Balancing Sex Positivity and Sexual Addiction
Something about extremes in thinking usually indicates that only a piece of the truth is being understood; no room is being made for a better understanding of the whole. This divide between sex addiction Doomsday-ers and sex positive how-dare-they-ers is as good example as any of this kind of inability to integrate the entire story before making harsh judgments or wild claims.
An Important Distinction
Analogy: Some folks love bread, all the bread. Some folks lack the ability to process and thoroughly digest gluten—a nutritive substance present in wheat. Some folks believe that because a few people exhibit gluten intolerance, all bread is bad, bad, bad, except of course for gluten-free, 100% certified organic, locally raised and baked bread products. Still others may prefer gluten-free bread, but have no personal stake in the gluten-free-ness of friends or lovers.
According to one sex addict and blogger:
…I’m a sex addict. This means that in some way shape or form sex has a controlling influence over my life that I maintain a constant struggle against. I’m also sex positive, and this means I support all things consenting adults do with each other when the clothes come off, and maybe the whips, cuffs and ball gags come out.
“A controlling influence over my life” is the key phrase here. Even someone whose beliefs about sex revolve around the central concept that sex is inherently good, admits to a weakness within his own personal sexual experience. And this is the ultimate distinction: sex among consenting adults is healthy and good; yet sex for me is interlaced with compulsiveness, impulsiveness, or more simply, problems.
Is Sex Addiction Real?
Recently, the media has had a field day with one study, which seemed to cast doubt on the reality of hypersexuality as an addiction. Although this was only one study, and like any other, subject to internal and external flaws, the reports did beg the question: why is sexual addiction being used as an “excuse”? But the lives of real people who experience compulsion and obsession around sex to the point of being unable to sustain marriages, relationships, family ties and careers are all present in real time for observation. These individuals experience withdrawal symptoms when attempting to disengage from their person or object of addiction. Irritability, anxiety, depression, confused thinking, sweating, hypersensitivity and erratic emotions are just some of the symptoms of withdrawal from sex that people who understand themselves to be addicted may experience. There are many behaviors the scientific community (and the rest of us) acknowledges are real without the benefit of brain science to support them. Perhaps the future will reveal more about how the reward mechanism within the brain is affected by sex addiction, as another study suggests.
Why Is Sex-Positivism Important?
Although there exist two camps in the sex addiction debate that continue to fight it out, the truth may be somewhere, not between, but outside both perspectives. Being able to see sex in positive rather than negative terms may be beneficial to all sex addicts. Fearing that sex is bad, therefore “I am bad” is part of the tremendous shame inherent to this disorder. Many call sexual addiction the “addiction of shame,” in fact. But if sex is good, and “I just happen to have a problem with sex,” then healing from shame is possible, thereby making healing from sex addiction possible.
The black-and-white thinking that leads to dispute between these two factions is a large part of the problem for both sides. Purely black-and-white terms suggest that sex is either all good or all bad. The most extreme side of the sex positive camp suggests it is only all good and cannot be addictive. The extreme thought on the sexual addiction side of the fence suggests that sex is all bad and can lead to a lot of trouble. But sex, and the humans who have it, is far more complex to fit into this all-or-nothing equation. Sex really can be a powerful, positive force in our lives. Discovering we have a problem in relation to sex is no different than discovering we have a problem in relation to food. Food is necessary; it’s often astonishingly good. We have to look underneath the surface behaviors of any addiction in order to discover the reasons the problem exists, and to heal it. If we’re just focusing on the behaviors of the problem itself, nobody wins.