Sex Addiction is the Loneliest Disease that Ever Was

There’s a scene in the movie, Shame, where Michael Fassbender’s sex addict is enduring the last of a day’s compulsive sexual experiences. He’s physically exhausted. He is in psychic agony. But. He can. Not. Stop. It’s one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever seen. To him, sex is every bit as torturous as a scene from a horror movie. This is as perfect a picture of sex addiction as they come. This is rock bottom. He has lost his job. He’s lost his family. He’s lost his sense of peace. He has replaced it all with shame, which he spends liberally on his pursuit of the next sexual high. As with heroin, that high will never come, so he hunts a ghost with all the compulsion he has.

A lot of Fetlife members like to call themselves sex addicts as though it’s fun or edgy. It is neither. It’s shame wrapped up in agony that rips through your psyche like a swallowed blade.

Sex addiction isn’t a clinical condition. The term was invented by Alcoholics Anonymous and was never included in the DSM. The closest the manual comes to naming it is through love and intimacy disorders.

I’ve spoken to many sex addicts in my time, and without fail, there is one thing they blame for their compulsions: an inability to cope with intimacy. Sex is the drug they use to overcome their loneliness while simultaneously avoiding connection. The thing they seek is the thing they avoid, like some kind of nightmarish begging of the question.

That picture fits neatly into the DSM’s intimacy disorder, which is an inability to connect and maintain stable relationships that often comes with an insatiable sex drive. Love avoidants live a life of suffocation. Closeness is torture for them, so they sabotage their relationships without even realising it. What better way to do that than by treating every partner as a body without a soul? What better way than by performing an assault on your very existence?

I have a strong sex drive, but my sexual experiences have rarely harmed me. Your average intimacy avoidant cannot say the same. Referring to your impressive libido as sex addiction detracts from the seriousness of the condition. This is not a diagnosis that feels like a fun walk on the wild side. Its consequences are every bit as damaging as alcoholism is.

Sexual dysfunction gets precious little mention on this site. It’s treated as a joke rather than the very real self-abuse that it is.

The last scene in Shame shows Fassbender’s face shifting from grief to pain to desperation. Surely, at this point, he will decide to put his agonised existence to bed? Surely, this is the part of every movie where the suffering character breaks through to something better? Surely, he’s had enough torture now?

Then, we cut to an exchange with a woman on a train--a clue that he’s about to put himself through yet more torture even if it kills him.

That is sex addiction--the loneliest disease that ever was. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc82iVVDpmI