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Don’t blame me, blame my sex addiction
About a year ago a couple I know well were going through a difficult patch that made having dinner with them a nightmare. In essence, he (a banker) had a roving eye and she was no longer prepared to put up with it.
Relations were so bad that if he so much as praised the looks of a Hollywood actress, her features would settle into a rabid snarl.
A few months on and her snarls were somewhat vindicated when, on a work trip overseas, he had a one-night stand with an intern. Not his finest hour, granted; and, although I privately thought she didn’t help matters by being such a controlling sourpuss, I — like all their friends — sympathised with her.
Until, that is, she mentioned sex addiction. “I think he’s a sex addict,” she whispered to me over the phone from her desk at work.
This ridiculous statement didn’t exactly come as a surprise. She’d been plying the sex addict theory around our friends for a while. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but isn’t he just a bit randy? He was going out with someone else when you met him — remember?”
No, she maintained, he was definitely addicted to sex, just as one might be addicted to drugs or gambling. “Don’t worry, though,” she cried. “He can get treatment!”
Was it with a similar mixture of piety and hope that Sandra Bullock greeted the news that her husband, Jesse James, was to enter similar treatment last week? No sooner had the actress picked up her Oscar for The Blind Side last month than it emerged that hubbie, a former roadie, had been having an 11-month affair with a heavily tattooed stripper, as well as enjoying various other sexcapades.
Bullock reportedly walked out on him. And now that they’re supposedly trying to patch up the cracks, he’s taken himself off to rehab to deal with some undisclosed addiction (who’s guessing it’s sex?).
A similar fate befell Tiger Woods earlier this year, although to be fair he’d become rather greedy. One by one, his extramarital affairs were exposed to public view until they came to a baker’s dozen.
With a wholesome brand to protect, Woods clearly couldn’t just loaf around his mansion looking rueful. He had to be seen to be doing something — so off he went to the Pine Grove clinic in Mississippi for $40,000-worth of rehabilitation. Among the courses available were “shame reduction” and “setting sexual boundaries”.
What’s changed? It used to be that if a husband did the dirty he was heading for either the spare room or the divorce court, but in recent years a new tool has emerged — and it’s no longer the preserve of celebrity cuckolds and twitchy banker’s wives.
“We’ve seen a 25% increase in six years in the number of people coming to us,” says Don Serratt, founder and chief executive of Life Works, one of the UK’s leading specialists in “curing” sex addiction.
“It’s purely because awareness has increased,” he continues.
“Behaviours haven’t changed in thousands of years — there just wasn’t any help before. We’ve had rock stars who cannot stop acting out on the road. They basically get women thrown at them and they can’t stop. We’ve had people who’ve bankrupted their families because they can’t stop going to prostitutes.
“The US has seen an even bigger rise [in people going to sex rehab] than we have — I would guess in excess of 50% — because people are much more open to getting help there.”
Help for what? Certainly, sex (and love) has been proved to light up the same areas of the brain as cocaine — but can a normal human instinct ever become a true addiction like booze or pills? Which isn’t to deny that there’s a seam of compulsive sexual behaviour that is so awful, it really doesn’t matter what label you give it.
“An addiction is to continue to do anything in spite of negative consequences,” believes Serratt, who has known family men lose everything to cripplingly expensive hooker habits, and nice middle-class ladies engage in outrageous (and often illegal) sex despite the huge risk to their reputation and health.
It’s been estimated by a leading American specialist (and then widely queried) that up to 3% of the population could be sex addicts. But surely there’s a line to be drawn between the man who spends the kids’ university fund on prostitutes and common-or-garden affairs?
Not any more, believes Serratt: “Sandra Bullock’s husband, as a single guy, was probably fine to go to this tattooed woman and do whatever. But because of being married and being high profile, he experiences negative consequences — so to continue to do so is an addiction.
“If you’re in a relationship and you keep having affairs, then you’re a sex addict.”
Couldn’t you just be stuck in an unhappy marriage? “Well,” he says, “then you would get out of your marriage, no?”
Hmm. It’s this grey area — which used to be written off as dumb men listening to their baser instincts — that seems to be confusing us, especially on planet Sleb, where everything tends to be black or white.
James and Woods are not exactly trailblazers in this respect. The comedian Russell Brand, who says he has slept with more than 1,000 women, was treated for his compulsive need to screw around. Likewise David Duchovny, the American actor, who did a stint in therapy when his marriage hit the skids.
Eric Benet, former husband of the actress Halle Berry, suffered the ignominy of being sent to rehab by his mother-in-law after cheating on her daughter — but plaintively objected to being seen as a sex addict.
“In retrospect, it’s not what I would label my situation,” he said afterwards.
“It was presented to me that for the marriage to have a shot, this is what you need to do ... I went and heard other people’s stories and realised this is really not my struggle.”
Could the labelling of every cheating husband as a sex addict merely be the latest manifestation of a trend to pathologise old-fashioned bad behaviour as a disease? After all, both overeating and gambling have been elevated into addictions that are often blamed on genetics or depression.
And what about women — do they ever suffer from so-called sex addiction?
“The reality is that it’s probably about 70% men and 30% women,” says Serratt. Women are more likely to suffer from “love addiction”, he claims, “which can have just as severe consequences”.
Not that he makes a huge distinction between the two conditions: “There’s a saying, ‘Scratch a sex addict and you’ll find a love addict’ — well, scratch a love addict and you’ll find a sex addict.”
We need to take this more seriously, he believes — but the trouble with the British is that it’s apparently hard to persuade them to ask for help before it’s too late.
“I had a consultant working for us who was doing some market analysis and he said the British attitude to going for treatment is that you need to be in the gutter first. That attitude comes from a Victorian stiff-upper-lip tradition and it’s endemic in the culture,” he says.
And you think this is a bad thing? “Oh yeah, definitely. I had another guy, employed by one of the toughest advertising firms in the UK, who used to have a major alcohol problem. So he had three different partners from his firm take him to the pub to talk to him about his ‘drinking issue’. The pub! In the US there would have been an intervention.”
Still, we are definitely starting to learn the American way and even Serratt agrees that it can go too far. “We’ve had the odd case of wives calling up recently saying, ‘I think my husband is a sex addict’ — because they found pornography,” he says.
He tuts at this overreaction — but I bet that he will soon be seeing lots more outraged wives clutching printouts of internet porn.
My friends, meanwhile, have split up. It turned out that he didn’t have a “disease” after all. Just a rotten relationship.
SOURCE : TIMESONLINE
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