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The Sex Epidemic. Those are the words Newsweek used to headline their article about sexual addiction two weeks ago. While the piece does a decent job of describing hypersexuality -- thereby destroying the ability of those caught red handed to claim sex addiction as a way to get off scot-free -- it discredits itself by being so quick to point to the internet as a main cause of the problem.
The title itself is problematic. The word "epidemic" suggests an illness that is contagious, but there is no data supporting this statement. In fact, there is very little data in the article at all. Chris Lee, its author, prefaces the estimate that over 9 million people could meet the criteria for sex addiction with the statement, "reliable figures for the number of diagnosed sex addicts are difficult to come by." So are there or aren't there millions of sex addicts out there?
"Love in A Car" via Shutterstock.
In a television interview on Tuesday, Lee confessed to MSNBC news anchor Thomas Roberts that experts still can't seem to agree on what actually classifies someone as a sex addict, though he was quick to point out that everyone who knows anything about its treatment agrees that the internet is responsible for the increase in the as-of-yet undefined problem.
"What is fueling it is the digital era," Lee said, echoing the tone of his article for Newsweek. "Pornography once upon a time used to be the province of dirty bookstores or XXX movie theaters and people had to be really motivated to seek it out, whereas nowadays it's ubiquitous online, it's anonymous, it's available for free."
He elaborates:
You have applications like the smartphone app Grindr, which can enable anonymous gay hookups with just the click of a GPS of your smartphone or the website AshleyMadison.com which is the world's leading married dating website, which advertises affairs guaranteed. So you have America's sexual metabolism revved up to fever pitch, mainly through the information age.
The experts I've spoken to said basically because this is available to so many people, people have become accustomed to using online pornography, and what you do online leads to offline activities. This is a generation that's coming of age and has grown up with unlimited access to pornography, so people know no difference and they develop a tolerance and sort of immunity to hardcore sexualized images and it's sexualizing people in a very strange way. It's changing everyone's social mores in the country.
"Not everyone who looks at a nude image is going to become a sex addict. But the constant exposure is going to trigger people who are susceptible," Dr. David Sack, chief executive of Los Angeles's Promises Treatment Centers, is quoted as saying in the article. But the way Lee is telling it suggests the opposite: sex addiction is a contagious disease that is largely cybernetically transmitted.
This disregard for any evidence renders the article as helpful as those that excuse cheating celebrities as victims of sex addiction. What is this "sex addiction," exactly? Stanton Peele, who blogs for Psychology Today’s blog network described it best in the post Why Anthony Weiner Is Not A Sex Addict:
The definition of addiction (or dependence) according to the American Psychiatric Association diagnostic manual (on which I was an adviser) focuses on the extremity of the negative consequences of a substance involvement. Despite these health, family, legal, job consequences, the addict is still not able to desist. And they try.
Recognizing their behavior is hurting them, they attempt to quit or to cut back, but repeatedly fail at such efforts. Think of gay men who haunt anonymous sexual meeting places, risking life-endangering infections, public embarrassment, and violent assaults. Still, they continue in their addictive pursuit, even as they regret it and may hate themselves for it.
Sex addiction is not giving in to desire. It's the inability to break a sexual pattern that negatively impacts the rest of your life. And while pornography, dating sites, and hookup sites can be abused, are we confusing symptom with cause? (This is entirely anecdotal, but as a recovering alcoholic, I would never blame my problem on the number of bars in my city.)
This isn't the first time such things have been cited as the root of such evils. Pornography in particular seems to have the worst reputation. In Pornography: Beneficial or Detrimental, for Psychology Today’s "The Porn Factor" series, Gad Saad, Ph.D., author of The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption cites a 2009
