Sex Addiction and STDs: Is There a Connection?

Also known as “hypersexuality” or “hypersexual disorder,” sexual addiction is a dysfunctional preoccupation with sexual fantasy and behavior, often involving the obsessive pursuit of casual sex, anonymous sex, pornography, compulsive masturbation, romantic intensity, and objectified partner sex. Most sex addicts organize their lives around sexual acting out, spending inordinate amounts of time fantasizing about, planning, pursuing, and engaging in sexual acts, at the same time neglecting important people, interests, and responsibilities. Often, sex addicts try to quit or limit their sexual acting out – without success. As time passes, they act out more frequently, or for longer periods or time, or in progressively more intense and/or bizarre ways.

Basically, diagnosing sexual addiction boils down to three main criteria:

1. Sex addicts have lost control over their involvement with sex. They say they want to stop, that they won’t do it again, and they make promises to themselves and/or others to change, but ultimately they are unable to abstain from the behaviors they hope/try/promise to discontinue.
2. Sex addicts continue their sexual acting out despite adverse consequences. They get arrested, lose jobs, and have health, relationship, financial, and personal losses directly related to their addictive behavior patterns, but they continue anyway.
3. Sex addicts are preoccupied to the point of obsession with their addictive sexual behaviors. The driving force and focus of sex addicts’ lives is sexual acting out. Sex is always on their mind, always a possibility, always something an addict can and will drop everything else to do.

Recovering sex addicts consistently report that when active in their addiction they somehow feel invulnerable, safe from the possibility of their compartmentalized sexual life resulting in negative consequences. Basically, sex addicts do not think about or consider the potential effects of their behavior – at least not any clear-headed way in which the potential downside of their actions comes into play. For sex addicts, the neurochemical pull of sexual arousal creates a false sense of protection, an increasingly impenetrable emotional bubble where, in the moment, little but the sexual behavior matters.

Because of this, sex addicts are at greater risk than the general population for contracting and transmitting sexually transmitted diseases such as hepatitis, gonorrhea, herpes, and HIV. They tend to have more partners, their partners tend to have more partners, and both they and their partners are more likely than most to engage in unprotected sex. If the sex addict is also drinking or doing drugs, as many often are, the risk increases because alcohol and drugs are disinhibiting, making sex addicts likely to engage in sexual activity with an even wider array of people without considering the potential consequences. Stimulants such as methamphetamine and cocaine are especially troublesome for sex addicts, as they are disinhibiting and they can extend a sex binge, further increasing the number of sexual partners.

The increased risk of STD transmission among sex addicts has been proven in a number of studies. In fact, studies show that sexual compulsivity increases the likelihood of engaging in high-risk sexual behaviors even if the threat of disease if very real – as it is with, for instance, sex in a gay bathhouse. Some studies estimate that sex addicts are four times more likely than non-sex addicts to contract HIV. Studies also show a link between drug use – especially stimulant abuse – and HIV transmission.

Making matters worse is the fact that, like the flu, STDs have a tendency to mutate over time, making them more difficult to treat. For instance, scientists have recently discovered an antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhea. Typically, gonorrhea symptoms are not life threatening – painful urination, abdominal pain, genital discharge, itching, and infertility in women – but with the new, untreatable form the Center for Disease Control is worried about more serious long-term consequences. The CDC is also worried that other currently treatable STDs will mutate in similar ways. If and when that happens, sex addicts will be at greater risk than the general population.