Free The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong by Brooke Magnanti Page B

is not a therapist, and neither is Ford. What the realities are of why he cheated on his wife, we may never know. The handful of known affairs
he has had hardly seems outside the norm. Is it addiction? Are any of us actually in a position to judge that from the outside?
    Jack Morin, author of The Erotic Mind , theorised why people with a lot to lose still engage in what seems to be – from the perspective of the viewer at home – risky behaviour.
‘The adrenalin and other chemical charges pump up the excitement . . . It’s so common in the sex lives of everyday people that it would be a huge mistake to pathologize it. This is
mainstream sexual behavior.’ 44
    For these celebrities, is it an addiction at work, or simply a common desire for immediate or intense gratification? Probably most young men would struggle to turn down a sudden abundance of
female attention. That much hasn’t changed. What people say when they’re caught out has changed.
    In the past, a famous person embroiled in a sex scandal might have owned up to simple bad decisions. Take Hugh Grant, who, after the Divine Brown fiasco, went on The Tonight Show with Jay
Leno and said, ‘I think you know in life what’s a good thing to do and what’s a bad thing, and I did a bad thing.’ Quite simply, he acknowledged that the temptation
might have been difficult to resist – but that is a far cry from claiming it’s impossible.
    According to Dr Philip Hopley, an addiction specialist at the Priory, ‘The major concern is where sex-related problem behaviour is labelled an “addiction” when in fact poor
decision-making and/orimpulse control lie at the root of the problem.’ When people talk about what is normal, average, or healthy when it comes to sex, these are not
concepts that are well defined. There are no recommended limits for adults with data to back it up as there are for alcohol. And even Patrick Carnes, the ‘man who wrote the book’ on sex
addiction, admits that 83 per cent of currently diagnosed sex addicts have some other kind of addiction. The real problem those patients face probably goes far beyond the symptom of sex.
    It seems to be that in the case of true compulsive behaviour there are other factors at work. Alcohol and drug misuse are relevant, because they can have a significant disinhibiting effect. With
a number of the celebrity cases in the media, accusations of drug or alcohol misuse seem to go hand-in-hand with the sex ‘addiction’.
    Calling compulsive sex an addiction blames bad choices on a disease. Real, physiological addiction to alcohol and chemical substances has long been demonstrated. Making the leap from a set of
well-established mental and physical maladies to something like this seems like a misuse of the term in all but a minority of cases.
    Phillip Hodson from the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy has pointed out the differences between something we have a biological urge to pursue, like sex, and something like
drugs or alcohol. Sex is hard-wired in us; having a three-martini lunch isn’t. ‘It’s the same with eating. You cannot really be “addicted” to normal drives.
What’s the cure – to stop procreating or eating?’
    Criticism of the ‘sex addiction industry is not new, either – but coverage of the criticism rarely makes it into the mainstream press. In 1988, it was being written in peer-reviewed
journals how ‘sexual addiction and sexual compulsion represent pseudoscientific codifications of prevailing erotic values rather than bona fide clinical categories.’ 45 In other words, the diagnoses represent not real problems, but perceived problems, as defined by what society thinks is right at that particular time. But the
number of people promoting the idea of widespread sex addiction continues regardless, with more than 1000 citations for the paper that first named the phenomenon – the one that claimed more
than 40 per cent of people may suffer from the