Sex addiction

[Mr Rayon]

Is it true that Tiger Woods is a sex addict?

 

And what is it that causes someone to become a sex addict in the first place? What's the root cause (if there is one!)?

[lemur]

Hugh Heffner said that sex cannot be an addiction, only an obsession. Is he an expert or just extremely biased by his position in the sex-economy? Imo, addiction is nothing more than habit-formation and dependency that develops. People are addicted to their jobs, money, families, personality traits, etc. Take away any of these things or change use-patterns and people will experience withdrawal symptoms. Humans are habit-forming animals so I think addiction is a natural (over)extension of human behavior. I think it is a byproduct of the highly-evolved ability humans have developed to control their access to the things they need and want.

 

I don't think Tiger Woods' sexual behavior is particularly more of an addiction than many other people's. It's just he happened to form sexual habits that are regarded as deviant/taboo by others. If his sexual addiction had remained fixated on his wife, he would probably have never gotten the opportunity to get it under control, as many people who are married or in otherwise closed situations won't. Do a cultural analysis of the relationship between sex and secrecy and I think you'll find that rule #1 for most sexual behavior, including what occurs in marriage, is "don't ask don't tell." Another way to put it is that many people live under the rule that as long as you keep your dirty-laundry private, there's no problem with it. In reality, people can be suffering from terrible addictions, domination, exploitation, and other control-disorders in their (secret) private lives and they will never get power over the things that disempower them because their lives are enshrouded in the respect of privacy. This is not to say it is nice to have your privacy revoked against your will and 'outed' publicly, per se'. It's just a hard question about what to do when people are complicit in protecting their own detriment from "outside interference."

Edited May 24, 2011 by lemur

[swansont]

!

Moderator Note

Voltman, please make an effort to post in the proper sections; the Lounge is for topics not covered by the other categories. The subject of sex addiction — and one needs to establish that it's a legitimate affliction — is a medical issue of some sort. Phrasing a question this way tries to establish the premise as true without actually providing any support for it. That's on the shady side of discussion tactics.

[PhDwannabe]

Is it true that Tiger Woods is a sex addict?

 

And what is it that causes someone to become a sex addict in the first place? What's the root cause (if there is one!)?

 

There is absolutely no straight answer here. "Addiction" is not clinically defined in any rigorous, "official" sense that a wide membership of the relevant sciences agrees upon. (Cue the part where somebody looks up something authoritative-sounding, quotes it, and claims that it has been. Come on, get it over with. Difficult for me to prove a negative and all.) Surprisingly, you actually don't need to really nail it down completely to do a lot of research on it.

 

The closest we have are disorders of substance use and abuse. A rough clinical formulation of addiction that is more-or-less agreed upon at the moment is that addiction involves both tolerance and withdrawal. With tolerance, you need more and more of the substance (we'll just go with "substance" for now) to achieve identical effects. Many mechanisms of drug tolerance are fairly well-explained physiologically: for many recreational drugs of abuse, the brain deploys antogonistic processes to maintain homeostasis in the face of the insult to the system that the drug represents--your brain is used to dealing with opioids, for instance, since it makes plenty of its own, so it has a small arsenal of opioid antagonists ready to dull the effects of too much activity at those receptor sites. (This is often referred to as "opponent process.") It's slightly more controversial to explore what you might call psychological mechanisms of tolerance (of course, all behavior and experience involves activity at the physiological level, but psychological mechanisms might be loosely thought of as those sort of better explained behaviorally.) These more distal psychological mechanisms of tolerance would probably be necessary to claim tolerance in non-drug "addictive" activity. This is despite the ardent desire of many researchers, "advocates," and those in the popular press to say that it's "all brain chemicals." You've no doubt read all kinds of fun articles about how this or that neurological pleasure center is activated in gambling, or how sex looks the same as cocaine to the brain, or any other such silliness. That line of thinking is reductive, tautological, and mostly worthless in the form it's presented in (I don't deny that it is very useful research, but that's another story), since, again, all behavior and experience is mediated by physiological processes. Gambling behavior is mediated by neuronal activity. Uhhh... we're supposed to be surprised by this? So is peeing, or coughing, or signing your name, or picking up the remote control. Bottom line, tolerance is harder to demonstrate for non-drug stuff; since all of the relevant outcomes are not objectively measurable, but instead consist of subjective experiences like "pleasure," we're force to ask people about them rather than being able to rely exclusively on fun neurotransmitter assays. Not that such things are unstudyable. But it's a damned can of worms.

 

So, withdrawal, then? We're just as sticky here. It's easy to say that people experience withdrawal when any sort of reinforcer is removed from their environment. Lemur gets to this when he says:

People are addicted to their jobs, money, families, personality traits, etc. Take away any of these things or change use-patterns and people will experience withdrawal symptoms.

...but this is really a connotative extension of this construct, "withdrawal," which more narrowly defines what we now often call a "withdrawal syndrome." When we're talking about "real" withdrawal, we're not just talking about feeling crappy because something fun is gone. We're talking about a syndromal collection of (typically measurable physiological) changes that typically represent a sort of mirror image of the substance's effects. So, benzodiazapines typically act as anxiolytics and anticonvulsants; suddenly go cold turkey, and you feel anxious and get tremors. Again, some of this is explained by "opponent process." The antagonistic mechanisms maintained by the body in a fight against the insult persist for a bit after the drug is removed, until they can catch on to the new state of affairs and return to baseline. Now, you could take a step here and say, "well, if the effects of something are fun and happiness, wouldn't anhedonia and dysphoria be the withdrawal syndrome, then?" Well, you could, but we're stretching the spirit of the law, here. Do that, and you expand the construct to explain so many things that it doesn't really end up explaining anything. Withdrawal is conceptually difficult to define outside of more readily identifiable chemical processes. We're just not usually talking about negative emotional states when we're talking about withdrawal--rather, those states are reactive to an unpleasant withdrawal process that's defined more rigorously.

 

So, then, what are we left with? I tend to view the idea of "sex addiction" with great skepticism, as I do gambling addiction, shopping addiction, internet addiction, eating addiction, and the rest of the great flowering of pathologies which self-help groups and popular book authors--not to mention more than a handful of real researchers--have more or less invented in the past few decades. Are these real and problematic behaviors? Good god, absolutely. Many of them have effects as debilitating and horrifying as any drug problem. But are these "addictions" the same kind of beast as drug addiction? Let's be clear: the mere use of that term is basically a rhetorical attempt to say that they are. As is much research which attempts to illuminate their neuropsychological underpinnings.

 

But you really have to take a step or two back and ask yourself--and this is where empiricism begins to fail us--what the hell do we even mean when we say "addiction," anyway? If I want desperately to hop on one foot all day, but I resist it with great effort, is that an addiction? Does it become one when I fail to resist it? What about when hopping on one foot all the time begins to cause problems in my social or occupational life? (This is our all-important "clinically significant distress" criterion.) Well, that's got its own problems. Most importantly, what does it say about the relative "power" of that substance (or activity) over me? Does it say I'm less culpable--in an almost moral sense--for my actions when I fail to resist my urge? Or ought it simply be less surprising to others when I continue to do so? Does it have implications for how others should be treating me? Sadly, most people seem to have locked onto a relatively simplistic dichotomy of "your-fault, lock-you-up" vs. "not-your-fault, have-some-sympathy." That obscures a whole hell of a lot of complication. What we're climbing towards is this: do we really think this thing somehow abrogates my free will? Is such a thing even possible? Consider what is, from one perspective, a nonsensical admonition of 12-step programs: that booze--or whatever--has complete power over me. And yet, we're all here sitting in this room not currently drinking. So is that power really complete? Seems like it could be a little more powerful, you know, and make you run screaming out the door right now. Maybe it's just got, like, 30% power over you. Wait... what the hell exactly does a human being with 70% of a normal level of moral agency look like?

 

I don't have the answers for you. I can answer, in a way, a question you didn't ask: what's an addiction? Well, we haven't really decided yet. As of now, the answer tells you as much about the values of the respondent as it does about the addict. Is sex addiction an addiction? Well, it depends on what the hell an addiction is. Is it the same thing as a crack addiction, or a nicotine addiction? I tend to think not. Though it might be closer, on a spectrum of behaviors-that-can-generally-sort-of-get-out-of-hand, than reading the morning paper or gardening. Is it a process that removes some chunk of free will or moral agency? I tend to think not.

 

What a mess.