Sex addiction?

Following on from yesterday's post, I decided to look a little further in search of evidence for the claim that vibrators can change the brain.  As I suspected, there does not appear to be any that specifically links the two. Research into obesity has, however, linked over-eating with a change in the activity of dopamine receptors.  In this article in Psychology Today, a similar change is suggested may occur with the over-use of sexual stimuli.  The evidence produced for this, however, appears to be purely anecdotal.  I have no problem with the idea that such a link may be correct but would hesitate to assert it as fact until it is demonstrated to be so.

Be that as it may, the article focuses on over-eating and the link is made with excessive use of sexual stimuli, whether that be porn or vibrators.  The effects of over-eating are plain for all to see, for the individual concerned will clearly be overweight.  Experimental subjects are therefore easy to identify.  Over-indulgence in sexual stimuli, however, gives no such external evidence and thus it would be hard to devise any trial.  Researchers would have to rely on their subjects to self-identify.  In the area of personal sexual habits, "excessive" is very often a matter of subjective judgement.  For a devout Christian one visit to a porn site in a month could be excessive, whereas for another person an hour or so a day would be considered unproblematic.  Furthermore, people lie.  No control group can be guaranteed to contain only occasional users or total abstainers.  These problems may be possible to overcome but, as far as I can see, no such study has been undertaken.

I do not deny that many people experience distress around their sexual behaviours. A gay friend of mine, in the years before Gay Lib, experienced such severe distress about his sexuality that he volunteered for the most brutal "treatments" from aversion therapy to hormone treatment.  None worked, of course, and his distress continued throughout the time I knew him.  He was, he assumed, sick both spiritually and mentally and the psychiatric establishment of his time fully accepted his self-diagnosis. He was, however, not sick.  He was simply gay.

For the father of sexology, Krafft-Ebbing, homosexuality was a perversion.  So were all other deviations from the missionary position.  Rape, however, was not.  Rape was merely an aberration since it did not preclude procreation.  On typing this, I am reminded of the Catholic moral theologian cited by Uta Ranke-Heineman in "Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven" who decreed that it was morally preferable to rape one's mother than to masturbate.  Which is, of course, the prime purpose of both porn and vibrators.

When I was young, I would and could masturbate to climax several times a day.  Age has taken away both the desire and ability to do this.  I need time to recover.  That is a simple and inescapable fact. In some ways  I regret the demise of that horny youth.  But there are far more ways that I do not. I do not now think that the habits of my youth were excessive.  I did, however, then.  For masturbation was surrounded by taboo and guilt.  It was a cause of both pleasure and pain.  It was not a subject really fit to mention.  Even today, when things are more open, it is a handy term of abuse to call another a "wanker".  (Of course, he almost certainly is so the insult always fits its target!).  In those days, when sex was always on my mind (far more even than today), I would not consider myself addicted, however.  I was within the range of normal - although my guilt and shame may have been greater than some.

I recently came across a comment on another blog that referred to me - not by name, but it was clear who  was meant- as a self-confessed sex addict.  I cannot remember using that term, for I do not believe that such a condition exists.  I like the company of women, both sexually and socially, and am even more fascinated by them than I ever was, so I fully accept that I could be seen as a womaniser - another word the commenter used.  I have also behaved in the past less than honourably and that is a matter for regret. But this is not, and has not been, a regular feature of my life.  I have a relatively high libido and this in itself is not a problem either for me or anyone else.  I am glad of it.  It is part of who I am.  There were, granted, long periods of celibacy, while I was a single parent, which I did not enjoy so much.  For those years masturbation was the only option that seemed available, so that is what I did.  I am not, however, an addict.  I never have been.  At least, not to sex.  Alcohol and tobacco, certainly.  Other drugs, perhaps.

The whole extension of the addiction model into areas that do not involve the ingestion of substances seriously disturbs me.  For the word addiction implies that a chemical dependency is built up so that withdrawal from the substance involved causes acute and often dangerous physical symptoms.  That cannot be said of gambling, sex or any of the other behaviours which have now been given the label of addictions.  Compulsions they may well be but they are not addictions.

I am highly suspicious of the current trend to pathologise sexual behaviour as addiction.  While accepting that there are many people whose sexual habits cause them distress and for which they need help, it seems to me that many of the advocates are more concerned with maintaining the Judeo-Christian moral codes than they are with the needs of the individual.  When I  was in AA I remember people identifying themselves as alcoholic because they would have a couple of drinks when they got home from work.  They did not report the physical symptoms or the all-consuming cravings that come with addiction.  They were not addicts.  They merely used alcohol to relax.  But it troubled them that they did so.  It went against their moral code.

This is, what I believe,  what is happening to many of those who seek help from sex addiction counsellors.  Their desires and sometimes their subsequent behaviours conflict with what they believe is the divinely ordained model.  Rather than questioning the model they then pathologise their own sexuality.  It is somehow preferable that a desire, that for others may be normal, becomes for them an illness rather than accept that what they perceive as  their god may have got it wrong.  Further, without being overly cynical, I have to note that there are many people within the Conservative Christian Community earning a living offering treatment for this imaginary condition.

For me, as I travelled along the path of the Goddess, it became necessary to accept and love myself as a sexual being, with all that that entails- pleasant and unpleasant.  The journey has not been easy, with manympainful lessons to be learnt.  I am nowhere near the end, but I am closer than I was at the beginning.  On a larger scale, I think that the Goddess Movement as a whole must move towards a morality that is realistic, and non-judgemental with consent at its centre.  No behaviour between adults with consent should be any concern to those not involved, but equally, any behaviour without consent must be recognised as the concern of the larger community.  For we are all Her children and we all will make mistakes and none of us are damned.

Brutal sex?

In yesterdays Independent was an article by Yasmin Alibhaia Brown in which she expresses strong disquiet about what she perceives to be the state of sexual relations today.  It starts with an account of two overheard conversations in a restaurant which severely discomfited both her and her friend.  The first was between a group of young women who cheerfully discussed their use of sex toys and the second between a group of young men who then loudly discussed how they would like to treat those women.

I accept that both groups of people were guilty of inconsiderate behaviour.  People have the right to eat their meal without being disturbed by the raucus chatter of others.  I personally would get just as upset by the loud and raucous discussion of the latest football match while I am trying to focus on an intimate conversation with a friend.  However, the conclusions she draws from her experiences bear absolutely no relation to reality.  I would have expected a journalist of her standing to be better informed.

The first point I would take issue with is her title, whether this be by a sub or not.  She asks, "When did sex become so brutalised?"  I would contend that it was ever thus but is in fact getting gradually less so .  The Soviet troops who raped their way into Berlin and other German cities at the end of the Second World War were not reacting to the free and frank, albeit ribald, exchange of views between consenting adult women. Their actions, condoned by Stalin with words to the effect of "Let the boys have their fun", were the result of a much longer tradition of male supremacy and active misogyny.  For to go back further, the Bible gives a clear account of the divine command to seize and rape the women of the conquered enemy.  Of course, "boys will be boys".  The young men in the restaurant were simply following this dishonourable tradition.  The women were discussing pleasure.  The men were discussing rape.  Yasmin appears not to notice the difference.

Nor is this use of sex toys by women anything new.  Jeremiah accused the women of his land of making love with idols.  By this, I assume, he was referring to carved phalloi or dildos.  In recent years, indeed, examples of what appear to be prehistoric dildos have been unearthed at many sites around the world - for just one see here.  In Restoration England there is a satire by the Earl of Rochester in which he writes of Englishmen being supplanted in their women's affections by a recent Italian immigrant, Signor Dildo.  In the nineteenth century the staple of many doctors' practices was the manual stimulation of women in order to cure "hysteria" by enabling an orgasm.  It was to save those men's overworked fingers that the vibrator was first invented. These soon spread into the home. The first five electrical items to be marketed were, in no particular order, sewing machines, fans, kettles, toasters and vibrators and by 1917 there were more vibrators around than toasters.  They were openly advertised in women's magazines.

YAB then segues into a condemnation of S and M.  This is again nothing new.  It has been around a long time.  There is a strong sado-masochistic eroticism in many of the accounts of the lives of saints and it is certainly there in much Christian iconography.  Victorian gentlemen who subscribed to magazines such as "The Pearl" were regaled with stories of bondage and whipping. There were also, it is certain, a plethora of child prostitutes who would provide them, unwillingly, with flogging fodder.  The modern BDSM scene, with its concern about consent even though this is at times breached, seems tame in comparison.

Sexuality is indeed problematic.  It has, however, been so for a very long time.  What seems to have offended Yasmin is not this problematic nature but the fact that it is now more in the open.  The young women were quite within their rights to discuss sex toys.  Sex is clearly an important part of their lives, as it is for most human beings. They were talking about something that gave them pleasure and harmed no one.  The same cannot, however, be said for the young men with their, only too traditional, talk of rape.  Yasmin, however, has doubts that vibrators are harmless, citing one anonymous Relate counsellor who talks of them changing womens' brains.  I know of no empirical studies that can support this claim. I assume Yasmin does not know either, or she would have cited them.  I am sorry, Yasmin, but an unnamed counsellor does not have any more authority than I or anyone else.

I am sorry that she and her friend, ethnicity (Asian) given but gender not, were embarrassed by the subject spoken about by those rather inconsiderate women.  I just question why it should offend them any more than any other overheard conversations.  I also question the conclusions she draws from the experience.

As it stands this article is as ill-informed and prejudiced as any in the Mail or other tabloid and I would have expected a journalist of Yasmin's calibre to have done better.

Sex at Dawn

A chance encounter while surfing lately led me to order a copy of this book.  On reading it, I found myself becoming what I can only describe as excited.  This, I must add, was not sexual but intellectual.  It was, in fact, akin to the feeling I had when I first read a book about the Goddess.   It was the excitement of recognition.  Nothing I read seemed new to me. Instead, I found within it a clear and cogent account of what I had inwardly believed for a long time.

Drawing on a variety of disciplines, from human biology through primatology to anthropology, the authors demonstrate that the dominant model of human sexual relationships is contrary to what may be termed the natural order of things.  Their thesis is presented in a clear and vernacular way that cuts through the dryness of academic discourse and reveals the faulty assumptions that have pre-determined  many of the conclusions drawn by researchers.  For example, we are told that marriage is a well-nigh universal feature of society.  When this claim is examined, however, it turns out that marriage is, in reality, a catch-all word that encompasses a wide variety of systems governing sexual relationships, from strictly enforced monogamy to plural and beyond.  Thus, the word marriage has no real meaning.

Within our own society, sexual exclusivity within heterosexual pairs has long been considered both the ideal and the natural order of things.   The current, acrimonious, debate about gay marriage is just one example of how this idea does not meet the needs of a significant proportion of the population. More telling, however, is the universal phenomenon, despite its dire and often fatal consequences, of adultery.  If monogamy is, as we are told, natural, then it would surely be unnecessary to enforce it.  And yet, all the dominant religions contain within their codes the penalty of death for unapproved sexual conduct.  Despite this, human beings within even the strictest of societies persist in fucking around and are often subject to the ultimate penalty for doing so.  The only conclusion that can be reached is, therefore, that monogamy is contrary to human nature.

Drawing on the observed behaviour of our nearest evolutionary cousins, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, the facts of human sexual anatomy and the findings of anthropology, the authors argue convincingly that we evolved as a species in which sex was vital to social bonding.  Their placing of the shift to sexual exclusivity at the point when we developed agriculture and thence civilisation is convincing.

We are where we are, however, and the book does not really go into any detail concerning how and if the immense damage within the human psyche caused by the model of exclusivity can be healed.  However, it presents a diagnosis and this is the first essential step towards a cure. And this cure must take the form of the development and adoption of a morality which takes account of human beings as they are and not how some   imaginary sky god, whom his devotees claim created human beings as they are, dictates they should be.


The criticisms I have read seem to focus on the colloquial style of their writing but this totally misses the point. Not only are they readable but they also reveal how the technical nature of much of the scholarly literature has hidden from view blatant absurdities and contradictions.

In short, for anyone interested in Goddess, sexual politics or social change, I would thoroughly recommend that they read this.

Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Human Sexuality.
Christopher Ryan  and Cacilda Jetha