Sexual Addiction and the Upper Class: One Woman’s Story
Julianne was a debutante from Alabama. She’d attended Ole Miss where she’d met her husband-to-be, as everyone knew she would. No one in her family really expected her to do anything with her English degree. Imagining Julianne as a teacher or a publisher or, for that matter, a writer, was a joke to them. No, she would do as all the women in her family going back generations had done – she would be beautiful. She might champion literacy and join the country club, certainly she’d join the Junior League. She might occasionally volunteer. Her future husband was to become a lawyer and a well-respected one, and likely a politician; he had his own family legacy to live up to after all. Julianne would play the dutiful wife. She’d make appearances in designer suits and gowns and she’d always time her hair and nail appointments correctly. She’d be masterful at entertaining guests.
But the real Julianne – the one even she lacked total access to immediately after college and in the beginning of her marriage, and still, after her two children were born – was unhappy with this arrangement. She felt unfulfilled, uninspired, as if something were missing, something another Chloé handbag or pair of Louboutins could no longer satisfy. For a time, Julianne was depressed. At first, no one much seemed to notice. Her mother kept saying that the French call the year of childbirth “the year of madness,” or was it the year after? She couldn’t remember. And she spoke a lot to Julianne about how she should have known that her body would be different, her beauty would be changed. This only made things worse.
Julianne no longer wanted to see her former sorority sisters and she began to make appearances with her husband out of habit rather than enjoyment. Though these occasions did make her feel she had some purpose beyond bearing and comforting small beings – she was intended to be looked at, complimented. She chose immodest dresses now and began to drink champagne to excess; her moods betrayed her. Her husband grew embarrassed and scolded her to which Julianne responded by being hurt and then angry for having been so easily dismissed. Did he not think she was beautiful enough anymore?
Julianne did what many people who are lonely and isolated, either by circumstances or temperament, do these days: she leaned into social media. She created an anonymous Twitter account and soon found there were others much like her as well as those ready to reward her simply for existing. She was as articulate as anyone can be in 140 characters, clever, and often humorous in her daily observations. She was frequently self-deprecating about her upper-class lifestyle, which many found refreshing. She began to post photos of herself and her audience grew larger; she was beautiful after all. Not just men, but women reached out in “friendship” to compliment and encourage her. Eventually, she grew a following and this following included many “fans.” Julianne had found something more enticing than Tiffany’s – at least for a while.
Everything which is newly exciting grows commonplace after a time. What kept the excitement going were the ample private messages Julianne received from handsome younger men who praised her sexiness, her style, her wit, and her beauty. Many of these men wanted something from Julianne the way young men in college and before that, in high school, had wanted something from her – something impossible to locate or even to possess, but something which she allowed herself to believe only she could fulfill. This belief, a mistaken belief, allowed her to imagine a scenario in which fulfilling others’ desires would somehow fulfill her own – desires she could not name.
Julianne’s time on Twitter and other social media began to take up so much of her time that her husband grew suspicious. She couldn’t get through a dinner without checking her phone; he demanded to know whom she was talking to. When she said, “No one!” so defensively, he knew she was withholding, and demanded to see her online activity. Unaccustomed to saying no to the men in her family, or really to any man, Julianne conceded; this was the first time she promised to take down her accounts and never to speak to any of these strangers again. She loved her husband and feared what would happen to her if he left. Her parents would never forgive her. But having these connections removed from her left her feeling desperate – she needed them in order to feel happy, to feel wanted.
Julianne returned to her role as dutiful wife for a time, but her cravings were too strong. She set up dummy accounts in another name and continued on as she had before. When a man was travelling through her town on business, she agreed to meet him. She wasn’t especially attracted to him, but she liked the way he admired her. Afterward, she felt guilty and disgusted, but this didn’t stop her from meeting another man, and another. Julianne would take temporary hiatuses from the Internet and from the affairs, but she always returned. A community of people who didn’t even know one another, not truly, somehow knew about Julianne and what she was doing. Rumors began to spread, as though it were high school, and one of these found its way to her husband’s law firm. She saw her life breaking before she realized how impossible her situation was: two men were desperately in love with her; she’d cheated countless times; she was having online affairs – emotional betrayals – with several others; and her self-esteem was teetering over the edge of nonexistence.
Was Julianne a Sex Addict or Was She Just Another Cheater?
Anyone who has been betrayed by someone may have a very difficult time believing in sexual addiction. All who have cheated must be accountable for their behavior whether they suffer sexual addiction or not. But just because someone appears to be a “serial cheater” does not necessarily make her a sex addict; there are real differences.
People who are serial cheaters may not have any psychological conflict about their cheating. Although they wish to keep their behavior from those they are lying to, they feel little remorse about their behavior until it affects them negatively. In contrast, someone who experiences sexual compulsivity or sexual addiction usually experiences a sense of dislocation about their behavior and their own ideal self. They do not wish to be cheating, lying, or manipulating, and they do not see these behaviors as in line with their basic identity. They feel a tremendous sense of cognitive dissonance, however, as hard as they try, they feel they cannot stop; the cravings are too great.
Another sign of sexual addiction is the presence of at least one other addictive behavior. For Julianne, these behaviors were shopping and binge drinking. Her purchasing behaviors and champagne consumption were out of control before the online flirting behavior that led to affairs. She began dressing immodestly, which was out of character for her, and which may have been impulsive behavior attributable to addiction.
Sex Addict as Sex Object: A Reversal
For Julianne, sexual compulsion did not come down to a fixation on the act of sex or sexual behaviors; she did not objectify others or see them solely as sex objects – she saw herself this way. Somewhere along the way, Julianne had adopted the mistaken belief that her worth was measured in the degrees to which she was desirable based on physical appearance alone. Nowhere could she experience this feeling of worthiness than in another’s sexual desire for her, and so she sought this feeling out – at first in friendly appreciation of her words and photos; then in private interactions in which others expressed desire for her; and finally in increasing sexual interactions like sexting, phone sex, and affairs.
As with nearly all addicts, it is her mistaken belief that Julianne must unwire and rewrite in the context of therapy, recovery, or personal healing if she wishes to change her compulsive behaviors. She may be able to stop acting out for a time, and she may even be able to permanently stop acting out sexually, but unless she addresses her root cause, her addictive pattern is likely to emerge somewhere else, through another set of self-sabotaging behaviors.
Julianne represents one type of person – a privileged, educated, middle-class, American woman. Someone we rarely see as having a life riddled with the problems of addiction. But addiction affects everyone; no one is immune to its touch. What is true for Julianne is true for millions of Americans: a life devoid of a sense of meaning and purpose, and one lacking a sense of personal worth beyond the purely surface, and quite temporary, mechanisms of value, is a life vulnerable to addiction and many other kinds of self-sabotage. We rarely wreck lives we value; we do not harm selves we respect. Regardless of class status, education, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, or any of the other things that divide us, we all can and should see ourselves as possessing lives of purpose and selves of innate, immeasurable worth. We all can begin to live lives free of addiction.