April 21, 2010 • 22 mins
Sex addiction is a term that's bandied about a lot these days, but is it really a disorder? Or just an excuse for cheating? Molly and Cristen examine what studies and anecdotal evidence have to say about sex addiction.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From House to works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Kristen, I'm Molly so well. My
(00:20):
sex addiction has been in the news a lot lately,
Oh boy has it? And to be honest, we positioned
this podcast so hopefully published around the time of the
Master's Golf Tournament because Tiger Woods is making his comeback. Yes,
and if there are any words that have been associated
with Tiger Woods lately, sex addiction. Yes. And that has
(00:42):
led to a lot of online discussion about whether sex
addiction is a real thing or if it's just an
excuse that a cheating husband like Tiger can use for
having a lot of mistresses. Um, I would I would
love to meet a woman who hasn't been a mistress
of Tiger Woods, because it seems like everyone has. Hello jolly, Yeah,
the mistresses of Tiger Woods are getting fired too much attention.
(01:03):
But anyway, is it real? Is it a thing? That's
what we decided to find out. Yeah, because it first
really popped up into pop culture in two thousand and eight,
when David D. Kovney checked himself into rehab for sex addiction.
I started to wonder if it would be the new exhaustion.
You know how celebrities are always saying that they had
to go to rehab for exhaustion. I wondered if it
would become the new new Uh, well, it seems like
(01:25):
it all of a sudden, everybody's talking about sex addiction.
So let's get to the bottom of that. What are
they talking about when they say that sex addiction? According
to psych Central, is best described as a progressive intimacy
disorder characterized by compulsive sexual thoughts and acts. Now, the
National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity has defined sex
addiction is quote engaging in persistent and escalating patterns of
(01:48):
sexual behavior acted out despite increasing negative consequences to self
and others. So it's basically having an acting on sexual
urges to the point that it disrupts your life. It's
not people who just necessarily like sex and have a
lot of it. There has to be some element of
it ruining your life in some way. Probably is affecting
your job, affecting your other relationships, etcetera. And it's not
(02:11):
necessarily just having sex with another person. It can also
be an addiction to porn, masturbating excessively to the point
where you know you may not go to work because
you need to stay home and be have some alone time.
And it might not even have anything to do with
deriving sexual pleasure, because CNN points out that a lot
of people who are sex addicts don't even like the
(02:35):
process of sex itself. They're just using it to numb
out painful feelings or kill time or just stop feeling lonely. Yes,
it's it's It can be an addiction in the same
way that drain hans and addiction, where you just have
to do it. It's not even because you're driving any
pleasure from it anymore. It's just an impulse you cannot stop.
And according to the Mayo Clinic, it affects three to
(02:56):
six percent of adults in the United States and supposedly
sex addiction has been also on the rise in the
past ten years or so because of the Internet. Basically
we have more access to sex than ever before, and
therefore people are just feeding it more and more on
(03:17):
the Internet. Now it is not listed, I think that
we should note it is not in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, which is the a p
a s. Handbook that we've talked about before in our
podcast on eating disorders. It is not listed as a
specific clinical disorder. It is just listed under sexual disorders
(03:41):
not otherwise specified. Right, And I do want to draw
again this distinction between sex for pleasure and sex drives
that you can't control, because when the term is used
for tiger Woods, I think it's a little bit misleading
because we just don't know. I mean, it feels like
we know because he's in the paper every day, but
wishing to remind ourselves that we don't know the guy,
and we don't know if this was something that he
(04:02):
couldn't control or if it was just a lot of affairs.
Having a lot of affairs does not necessarily mean you
are a sex addict. It could just mean that you
were having a lot of affairs. Yeah, And so that's
leads some lad some people to question, I mean, is
this an actual neurological disorder where he could not stop
himself from doing anything? Or were we just giving a
cheating man a pass. So let's go into how you
(04:25):
might decide if you're at risk for this condition. Now,
sex Addicts Anonymous has a self assessment tests you can take.
These are twelve questions, and if you answer yes to
more than one of these questions, you might be a
sex addict. Don you want to read it for you
all right? Do you keep secrets about your sexual behavior
or romantic fantasies from those important to you? And do
(04:47):
you lead a double life? Have your sexual practices cause
you legal problems? Could your sexual practices cause you legal problems?
Do your sexual activities involve coercion, violence, or threat of disease?
Does your preoccupation with sexual fantasies caused problems in any
area of your life even when you do not act
out on those fantasies? Have a few more? Have your
(05:10):
desires driven you to have sex and places or with
people you would not normally choose? Do you need greater variety,
increased frequency, or more extreme sexual activities to achieve the
same level of excitement or relief? Do you frequently want
to get away from a partner after having sex? Do
you feel remorse, shame, or guilt after a sexual encounter?
And does your pursuit of sex or sexual fantasy conflict
(05:32):
with your moral standards or I fear with your personal
spiritual journey. So these questions can also be troubling for
people who wonder whether or not sex addiction is real
and valid, because they would say that for plenty of people,
they have hidden fantasies that might not be necessarily socially acceptable.
(05:57):
It might not be vanilla missionary style, but it's just
something they want. Yeah. Sex columnists Dan Savage had a
really good point in a Slate piece you sent me
about whether we are just demonizing all sex that doesn't
fit cultural norms that we think it should. Essentially, if
you're not you know, married and having you know, as
(06:18):
Kristen put it, very vanilla plain sex, if you're doing
anything that's outside of a cultural norm stereotype, then yes,
you must be a deviant and thus you must be
a sex addict. Because let's say, Molly, someone has bondage fantasies, okay,
outside of the social norm if you will, um, and
probably something that they might not share with their partner.
(06:42):
Does that necessarily mean they're a sex addict or that
they just like to get be tied up? You know?
I mean, is that is one? Is that wrong that
they have those kind of fantasies. Right. So, I think that,
you know, a troubling thing within this diagnosis right now
is it does seem to demonize some forms of sex
that aren't necessarily addictive behaviors. And I think that that's
(07:03):
why the Tiger Woods Association again kind of rubs all
the wrong way, because we don't know, if you know,
this is a guy who just wanted to have a
lot of sex, or if they had, you know, just
the drive that was consuming his life. So to maybe
enlighten us a little bit about this whole situation, we
should look to someone who has been through rehab for
sex addiction. Uh, there's a sky named annoint dennisit Lewis
(07:27):
who wrote a piece for the New York Times Modern
Love column in which he shares his past problems with
sex addiction. Right. He opens with the story when he's
twenty four years old and he has driven three hours
away from his home. He has skipped one of his
close friend's weddings because he is trying to hook up
(07:48):
and honestly with two guys came in off the internet. Um,
one of the guys doesn't show, so he goes with
the backup plan and he just speaks of you know
how that was kind of a turning point where he
he's three hours home, he'd had sex with this guy
he didn't know had a boyfriend. He was upset because
the other guy didn't show any realized that something was
wrong with this picture that you know, he was essentially
(08:09):
discussed with himself for letting this overtake his life. Um
And he says, I suspect that my addiction is a
misguided attempt to find the acceptance and unconditional love that
I didn't feel growing up. And that's often a theme
that we'll see with UM. With sex addiction diagnoses as well,
there's usually some kind of childhood trauma. It goes back
to or sexual abuse or parental neglect, so we see
(08:32):
that same theme coming up and um And he talks
about UM. If you ask alcoholics about the first time
they became drunk man, he will say it was the
moment that they finally felt okay in the world. I
never had that sensation while drunker stone, but I did
feel it for the first time when I entered a
gay man's gay men's chat room while in college and
a kind of hypnotic trance. I sent out photos of
(08:52):
myself to Rave reviews, and then everything starts to snowball.
He says, within three months, I had hooked up with
twenty guys online. With the six months I was skipping
out on friends that I could spend nights in chat rooms.
I mean, this really sounds like addicted behavior. It was
overtaking his life. He was alienating himself from friends and
family so that he could basically have cyber sex with strangers. Right.
(09:15):
And when he said that that was the first time
he felt, you know, like a normal person. That made
a lot of sense. And then he said, how you
know how ephemeral that feeling was, how he just had
to keep seeking it out, and how it was, you know,
it just never came back the way it it did,
but it was this constant search to reclaim that UM.
Then he writes about how he did give treatment a chance,
(09:36):
and this this will bring us into sort of the
the controversy about how you treat something that you're not
even sure as an addiction. UM. He writes about how
he went to one center where the men would write
empathy letters, where they would you know, try to identify
all the hurt that they had caused their wives because
you know many of these people are married, um, and hey,
you're doing real damage to friends, spouses, domestic partners and
(09:59):
you know of wives. Meanwhile, would send the men these
cost letters that detailed, you know and in very sad detail,
all the all the things that you know have been
broken or hurt. And that was one way they did
did treatment. They also did a lot of journaling and
one uh excerpt he included in this article was something
he wrote in his journal where he was trying to
give voice to this this compulsion to keep having anonymous sex.
(10:23):
He wrote, I will write in the voice of he wrote,
in the voice of his addiction. I will make annoit, lie,
and manipulate and chase sex every of the day until
he can't feel anything anymore, until everything good and decent
about him is removed. He needs me, his life is
boring when I'm not in charge. I control him. I
keep him numb so he can function and make him
feel good, and I make him feel worthless. The minute
(10:44):
he steps out of the stupid rehab, I'll start whispering
in his ear. That's all it takes. Whispers. I win.
I always win. So when you hear about sex addiction
from this perspective. From his first person perspective, it definitely
sounds like a very serious issue, like a valid mental disorder.
And there is a guy named Martin Kafka who is
(11:07):
sort of the expert on sex addiction and treatment, I
would say in the US, who um studies this at
McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. And we found a New
York Times magazine piece profiling Kaka and his UH and
basically this whole issue of what is sex addiction and
sort of does it reside in the brain, what is
(11:28):
it related to? And it's interesting, he said. One of
his biggest breakthroughs was when he noticed a similarity between
UM these sex addicts. They were all men who he
was treating and women with eating disorders. UM basically the
fact that they both involved the difficulties experiencing UM satisfaction
(11:52):
as well as a general disregulation for these appetite drives
something completely uncontrollable and outside of their power. And he
thinks that it might have something to do with serotonin
levels in the brain. UH. The article references in nineteen
sixty nine study published in Science in that found that
(12:13):
in rats, when their serotonin levels drop in the brain,
their arousal goes up, and there's also this inverse relationship
between dopamine and serotonin. There was another study on male bears, actually,
of all thinks, seems like male bears to be hard
to study, uh, that found that before they made it,
(12:35):
their dopamine levels would shoot up and the serotonin levels
would go down, and hence their libidos would their bare
libidos would go up. And then after they made it,
the opposite occurs. The serotonin rises, the dopamine falls. So
they think that it might have something to do with these, uh,
these levels of brain chemicals. Right, So if you know
(12:56):
that there's something about the seratonin you can address, you
might think that that lends itself to an easy treatment.
We have selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like prozac, and Dr
kof has put a few men on prozac and has
actually found that, uh, it certains almost as like a
chemical castration. They kept referring at too, because you totally
lose libido. They get rid of their sex addiction by
(13:18):
losing their sex, by losing their sex driv and for
some of these men that's actually huge relief. Yeah, they're
fine with that. Dr Kafa is hoping that he can
treat the sex addiction without affecting sex arousal or desire,
because it is healthy to have a sexual desire. That's
essential to repopulating the species. UM. So he's hoping that
(13:39):
one day he can figure out enough about the brain
to where he could give a man a drug you
know that's not prozac and just doesn't completely kill the
labto And he has a lot of interesting theories that maybe, um,
the part of our brain that controls the deviant behaviors
is different than the one that just controls normal sexual behaviors.
And I was surprised to learn too from Kafka's research
is that there's still not entirely sure how sexual arousal
(14:04):
works in the brain. They haven't exactly been able to
pinpoint every single location the exact functioning of it, and
so they really can't go in and say, well, this
guy has an enlarged hypothalamus, therefore, you know he has
an enlarge libido. You know, they can't exactly map out
the neurology of arousal. So it's still a big question,
(14:25):
which has lead to I guess other treatments they have
to rely on that might not be as precise um
to address this issue of sex addiction, because in a way,
you could draw a very loose comparison between sex addiction
and eating disorders. For instance, with an eating disorder, obviously
the food is the issue at the heart of the matter,
(14:48):
but you don't want to eliminate the food. You can't
eliminate the food, and you also don't want to demonize
eating because, like sex, food is necessary for human functioning, right.
I mean, it's the kind of thing where you know,
if you're treating an alcohol addiction, the goal is no alcohol,
but that's not the approach that people are taking a
(15:08):
treating sex addiction. Uh. In some clinics, they'll have people
make a list of what the what the bad behaviors are,
and they're just not allowed to do those. So if
your problem was, let's say, um, masturbating every morning, if
you did that, then that would be yes of fall
back into your sex addiction, Whereas having sex with a
spouse would not be a sign of the sex addiction
(15:29):
manifesting itself. Having sex with ten women in addition to
your wife, that might be a sign of it. It's
all about finding for that person what um the middle
ground is now other doctors you know, are taking maybe
a more aggressive approach and reconditioning men to disassociate pleasure
from the behaviors that used to bring them pleasure. So
there are a wide variety of treatments in how people
(15:50):
are trying to approach this, not really knowing exactly how
it comes to be normally. I don't know if you've
noticed this or not, but we keep using men as
example with sex addiction, and statistically men are the ones
who have a bigger problem with sex addiction, but women
are can be sex addics too, true, And I think
(16:12):
that this is one of those places where, um, there's
an uncomfortable double standard for me, because we were talking
about how, um, we've used sex addiction in some cases
to demonize certain kinds of sex. But I also think
that we might throw the term too easily at a
woman just because she has a lot of sex. Yeah.
And and there's also a distinction between the how sex
(16:35):
addiction works for men and sex addiction works for women
because according to a Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health,
a lot of times they will refer to a woman's
sex addiction as merely love addiction. It always comes back
to a woman's need for intimacy and closeness. These women,
you know, aren't actually you know, needing the climax or
(16:56):
the shot of dopamine from uh, from having sex with someone.
They really just want to lie tenderly in someone's arms
and feel close to someone for if only a fleeting moment. Right,
Women couldn't possibly like sex porting to this and it's
depiction of it. Yeah, and and it does come up
again and again. And even even Susan Chiever, who recently
(17:17):
wrote a book about her own sex addiction problem, kind
of perpetuates this. And an article we found in The
Times Online where she was saying that she thinks that
her sex addiction came from her parents never telling her
that she was pretty and feeling unsupported by them and
how you know, it really was just this quiet quest
for love. And we see that theme over and over
(17:38):
again where it's just kind of this um, I guess,
sort of a mating drive for women, whereas with men
it's just this more primitive urge to just spread their
seed and leave. Yeah, I mean, I guess Another reason
I find the term uncomfortable is that it just really
does tie up a lot of societal conceptions about men
and women and sex, which is already just I think,
(17:58):
a battleground of stereotypes and myths. But I will say
what was interesting to me is that women do seem
to also have a co addiction. When they have a
sex addiction, they might also be um suffering with addiction,
addiction to alcohol, and eating disorders. Some sort of impulse
control problem could possibly be the thing that kind of
triggers this constant need for sexual gratification. Yeah, and I
(18:20):
guess kind of compounding all of those disorders together would
also leads you to question to like, well, are these
just all symptoms of a different disease altogether. So again
and again, Molly, throughout this conversation, we keep coming back
to this gray area of on the one hand, we
have coughcus patients who obviously have a problem with sex addiction.
(18:44):
Genuinely there seems to be something going on in their
brains that's driving them to this. And then on the
other hand, we do have this, uh, you know, the
sort of the Tiger Woods question of just cheating men,
isn't it is a pop psychology chterm. Do we see
a man who cheats repeatedly and think oh, sex addict. Right?
Are we just demonizing someone's maybe elevated libido right and
(19:08):
search for maybe I don't know, maybe kinkie or sex too.
That would make us uncomfortable, right, that's the question. We
can't answer it, so we turn as always to our
faithful listeners. Let us know your thoughts on sex addiction,
if it's real, if it's not what you think about it.
The email is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
and we shall finish with a few emails from that
(19:30):
email address. UH one is from Mary, who we have
to give major props to you because she counted all
the times we said poop in our poop podcast, which
was called What's the Scoop on Lady Poop? Now. You
might remember, Kristen that at the end you said something
like we've probably said poop sixty five times, and I said, no,
(19:51):
it's more than that, and I was right. I didn't
want to say it. You manage to say the word
poop or poops, pooped, pooping, etcetera seventy three times in
a twenty two minute episode. That's an average of three
poops a minute. Thank you Mary for counting. You are
truly a saint. For doing that. You know what, I
bet that we topped the poop record with sex in
(20:13):
this episode. True. There's always a weirds Baldo word in
our podcast. Yes, speaking of poop, got another one here
from Kim. She said, just listen to your podcast on
girl poop, and I gotta say I loved it. In
the words of Frank Reynolds on It's always stunny in Philadelphia,
poop is funny. Thank you for that reference. You gotta
love Frank. I totally got you when you were talking
(20:36):
about the waiting game. But some of my girlfriends and
I go the opposite way in the right circumstance. We
nicknamed it the group Poop. It started a few years
ago when we were at a restaurant on a road trip.
There were four of us and we took up all
four stalls at once. One of us just to new
she was going to go for it, and after that
we just saw went for it and by it, she's
(20:57):
meaning poop. Ended up being a rather fun bonding experience,
laughing about farting and splashing and everything. We still joke
about it and do it again when the right situation arises. Um.
Thank you Kim for the anecdote. But I'm gonna say
I'm gonna be on high alert next time I see
a group of four women walking to the bathroom the
same time giggling, because it might be a group poop.
(21:17):
All right, If you don't want a group poop, Christen,
then I've got an email from page that may help you. Um.
She writes about a tip for the bathroom showdown. Ideally,
you want to wait to hold it until the other
person flushes their toilet. That way, the sound of your
pooping is masked by the flushing. Otherwise, you can flush
your toilet to drown out the sound, and it also
works as a courtesy flush, so there's no stink. The
(21:38):
second way will probably result in you doing a double flush,
and the other person or people might still know that
you pooped, but at least they won't have actually heard
the incriminating noises. So that's from Page. I will say
our bathroom sometimes you get like a mystery flush, and
you can always just say a tough toilet is just
flushing like crazy flush. I don't know flush. It wasn't
me flushing to hide my poop. So guys, send us
(22:00):
your thoughts on anything and everything. We love getting emails
from you guys. They make our day. The email addresses
mom stuff at how stuff works dot com. During the week,
we have a blog. It's called how to stuff and
you can find that blog as well as many other
articles on sex, at how stuff works dot com. Want
(22:27):
more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the
house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to you
by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are
you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From House to works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Kristen, I'm Molly so well. My
(00:20):
sex addiction has been in the news a lot lately,
Oh boy has it? And to be honest, we positioned
this podcast so hopefully published around the time of the
Master's Golf Tournament because Tiger Woods is making his comeback. Yes,
and if there are any words that have been associated
with Tiger Woods lately, sex addiction. Yes. And that has
(00:42):
led to a lot of online discussion about whether sex
addiction is a real thing or if it's just an
excuse that a cheating husband like Tiger can use for
having a lot of mistresses. Um, I would I would
love to meet a woman who hasn't been a mistress
of Tiger Woods, because it seems like everyone has. Hello jolly, Yeah,
the mistresses of Tiger Woods are getting fired too much attention.
(01:03):
But anyway, is it real? Is it a thing? That's
what we decided to find out. Yeah, because it first
really popped up into pop culture in two thousand and eight,
when David D. Kovney checked himself into rehab for sex addiction.
I started to wonder if it would be the new exhaustion.
You know how celebrities are always saying that they had
to go to rehab for exhaustion. I wondered if it
would become the new new Uh, well, it seems like
(01:25):
it all of a sudden, everybody's talking about sex addiction.
So let's get to the bottom of that. What are
they talking about when they say that sex addiction? According
to psych Central, is best described as a progressive intimacy
disorder characterized by compulsive sexual thoughts and acts. Now, the
National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity has defined sex
addiction is quote engaging in persistent and escalating patterns of
(01:48):
sexual behavior acted out despite increasing negative consequences to self
and others. So it's basically having an acting on sexual
urges to the point that it disrupts your life. It's
not people who just necessarily like sex and have a
lot of it. There has to be some element of
it ruining your life in some way. Probably is affecting
your job, affecting your other relationships, etcetera. And it's not
(02:11):
necessarily just having sex with another person. It can also
be an addiction to porn, masturbating excessively to the point
where you know you may not go to work because
you need to stay home and be have some alone time.
And it might not even have anything to do with
deriving sexual pleasure, because CNN points out that a lot
of people who are sex addicts don't even like the
(02:35):
process of sex itself. They're just using it to numb
out painful feelings or kill time or just stop feeling lonely. Yes,
it's it's It can be an addiction in the same
way that drain hans and addiction, where you just have
to do it. It's not even because you're driving any
pleasure from it anymore. It's just an impulse you cannot stop.
And according to the Mayo Clinic, it affects three to
(02:56):
six percent of adults in the United States and supposedly
sex addiction has been also on the rise in the
past ten years or so because of the Internet. Basically
we have more access to sex than ever before, and
therefore people are just feeding it more and more on
(03:17):
the Internet. Now it is not listed, I think that
we should note it is not in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, which is the a p
a s. Handbook that we've talked about before in our
podcast on eating disorders. It is not listed as a
specific clinical disorder. It is just listed under sexual disorders
(03:41):
not otherwise specified. Right, And I do want to draw
again this distinction between sex for pleasure and sex drives
that you can't control, because when the term is used
for tiger Woods, I think it's a little bit misleading
because we just don't know. I mean, it feels like
we know because he's in the paper every day, but
wishing to remind ourselves that we don't know the guy,
and we don't know if this was something that he
(04:02):
couldn't control or if it was just a lot of affairs.
Having a lot of affairs does not necessarily mean you
are a sex addict. It could just mean that you
were having a lot of affairs. Yeah, And so that's
leads some lad some people to question, I mean, is
this an actual neurological disorder where he could not stop
himself from doing anything? Or were we just giving a
cheating man a pass. So let's go into how you
(04:25):
might decide if you're at risk for this condition. Now,
sex Addicts Anonymous has a self assessment tests you can take.
These are twelve questions, and if you answer yes to
more than one of these questions, you might be a
sex addict. Don you want to read it for you
all right? Do you keep secrets about your sexual behavior
or romantic fantasies from those important to you? And do
(04:47):
you lead a double life? Have your sexual practices cause
you legal problems? Could your sexual practices cause you legal problems?
Do your sexual activities involve coercion, violence, or threat of disease?
Does your preoccupation with sexual fantasies caused problems in any
area of your life even when you do not act
out on those fantasies? Have a few more? Have your
(05:10):
desires driven you to have sex and places or with
people you would not normally choose? Do you need greater variety,
increased frequency, or more extreme sexual activities to achieve the
same level of excitement or relief? Do you frequently want
to get away from a partner after having sex? Do
you feel remorse, shame, or guilt after a sexual encounter?
And does your pursuit of sex or sexual fantasy conflict
(05:32):
with your moral standards or I fear with your personal
spiritual journey. So these questions can also be troubling for
people who wonder whether or not sex addiction is real
and valid, because they would say that for plenty of people,
they have hidden fantasies that might not be necessarily socially acceptable.
(05:57):
It might not be vanilla missionary style, but it's just
something they want. Yeah. Sex columnists Dan Savage had a
really good point in a Slate piece you sent me
about whether we are just demonizing all sex that doesn't
fit cultural norms that we think it should. Essentially, if
you're not you know, married and having you know, as
(06:18):
Kristen put it, very vanilla plain sex, if you're doing
anything that's outside of a cultural norm stereotype, then yes,
you must be a deviant and thus you must be
a sex addict. Because let's say, Molly, someone has bondage fantasies, okay,
outside of the social norm if you will, um, and
probably something that they might not share with their partner.
(06:42):
Does that necessarily mean they're a sex addict or that
they just like to get be tied up? You know?
I mean, is that is one? Is that wrong that
they have those kind of fantasies. Right. So, I think that,
you know, a troubling thing within this diagnosis right now
is it does seem to demonize some forms of sex
that aren't necessarily addictive behaviors. And I think that that's
(07:03):
why the Tiger Woods Association again kind of rubs all
the wrong way, because we don't know, if you know,
this is a guy who just wanted to have a
lot of sex, or if they had, you know, just
the drive that was consuming his life. So to maybe
enlighten us a little bit about this whole situation, we
should look to someone who has been through rehab for
sex addiction. Uh, there's a sky named annoint dennisit Lewis
(07:27):
who wrote a piece for the New York Times Modern
Love column in which he shares his past problems with
sex addiction. Right. He opens with the story when he's
twenty four years old and he has driven three hours
away from his home. He has skipped one of his
close friend's weddings because he is trying to hook up
(07:48):
and honestly with two guys came in off the internet. Um,
one of the guys doesn't show, so he goes with
the backup plan and he just speaks of you know
how that was kind of a turning point where he
he's three hours home, he'd had sex with this guy
he didn't know had a boyfriend. He was upset because
the other guy didn't show any realized that something was
wrong with this picture that you know, he was essentially
(08:09):
discussed with himself for letting this overtake his life. Um
And he says, I suspect that my addiction is a
misguided attempt to find the acceptance and unconditional love that
I didn't feel growing up. And that's often a theme
that we'll see with UM. With sex addiction diagnoses as well,
there's usually some kind of childhood trauma. It goes back
to or sexual abuse or parental neglect, so we see
(08:32):
that same theme coming up and um And he talks
about UM. If you ask alcoholics about the first time
they became drunk man, he will say it was the
moment that they finally felt okay in the world. I
never had that sensation while drunker stone, but I did
feel it for the first time when I entered a
gay man's gay men's chat room while in college and
a kind of hypnotic trance. I sent out photos of
(08:52):
myself to Rave reviews, and then everything starts to snowball.
He says, within three months, I had hooked up with
twenty guys online. With the six months I was skipping
out on friends that I could spend nights in chat rooms.
I mean, this really sounds like addicted behavior. It was
overtaking his life. He was alienating himself from friends and
family so that he could basically have cyber sex with strangers. Right.
(09:15):
And when he said that that was the first time
he felt, you know, like a normal person. That made
a lot of sense. And then he said, how you
know how ephemeral that feeling was, how he just had
to keep seeking it out, and how it was, you know,
it just never came back the way it it did,
but it was this constant search to reclaim that UM.
Then he writes about how he did give treatment a chance,
(09:36):
and this this will bring us into sort of the
the controversy about how you treat something that you're not
even sure as an addiction. UM. He writes about how
he went to one center where the men would write
empathy letters, where they would you know, try to identify
all the hurt that they had caused their wives because
you know many of these people are married, um, and hey,
you're doing real damage to friends, spouses, domestic partners and
(09:59):
you know of wives. Meanwhile, would send the men these
cost letters that detailed, you know and in very sad detail,
all the all the things that you know have been
broken or hurt. And that was one way they did
did treatment. They also did a lot of journaling and
one uh excerpt he included in this article was something
he wrote in his journal where he was trying to
give voice to this this compulsion to keep having anonymous sex.
(10:23):
He wrote, I will write in the voice of he wrote,
in the voice of his addiction. I will make annoit, lie,
and manipulate and chase sex every of the day until
he can't feel anything anymore, until everything good and decent
about him is removed. He needs me, his life is
boring when I'm not in charge. I control him. I
keep him numb so he can function and make him
feel good, and I make him feel worthless. The minute
(10:44):
he steps out of the stupid rehab, I'll start whispering
in his ear. That's all it takes. Whispers. I win.
I always win. So when you hear about sex addiction
from this perspective. From his first person perspective, it definitely
sounds like a very serious issue, like a valid mental disorder.
And there is a guy named Martin Kafka who is
(11:07):
sort of the expert on sex addiction and treatment, I
would say in the US, who um studies this at
McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. And we found a New
York Times magazine piece profiling Kaka and his UH and
basically this whole issue of what is sex addiction and
sort of does it reside in the brain, what is
(11:28):
it related to? And it's interesting, he said. One of
his biggest breakthroughs was when he noticed a similarity between
UM these sex addicts. They were all men who he
was treating and women with eating disorders. UM basically the
fact that they both involved the difficulties experiencing UM satisfaction
(11:52):
as well as a general disregulation for these appetite drives
something completely uncontrollable and outside of their power. And he
thinks that it might have something to do with serotonin
levels in the brain. UH. The article references in nineteen
sixty nine study published in Science in that found that
(12:13):
in rats, when their serotonin levels drop in the brain,
their arousal goes up, and there's also this inverse relationship
between dopamine and serotonin. There was another study on male bears, actually,
of all thinks, seems like male bears to be hard
to study, uh, that found that before they made it,
(12:35):
their dopamine levels would shoot up and the serotonin levels
would go down, and hence their libidos would their bare
libidos would go up. And then after they made it,
the opposite occurs. The serotonin rises, the dopamine falls. So
they think that it might have something to do with these, uh,
these levels of brain chemicals. Right, So if you know
(12:56):
that there's something about the seratonin you can address, you
might think that that lends itself to an easy treatment.
We have selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like prozac, and Dr
kof has put a few men on prozac and has
actually found that, uh, it certains almost as like a
chemical castration. They kept referring at too, because you totally
lose libido. They get rid of their sex addiction by
(13:18):
losing their sex, by losing their sex driv and for
some of these men that's actually huge relief. Yeah, they're
fine with that. Dr Kafa is hoping that he can
treat the sex addiction without affecting sex arousal or desire,
because it is healthy to have a sexual desire. That's
essential to repopulating the species. UM. So he's hoping that
(13:39):
one day he can figure out enough about the brain
to where he could give a man a drug you
know that's not prozac and just doesn't completely kill the
labto And he has a lot of interesting theories that maybe, um,
the part of our brain that controls the deviant behaviors
is different than the one that just controls normal sexual behaviors.
And I was surprised to learn too from Kafka's research
is that there's still not entirely sure how sexual arousal
(14:04):
works in the brain. They haven't exactly been able to
pinpoint every single location the exact functioning of it, and
so they really can't go in and say, well, this
guy has an enlarged hypothalamus, therefore, you know he has
an enlarge libido. You know, they can't exactly map out
the neurology of arousal. So it's still a big question,
(14:25):
which has lead to I guess other treatments they have
to rely on that might not be as precise um
to address this issue of sex addiction, because in a way,
you could draw a very loose comparison between sex addiction
and eating disorders. For instance, with an eating disorder, obviously
the food is the issue at the heart of the matter,
(14:48):
but you don't want to eliminate the food. You can't
eliminate the food, and you also don't want to demonize
eating because, like sex, food is necessary for human functioning, right.
I mean, it's the kind of thing where you know,
if you're treating an alcohol addiction, the goal is no alcohol,
but that's not the approach that people are taking a
(15:08):
treating sex addiction. Uh. In some clinics, they'll have people
make a list of what the what the bad behaviors are,
and they're just not allowed to do those. So if
your problem was, let's say, um, masturbating every morning, if
you did that, then that would be yes of fall
back into your sex addiction, Whereas having sex with a
spouse would not be a sign of the sex addiction
(15:29):
manifesting itself. Having sex with ten women in addition to
your wife, that might be a sign of it. It's
all about finding for that person what um the middle
ground is now other doctors you know, are taking maybe
a more aggressive approach and reconditioning men to disassociate pleasure
from the behaviors that used to bring them pleasure. So
there are a wide variety of treatments in how people
(15:50):
are trying to approach this, not really knowing exactly how
it comes to be normally. I don't know if you've
noticed this or not, but we keep using men as
example with sex addiction, and statistically men are the ones
who have a bigger problem with sex addiction, but women
are can be sex addics too, true, And I think
(16:12):
that this is one of those places where, um, there's
an uncomfortable double standard for me, because we were talking
about how, um, we've used sex addiction in some cases
to demonize certain kinds of sex. But I also think
that we might throw the term too easily at a
woman just because she has a lot of sex. Yeah.
And and there's also a distinction between the how sex
(16:35):
addiction works for men and sex addiction works for women
because according to a Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health,
a lot of times they will refer to a woman's
sex addiction as merely love addiction. It always comes back
to a woman's need for intimacy and closeness. These women,
you know, aren't actually you know, needing the climax or
(16:56):
the shot of dopamine from uh, from having sex with someone.
They really just want to lie tenderly in someone's arms
and feel close to someone for if only a fleeting moment. Right,
Women couldn't possibly like sex porting to this and it's
depiction of it. Yeah, and and it does come up
again and again. And even even Susan Chiever, who recently
(17:17):
wrote a book about her own sex addiction problem, kind
of perpetuates this. And an article we found in The
Times Online where she was saying that she thinks that
her sex addiction came from her parents never telling her
that she was pretty and feeling unsupported by them and
how you know, it really was just this quiet quest
for love. And we see that theme over and over
(17:38):
again where it's just kind of this um, I guess,
sort of a mating drive for women, whereas with men
it's just this more primitive urge to just spread their
seed and leave. Yeah, I mean, I guess Another reason
I find the term uncomfortable is that it just really
does tie up a lot of societal conceptions about men
and women and sex, which is already just I think,
(17:58):
a battleground of stereotypes and myths. But I will say
what was interesting to me is that women do seem
to also have a co addiction. When they have a
sex addiction, they might also be um suffering with addiction,
addiction to alcohol, and eating disorders. Some sort of impulse
control problem could possibly be the thing that kind of
triggers this constant need for sexual gratification. Yeah, and I
(18:20):
guess kind of compounding all of those disorders together would
also leads you to question to like, well, are these
just all symptoms of a different disease altogether. So again
and again, Molly, throughout this conversation, we keep coming back
to this gray area of on the one hand, we
have coughcus patients who obviously have a problem with sex addiction.
(18:44):
Genuinely there seems to be something going on in their
brains that's driving them to this. And then on the
other hand, we do have this, uh, you know, the
sort of the Tiger Woods question of just cheating men,
isn't it is a pop psychology chterm. Do we see
a man who cheats repeatedly and think oh, sex addict. Right?
Are we just demonizing someone's maybe elevated libido right and
(19:08):
search for maybe I don't know, maybe kinkie or sex too.
That would make us uncomfortable, right, that's the question. We
can't answer it, so we turn as always to our
faithful listeners. Let us know your thoughts on sex addiction,
if it's real, if it's not what you think about it.
The email is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
and we shall finish with a few emails from that
(19:30):
email address. UH one is from Mary, who we have
to give major props to you because she counted all
the times we said poop in our poop podcast, which
was called What's the Scoop on Lady Poop? Now. You
might remember, Kristen that at the end you said something
like we've probably said poop sixty five times, and I said, no,
(19:51):
it's more than that, and I was right. I didn't
want to say it. You manage to say the word
poop or poops, pooped, pooping, etcetera seventy three times in
a twenty two minute episode. That's an average of three
poops a minute. Thank you Mary for counting. You are
truly a saint. For doing that. You know what, I
bet that we topped the poop record with sex in
(20:13):
this episode. True. There's always a weirds Baldo word in
our podcast. Yes, speaking of poop, got another one here
from Kim. She said, just listen to your podcast on
girl poop, and I gotta say I loved it. In
the words of Frank Reynolds on It's always stunny in Philadelphia,
poop is funny. Thank you for that reference. You gotta
love Frank. I totally got you when you were talking
(20:36):
about the waiting game. But some of my girlfriends and
I go the opposite way in the right circumstance. We
nicknamed it the group Poop. It started a few years
ago when we were at a restaurant on a road trip.
There were four of us and we took up all
four stalls at once. One of us just to new
she was going to go for it, and after that
we just saw went for it and by it, she's
(20:57):
meaning poop. Ended up being a rather fun bonding experience,
laughing about farting and splashing and everything. We still joke
about it and do it again when the right situation arises. Um.
Thank you Kim for the anecdote. But I'm gonna say
I'm gonna be on high alert next time I see
a group of four women walking to the bathroom the
same time giggling, because it might be a group poop.
(21:17):
All right, If you don't want a group poop, Christen,
then I've got an email from page that may help you. Um.
She writes about a tip for the bathroom showdown. Ideally,
you want to wait to hold it until the other
person flushes their toilet. That way, the sound of your
pooping is masked by the flushing. Otherwise, you can flush
your toilet to drown out the sound, and it also
works as a courtesy flush, so there's no stink. The
(21:38):
second way will probably result in you doing a double flush,
and the other person or people might still know that
you pooped, but at least they won't have actually heard
the incriminating noises. So that's from Page. I will say
our bathroom sometimes you get like a mystery flush, and
you can always just say a tough toilet is just
flushing like crazy flush. I don't know flush. It wasn't
me flushing to hide my poop. So guys, send us
(22:00):
your thoughts on anything and everything. We love getting emails
from you guys. They make our day. The email addresses
mom stuff at how stuff works dot com. During the week,
we have a blog. It's called how to stuff and
you can find that blog as well as many other
articles on sex, at how stuff works dot com. Want
(22:27):
more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the
house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to you
by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are
you
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