Newsweek tackles Sexual Addiction
The Sex Addiction Epidemic , an article in the December 5th edition of Newsweek , attempts to shed new light on sexual addiction . The only thing the article actually does effectively, is to inform individuals about Shame , a critically acclaimed movie about sexual addiction in which the protagonist is a New Yorker in Manhattan . We also learn that a lot of women are coming forward about their sexual addiction.
Sexual addiction is a difficult addiction to explain. Women with sexual addiction problems, have long been passed off as nymphomaniacs; looking at female sexual addiction in that way, through use of a pejorative, fails to put their addiction in the proper perspective. Sexual addiction is an abstract concept that is not your problem, until it happens to you.
There is also the issue of attempting to understand sexual addiction through causation; does wasting your life on the Internet looking at pornography bring on sexual addiction? The truth is probably somewhere in between; I doubt that pornography would make you addicted to sex any more than marijuana makes you addicted to hard drugs. Pornography can give you a skewed, twisted, demented, and unhealthy outlook on life, and definitely affect your sexual health, but it is its own problem. A lot of people that are trapped in the matrix of pornography, do not even have sex; some in spite of it, some because of it.
Instead we are led to believe that obsessive masturbation is a symptom of sexual addiction. But masturbation is not that much different from pornography; pornography is psychological, masturbation is physical, but both are their own issue. It is easy to compartmentalize sex; sexual intercourse , giving or receiving oral pleasure, pornography, and masturbation, are all degrees of separation, and tangents, of sexuality that may not have anything to do with each other, and that can be experienced in no particular order.
Everyone enjoys sex. But what is it that causes some of us to worship the act itself? Sex is meant to be an experience with its own mind, that comes and goes as it pleases, an experience that you can never perfect, and one that you can never fully control. Sex addicts, may be seeking a holy grail of perfection that is impossible to achieve. In their quest for variety, or the perfect individual, or for physical intimacy, they may never find what they are looking for.
Society persecutes individuals that are looking for loopholes, that want more. Some people are just into sex, for what sex is worth. Some people are willing to go to great lengths in order to experience sex that other individuals simply are not going to take. Does that make them an addict any more than someone that has to climb an even higher mountain or jump off of an even higher cliff? Does that make them evil; chasing the sexual experience is immoral and sinful, but does this make them any worse than the rest of us?
The average person wants to experience some of the abnormalities and idiosyncrasies of sex that the sexual addict takes for granted but is never going to go out of their way to have any of these experiences. God has given us plenty of consequences to deal with when we do so. If you can turn that part of your brain off, what does this make you? A sinner perhaps, but it does it necessarily mean that you are an addict?
