Let’s start with a certain scenario: a fourteen-year-old gets arrested for stealing a car. This single act is likely to become the beginning of a life of going in and out of correctional facilities. So what if, during their court hearing, they ask the judge if they can make a statement. But instead of truly apologizing or admitting to doing something wrong, they say they have a problem, a compulsion, that led them to commit that crime. Or worse, they say they’re kleptomaniac as if that provides an excuse. In reality most of those teenagers don’t get a reprieve or a second chance, while others who commit much more violent crimes will be pardoned for the fact that they are in a more privileged position.
With the recent exposé regarding Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, it seems that at least one thing has been proven: we’re never far from a new sex scandal regarding a powerful man and allegations of sexual harassment, assault, or rape from filling our headlines and timelines. Most of the time we brace ourselves to hear the horrible details from the victim’s attorneys as well as the ensuing public statement from the accused. We’re then bombarded with these forced words of contrition that include a promise to get some sort of help, since these of perpetrators are almost never prosecuted, as well as an admission to this event leading them to realize they have a sex addiction.
The biggest problem I have with this is the use of sex addiction as an excuse for this sort of behavior. While people in the medical field are still not all on the same page on whether sex addiction is real or not, my non-expert opinion is that there are people who are suffering from this condition, especially now. That being said, I doubt that most of the people publicly saying they have it actually do. Addiction is a complex subject; there are millions of triggers that can lead to it, whether it’s a coping mechanism that’s gone too far, a consequence of buried trauma, or even hereditary, everyone of us is vulnerable to addiction. Though some of us are more than others.
Amidst this media storm regarding whether the producer should or should not go into rehab, Deborah Schiller, director of a sexual addiction treatment center in Mississippi, spoke with The Cut about what sex rehab is really like and about. But let’s start with her explanation about this condition.
“There’s a glitch in the brain, and the person who is born with fewer dopamine receptors than others are unable to reward themselves from within. They reach for something outside themselves to fix that, starting early on in life. Sex is one of those behaviors that people can start to deal with their stress.”
While plenty of health and science professionals claim there’s no such thing as sex addiction because there’s no physical withdrawal symptoms, like other substance abuse problems would have, we can’t deny that if someone we know told us they’ve been masturbating for five hours we’d think that they were just having a good time. Because that’s what sex addiction actually is. It’s not the person having the time of their life engaging in sexual encounters, watching porn non-stop, and masturbating continuously. It’s someone not being able to go about their day because there’s all this other stuff in their brain keeping them from functioning. Any one of us who can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be in that situation would tell them to just stop. But that’s the same as telling someone with anorexia to just have a sandwich.
The larger problem happens when other people use that illness as an excuse for their behavior. Since addiction and mental illness continues to be a taboo subject that people look away from, most who hear these statements just analyze the entire thing. They don’t consider the fact that consent doesn’t disappear because of addiction. And when we hear of something as horrible as sexual assault, it’s easier to be deaf and blind to the whole thing. Because one thing we tend to forget is that sexual assault or harassment is not about sex. It’s a warping of the sexual encounter. It’s taking a natural human instinct and using it against someone. It’s about power and exerting that power on someone else.
In fact, Schiller stated that her clinic does not work with people who’ve committed assault:
“We do take people who look at child pornography, voyeurs, people who have ongoing affairs. But rape is a violent assault. It’s not about sex. It’s about dominance. It’s like beating somebody up. That’s not sex addiction.”
We need to start reconsidering how we talk about assault and harassment, as well as how we think about sex addiction. Because placing one next to the other might seem an obvious choice, especially since we’ve seen it done so many times. But one is an act of intended violence. The other is a condition that is more self-destructive than anything else. People with sex addiction destroy the world around them, but they don’t attack others. Sexual predators hurt the people they encounter because they know they can. Let’s stop confusing these two concepts and make sure that people who need help get it and those who commit horrible crimes are properly prosecuted and punished.
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Images by Richard Prince