by Eurydice (c) 1999

Sex Abundance: Too Much of a Good Thing

I was in a circle of friends one evening, when we started comparing the number of our lovers. Most people had had around twenty; a few had fifty, which seemed to the men who had twenty to be more than is good for you, to which the people who had fifty meekly agreed. One of us said she'd had about three hundred partners. The moment she said it, silence ensued. What had been a light-hearted, vaguely therapeutic bullshit session became intense. Everybody went home. The woman, who had never felt shame for her sex habits, but had felt empowered by them, now felt shunned. She lost our respect. I ask you: If fifty lovers are acceptable, why not three hundred? Do we assume that one can't lead a full, productive life and still have time for so much recreational sex? Can't one have had three hundred lovers and be kind and loving? Does having a large number of partners mean one is incapable of having just one, of enjoying lasting love affairs at other periods of their lives? Is being young and wanting to fuck anything-with-a-pulse a pathology? Is having 'numerical sex' at age fifty a sign that a person hasn't 'grown up' and needs help? Can we map out human desire? Can we create a detailed blueprint for everyone's sexual behavior? Why is accelerated sex considered condemnable, and not an evolutionary perk? If my lifelong lover and I have sex three times a day every day for fifty years, are we addicts, or do we just have great chemistry? If we had no morality, wouldn't we all be fucking all the time? And which is morally preferable: to perform any sexual act with one stable partner (bloodletting, poop-eating, electroshock), or to have boring sex with three hundred people? Does our repression end where our addiction begins? Are repression and addiction the two faces of the same coin?

I am, contestably, the world's worst actress; in addition, I am by temperament unable to go unnoticed and to keep my mouth shut. So when I tried to attend my local Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA) meetings, as part of investigating sex addiction, and was told that I had to be a sex addict in order to attend, I nearly gave up. Half-heartedly, I posed as an addict: I told everyone there that I was "helplessly sexual," which is true, and otherwise interacted in my normal manner, never pretending or hiding anything. I was shocked to realize that was all it took for me to "pass." This was the surprising overall realization I came to after the months I spent researching this so-called pathology: the average person can qualify as a sex addict. The SAA manual defines sex addiction in much the same way my friends and I, and I think most people, define sex. Welcome to the addict world.

SAA and SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) say that addicts turn to sex to fill a void in their lives; when they're down on themselves or feel abandoned or need attention, they compensate by having sex, which gives them a sense of success and emotional balance. A preoccupation with sex is their way to disassociate from stress, because sex works as an analgesic. But this remedy is temporary, lasting as long as the last 'fix.' Then their problems return, and their only way to alleviate the negativity is to get laid again. This escalation spins out of control until sex becomes as painful as the pain it's meant to cover up. The SAA manuals list 10 types of sex addicts with 114 different sexual behaviors. "Self-abuse" (masturbation) is the second most common compulsion.

SAA is the progeny of SLAA, which emerged in the '70s in Boston as an offspring of AA and adapted the twelve-step system to treat "selfish sexual needs." SLAA recommends using sex-quotas, whereas SAA recommends abstinence from all sex, to be followed by lifelong monogamy "in due time." SAA surpassed SLAA in popularity. Over 1,200 SAA groups meet worldwide. SLAA defines "sex and love addiction as a progressive illness which cannot be cured, but which can be arrested. It may take several forms, including a compulsive need for sex, extreme dependency on one person, and/or a chronic preoccupation with romance, intrigue, or fantasy." Under this broad umbrella, SAA lumps together flashers-in-the-park and the guy who cheats on his girlfriend. The organization doesn't make any distinction beyond assigning members a "level" of sexual addiction, which connotes the degree of risk they're willing to take for their sexual "fix". A Level One addict is socially harmless; a Level Two addict is a sex offender. Sociopaths and playboys, child molesters and men who have a fear of commitment, are treated alike in the recovery movement. They are all considered biochemically-disabled. (As a result, attorneys can now argue that sentencing sex offenders is like sentencing an alcoholic for each drink he takes.)

The term "sexual addiction" was coined in 1983 by Patrick Carnes, a prison psychologist, in his book The Sexual Addiction.  He defines sex addicts as people whose sexual behavior becomes excessive and unstoppable, despite possible severe consequence--like job loss, family breakdown, STDs. Carnes's prototype of the sex addict is a person with low self-esteem, a lot of shame, and a "sex-negative personal belief system." Carnes claims that sex addiction has a physiological base: when we have sex, our brain produces dopamine, the same neurochemical that our body metabolizes from alcohol; sex involves a chemical release (and trancelike pleasure) that's highly addictive. Carnes estimates that 6 to 8 percent of adults (22 million Americans) are sex addicts. Research shows 81 percent are men, 19 percent women, 90 percent white, 41 percent married, 63 percent heterosexual, 38 percent had postgraduate education; only 16 percent are in recovery (compared to 48 percent for alcoholism).

Carnes' landmark book includes a 25-question screening test. If you respond in the affirmative to 13 questions or more, you are a sex addict. Here are some of the questions: "Have you ever felt that you had to have sex?
Have you subscribed to or regularly purchased sexually explicit magazines?
Have you ever worried about people finding out about your sexual activities?
Has sex been a way to escape your problems?
Do you feel that life would have no meaning without a love relationship or without sex? Do you need to have sex or fall in love in order to feel like a 'real man' or 'woman'?
Do you feel the need to hide your sexual activities from others?"

As a 12-stepper, I had to admit being powerless over my urges, and then appeal to a higher power for help. I mimicked the familiar ritual of standing before strangers to reveal oneself in the ceremonial group terminology: "Hi, I'm Eurydice and I like fucking people I'll never see again." I was assigned Jake as my sponsor ("Hi, I'm Jake, and I molested boys")-who was described as "a seasoned, sober SAA, a healthy model." Jake is the scion of a rich banking family, and was molested by an uncle as a child. (Childhood abuse is a 'classic addiction trigger'.) Jake told me to "rewire" myself and warned me to avoid chaos, drama, and any loss of boundaries. "Our rule of thumb," he said in psychotechno lingo, "is SAFE: no Secret, Abusive, Feeling-altering, Empty sex. Doing 90 meetings in 90 days is the motto for starting recovery." I asked him to define the difference between addict and non-addict sex. "Non-addict sex is monogamous, based on love, more metaphysical than physical. Everything else is Addiction. The best pleasures in life don't involve sex. We watch out for HALT-Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. That's when we 'medicate'. Things go wrong, we act out; then we feel shame and guilt, and deal with it by wanting to act out again, so we won't crash. Or things go well, we get tired or confident, we act out, feel horrible, so we go act out again." Jake's self-loathing stems from the belief that casual sex involves a loss of self-control akin to a loss of self.

Does sex addiction exist? The American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Society of Addiction Medicine refuse to recognize it as a clinical condition. Critics accuse Carnes and his colleagues of inventing a disease to fit the trend of victimization that rejects personal responsibility. Doctors argue that sex doesn't meet the criteria for addiction (e.g., psychological dependence on a substance). The 1994 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists sexual addiction under Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, defined as "distress about a pattern of repeated sexual relationships involving a succession of lovers who are experienced by the individual only as things to be used." Freud, the first human to analyze sexual behavior for a living, who launched us on our sexual self-consciousness, slept with his young sister-in-law until his wife threatened to commit suicide. A typical Victorian, he kept sex in the family. Today, he would have been a Level Two addict.

So what's the difference between addiction and abundance?

Jackie, the youngest woman in my SAA group, had one hundred partners in the past six months. "Good sex is hard to find, consistently," she advised me confidentially. "I've never had a partner I didn't like, but very few make me go back for a repeat. I'm like an sex collector." She was a pert, wholesome-looking blonde in cutoffs and a T-shirt. "We women know that sex is fun and free. But men still believe it comes at a price--babies, dinners, attachments, entanglements-I call it The Last Tango in Paris syndrome," she complained. "I have guys I talk with, and guys I fuck. I'd like a relationship, but men are afraid of it. So I reject them emotionally before they do me. Intimacy brings power-conflicts. When I was young and in love, I felt jealousy eating at me. If I thought my guy went with someone, I'd go with four men to get even. I had compulsive sex not for me, but to punish him. I fucked out of insecurity. I wanted power. I never got it. Now I get up after sex, get dressed, and say 'See you.' I don't allow myself to want more. I'm existential." Jackie has been in SAA for seven years. "Sex is like drugs: the first time is great, so you want more. Addicts just want to feel better. Sometimes I fuck somebody because the silence between us is making me uncomfortable, and I have no idea what else to do. Sometimes sex leaves me empty, lost. When all I do is fuck, it's a bad high. But, unlike drugs, good sex still works: I feel happy, strong, one with God. I'm a slave to sex, I put it before anything else. I want to feel alive. Sex is the only thing that engages all of me. Too bad I can't live on it alone. I sleep with a different person every day for a week as my reward if I achieve a goal. I have guys scaling my walls. Then I quit, set another goal, and stay celibate. The abstinence motivates me." I asked why most sex addicts are men. "Guys would fuck a headless woman," she said. "Misogyny is the root of sex addiction. I'm a nympho, whereas guys are players. Unlike men, I'm picky. I'm attracted to energy. Most men think they're blowing your mind, but they've no idea how good sex can be; they're into the idea of fucking. I like boys who fuck like machine guns, like sex athletes." Can love ensure great sex? "No, because good sex is impersonal," she argued. "It makes me feel warm, released from the bondage of myself. Addiction is bad sex. When you fuck and wish you were doing the dishes, when you have forgettable sex, it's addict sex. Good sex is when you go so far into self-annihilation that there's no mind, no world, when you die on some level." Her sense of self-transcendence is a big part of what society fears about sex and why it tries to control it. Good sex is the death of logic.

One woman I met gave unpaid blowjobs to 100 men before she was 19, then she developed TMJ, became a mother, and made sex irrelevant in her life. Another woman, in 20 years of marriage, had 1,000 extramarital lovers, and stunned her husband when she confessed to him not only all her infidelities, but that she'd never had an orgasm with anyone but him; her quickies had taken place during her lunch hour or after work in public places-cars, doorways, alleys, backyards, elevators-which could lead to exposure and arrest. She never felt anything for those men, which is the reason her husband never suspected it. If she was addicted to anything, it wasn't sex, but danger--the risk of getting caught. Another woman had several hundred one-night-stands because she could only orgasm by putting her tongue in a stranger's ass. She failed to sustain monogamous relationships despite years of shrinks and understanding boyfriends, until she became bulimic, literally unable to keep food down, and gave up her fetish.

For some people, sex is so good it's scary, an invitation to chaos. Our lusts are messy, our fantasies downright antisocial. They ride over our will to be faithful and trustworthy. We are genetically wired to be sexually active. So when our natural sex impulse is hindered, our urges become compulsive. Meaningless desire is what makes the world go round. Sexual addiction is, more honestly, an addiction to guilt and shame and the fear of being judged. The problem is not with the individual, but the prevailing social opinion. We live in a culture that is neurotic about sex, and yet rewards greed and the lust for power, that associates sex with reproduction and the family unit and treats extramarital fucking as a greater threat to order than carrying a gun in the street.

In my opinion, the difference between abundance and addiction isn't in the numbers, but in the quality and the appreciation. If you legally and consensually fuck every woman you can, and appreciate that you're living a dream life, power to you. Let's be reasonable: if sex is good, lots of sex is even better. Good sex can make you a better person. So lots of good sex might make you the finest person you can be. Your body isn't just your temple, it's also your holy brothel. Sex may be your way of worshiping God.