During a local talk on sex addiction to an earnest group of Saturday morning listeners, my two female colleagues, Joanne and Gina, and I gave a modest introduction to the demographics of our business. As we sat listening to one another, we gave supportive nods, affirming all of our thoughts, though in truth, a couple of my one colleague’s ideas had me bristling. One of her chestnuts concerns the under-researched area of female sex addiction: “as shameful as this condition is for the men, it is especially stigmatizing for the women.” She also said something about men being raised with a ‘John Wayne’ model of emotional expression, and were thus constricted, suffering from intimacy disorders, which in turn impacts their partners. Everyone nodded, including me, only more faintly. I didn’t say anything contrary, partly because of time constraints, partly because of the agreeable ambience in the room, and also, frankly…I’m not sure how important this issue is.
It seems worth writing about, anyway. And arguing about, I guess. As Joanne made one or two other similarly-themed remarks, I recalled the comments of her junior colleague, Gina, from a day earlier, during a staff meeting at our shared agency. At that time the context was our much maligned room schedule board, admittedly outdated, but still in use because no one wants to take time to devise a new system, or tear down our old but beloved white board, streaked as it is with cheesy black demarcation strips and years’ worth of dry erase pen smudges. An online calendar would be best, chirped our newest colleague, proclaiming it is 2016, after all, not 1972.
Not 1972. My mind turned back to the present context and Joanne’s assertions. Frozen in time, I think. Afterwards, over coffee, I told her that I thought some of her pronouncements tired and superannuated, though I didn’t quite put it like that. How so? She queried, comfortably unoffended.
“Well, let’s take the one about women and sexual stigma. You say that women feel an extra layer of stigma in society about sex addiction, and therefore shy away from treatment or recovery, which is why we have less research about them.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, but the point seems moot, because men aren’t seeking treatment either.” Her head sort of went crooked at this point, indicating surprise and perhaps something else; a playful rebuke, maybe. I was nit-picking, or something. Anyway, I continued. “You said later in the talk that many if not most of the men in our program are mandated: there because of a court order, or a demand from a disgruntled partner. So in my opinion the more pertinent question is this: if there are scores of untreated female sex addicts out there, why aren’t their disgruntled partners mandating treatment?”
She was unperturbed by this challenge, but still waffled with unconvincing polemics. Husbands and boyfriends are less forgiving, she opined, and also—many of those women’s partners are also sex addicts; that women are more judgmental of each other’s sexuality than men are. She spoke with authority on these points, as if she had volumes of data at her disposal. We don’t know these things, I contested, though I sort of agreed with the middle assertion, while thinking the first and the third contradicted each other. We danced around items of research for a bit, eventually dissolving the ‘evidence-based’ part of the discussion and finally dropping into what’s left: what people actually think, which is what matters. I countered her first idea: “While there may be something to your first point—the humiliated male being an especially unforgiving figure—I’m not sure that history or tradition shows that the cuckolded man is a fiercer image than the ‘hell hath no fury’ woman. But regardless, as Gina would say, this is not 1272, or 1972, and by the way, millennials don’t even know who John Wayne was.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is this: over the last generation, possibly two, most of the scarlet-lettering that happens in society—at least that which gets media attention—has been aimed at men. Or maybe you can tell me: who would be the female equivalents of Tiger Woods, Anthony Wiener, Elliot Spitzer…Bill Clinton?”
“That’s different,” she said, a bit sharply. It was on.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 