Sex Addiction
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Steven is currently an active member of AA and Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA). He’s also in longterm therapy dealing with the fact that he’s nearing fifty and has never sustained a relationship with a woman for longer than a year, and never one that included his being monogamous. “It’s all the same addiction,” he says. “The drinking, the pot, the sex–it’s all about not being able to really connect with anybody.”
Whether or not such a thing as “sex addiction” exists is controversial. In “Why There is No Such Thing as Sex Addiction – and Why it Really Matters,” Dr. Marty Klein argues that by using such a phrase, we are at risk for pathologizing sexual behavior that is outside the mainstream. This is an important consideration, because society has a way of making people wrong who are sexually active and alive, people we might call “sex positive.” The mainstream often makes people wrong who have a lot of partners or people who engage in alternative lifestyles such as polyamory, whether they have psychological problems or not. People may be branded as “sex addicts” just because they really, really like sex.
