That sex addiction is an excuse for licentious behavior is itself one of contemporary society’s displacement arguments. It’s also a displacement to argue that sex addiction treatment is a coded endorsement of monogamy. It is. But this argument is only half made on behalf of the religious. What progressive-leaning, anti-religion commentators won’t add is that the monogamous implications of sex addiction treatment are made on behalf of the largely monogamous women who comprise the majority of impacted partners, who find in sex addiction treatment a partly-medical, partly-psychotherapeutic premise for an overreaching critique of masculine sexuality: the too frequent demands for sex of heterosexual men; the objectifying, “performative”, “penetrative”, but not “intimate” sexual needs of misattuned, inattentive, sexually remedial men.
Why am I going here in Getting Real About Sex Addiction? Well, I might not have had I not been encouraged to explore what editors and early readers described as “intersectionality”. Of course, they meant that sex addiction treatment intersects with matters of social justice in a way that draws attention to how social groups like women are disadvantaged in treatment circles, not how they have tacitly garnered allies and are seated at the side of righteous authority, being cast as “betrayed” or “survivors”, in keeping with monogamous agreements and trauma model theories. So, I did a naughty thing in mine and Joe Farley’s book and went the other way. The reason: I didn’t want to write a load of trite BS, basically. I know about the hoary biases that society and the medical establishment have aimed at girls and women over the decades, but at the risk of being glib or seeming dismissive about that which I haven’t endured personally, that’s not the zeistgeist that is in place within the field of sex addiction treatment, nor is it likely the trend in a profession now dominated by women (numerically, at least); and by the way, that “trend” has been in place for some time now.
Sex addiction treatment, its principles or underlying assumptions, intersect with our protean sexual mores, our notions of what is objectifying treatment of human beings, for example, because many practitioners in this field, and in the wider field of psychotherapy, routinely attach their interventions to thoughts about what is happening in the culture at large, all in the name of concepts like intersectionality. There can be no doubt that in some quarters, the matter of sex addiction is attached to movements against sex slavery, or so-called gender-based violence, and that protests against such phenomena are aimed against a sex addiction treatment population that is dominantly comprised of heterosexual men. The treatment of sex addiction—the invoked theory, if you like—is girded by psychoanalytically-derived observations of obsessive sexual fantasy that casts sex partners as sex objects, treating persons as interchangeable bodies and images, or part-objects, as they are also termed.
This dovetails with a feminist critique of masculine ego primarily, hence the pathologizing of men more than women in sex addiction circles—a reactionary trend. The pathologizing of women, by male practitioners especially, is largely discredited in the current discussion of sex addiction. To assess a female patient as a sex addict is to risk being branded a slut-shaming misogynist, perpetrating an iatrogenic, traumatizing intervention, thwarting the fragile sexual freedoms of women. If a female therapist were to assess a male patient as a sex addict, she might be branded a misandrist, but this is less likely, if only because most people, including many mental health professionals don’t even know that word. Such is the bumper sticker, Twitter (or “X”)-speak vocabulary of many in our society. Meanwhile, opponents of sex addiction treatment like to pretend that sex addiction theory is a fabrication of religious zealots because it is politically correct to scapegoat religion for all of the guilt and shame that stems from our neurotic relationship to sex.
The guilt and shame that feminists might like to induce in male sex addicts, or men in general, is not called guilt and shame when such feelings emerge. Not typically. Dodging religious associations with those words, they’d call the phenomena something else—justice, probably. Only in this respect would I concede that our book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction, is anti-feminist, because no less than any impacted partner of a sex addict, I do not like being gaslighted. Though not religious myself, I don’t think it’s right that religion takes so much on the chin in sex addiction treatment when social justice is the real moral lens of the field and has been for some time. Secondly, if you think that male sex addicts, or that masculine ego in general deserves a moral reckoning, I may say fair enough. But let’s stop pretending that treatment protocols, which have practitioner sex addiction specialists standing with polygraph machines nearby, full disclosure confessional exercises, all-day, or all-weekend workshops, and provisional labels of sex addiction (which is not yet recognized by the American Psychiatric Association) plus gratuitous extras like Narcissistic Personality Disorder (which is), are privileging its subjects. Stop pretending that your nomenclature is anything other than pejorative, and that your scarlet letter agendas haven’t turned blue.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 