhD, executive director of Gentle Path Program at Pine Grove Behavioral Center in Hattiesburg, MS, may be considered the founder of the sexual addiction recovery movement. In 1983, he published “Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction,” making him the leading advocate of the idea that sexual behavior can be addictive. About the rise of women’s pornography addiction, sexual affairs, and sadomasochistic behaviors, Carnes has said, “We are seeing the biggest change in human sexuality maybe in the history of our species.”
While famous men like Tiger Woods and David Duchovny were reportedly treated for sexual addiction, and former President Bill Clinton was speculated to have had sexual addiction, clinical professionals discuss the fear and shame that has heretofore kept women from coming forward with their own sexual addictions. When women, and certainly women in the spotlight, are reported to be having affairs, it can be career-ending. In a culture that has long rewarded men for sexual conquest, and which shames women merely for dressing in revealing attire, it is no wonder the data on women’s sexual addiction is still unknown.
The Danger of Double Standard
We live in a culture that teaches girls to be sexy, but not sexual. By the time they are young women, they know that the most despicable thing they can become, the most damaging word they can be called, is “slut.” Young men want what they have, but they may not value them if girls decide to express their sexuality. Now the trick is to be sexy, but not too sexual. Girls are left to make blurry distinctions about their own value in a culture that is obsessed with sex – where media is saturated with overwrought images of sexuality and violence, many times combined or conflated.
When young people are still having their first college experiences, the cultural norm involves a great deal of alcohol, intoxication and sex. But the holdover from a more repressed period in American history is still guiding the messages about women, sex and self-worth. The virgin/whore dichotomy is as rampant in high schools across the nation as it is American soap opera. Boys are lauded as heroes for having sex (or claiming they did), and girls – who were only days before courted and chased and sweet-talked – are cast out: slut-shamed by both boys and girls. No one loves a slut.
Addiction-Based Shame
Why is this important to female sexual addiction? Not because sexuality is wrong, or bad, or despicable. Sex is natural; sex is good; sex is why you are here and reading this. Slut-shaming and the inequity inherent to gender in our culture is important to female sex addiction because sexual addiction is an addiction of shame. The habitual behaviors themselves, the processes of process addiction, neurologically produce the let-down of oxytocin (“the bonding hormone”) and dopamine, which are the underlying chemicals the addict craves, but after sex with a stranger, sex with a married man (or sex with someone else while you are married), or a pornography binge that has become more and more disturbing in order to be satisfying, a woman – just like a male sex addict – feels ashamed. The longer her addiction goes on, the worse it becomes, the more ashamed she feels.
If we could decipher the root of her addiction, we might discover a woman who had been sexually abused by her grandfather as a little girl; or a woman who had rigid parents who refused to talk to her openly, to share emotions, and who had shamed her as a way to discipline her as a child; or we might discover a woman who had rarely believed in her self-worth and who suspected she was a fraud – at motherhood, at marriage, at life.
Arising From the Shadow of Shame
Shame is the most penetrating, self-defeating emotion available to us, and it has been used to harm women and girls (and men and boys) in terrible ways. A Jungian theory of psychology suggests that when we value beauty and sexuality above other important things (our culture has taught us to do this from an early age), it takes on a shadow aspect. The shadow of sexuality may arise in the form of addiction. If we believe we do not have as much right to sexual agency, if we imagine our sexual choices are in any way shameful simply because we are women, we may be at risk for sexual addiction.
But when we begin to seek treatment, abstinence from the patterns we found addictive may be necessary, but as we begin to heal from beliefs of unworthiness, and as we come to understand that as women we have no reason to be ashamed, our sexuality will take on a new wholeness. It will not be about suppression or puritanical behavior unless we want it to be. There is healthy sexuality, and we may claim it without fear of how others will perceive us. Our culture may have a long way to go, but thankfully, becoming whole, healthy women able to practice wise, safe, unashamed sexuality won’t take nearly that long.