Addict Nation (17 page)

Vanity Fair
came out with an explosive article in which a bevy of women describe Tiger’s “huge sexual appetite” in excruciatingly embarrassing detail. Did I really need to know that one of Tiger’s estimated fourteen alleged mistresses claimed she told Tiger she didn’t want to have sex (because she had her period), but he insisted she pull out her tampon anyway as he allegedly took her from behind in a church parking lot while, unbeknownst to them, a tabloid hack purportedly shot grainy photos of the tryst? Did I really need to know that a woman who runs an escort service claimed to
VF
that Tiger would pay up to $60,000 for a weekend with “college-cutie, girl-next-door types . . . ”?

If half of what
Vanity Fair
laid out in that article is true, one could reasonably diagnose Tiger as a sex addict. That seemed the only explanation for Tiger’s extraordinarily reckless actions . . . deeds that led to massive personal and professional wreckage. Even though Tiger remained coy, refusing to say what, specifically, he finally went into “treatment” for, we really didn’t need to wait for this addict to self-diagnose. A drunk passed out in the gutter might never admit he’s an alcoholic, though a sober passerby might casually look down and, in the flash of an eye, accurately identify him as a chronic boozer.

I tried to imagine how Tiger must have felt reading that lurid
Vanity
Fair
article. In recovery, we talk about the “incomprehensible demoralization” of addiction. It’s the blushing shame that the addict feels when he looks back remorsefully on his own behavior, wondering,
How did I become that person? Why did I feel compelled to do those things?

“I had no control over my addiction—it was bigger than I was. Resistance was futile.”

—Dave, recovering sex addict

It’s the Intrigue That Hooks Us

One of the most fascinating aspects of sex addiction is that its “high” can be just as intoxicating as drugs or alcohol and is not primarily achieved by the sex act itself. While the addict may certainly derive pleasure from intercourse, oral sex, or any other type of physical sexual contact, it’s the “dance” preceding the sex that drives the compulsion. That dance is known as “intrigue.”

Most of us have experienced the enchanting exhilaration of falling in love. Most of us have been “under the influence” of romantic passion or lust at sometime in our life. There is nothing like it. It’s the inspiration for spellbinding novels and heart-wrenching songs. More than almost anything else, it propels, inspires, and— yes—intoxicates us. Mother Nature made it that way.

The laws of “natural selection” dictate that women will seek to attract the strongest, healthiest, and most dependable man. She needs to know she can count on his support to raise healthy offspring and protect the family. For this reason, she is more likely to be choosy and less likely to have sex with every male who makes the offer. Men, on the other hand, have an innate yearning to “fertilize” as many females as possible. Just as a bee pollinates flowers, he will seek to plant his seed over and over again—sometimes to the point of obsession.

Addiction Is Instinct Gone Awry

With sex addicts, the instinct to pollinate has gone completely haywire. One sex therapist describes it as the “challenge to get partners to say OK . . . Sex addicts get a sense of ‘job well done.’” So, when it comes to sex addiction, men seem, naturally, more vulnerable to the disease than women. Counselors report a large majority of the clients they treat for sex addiction are men.

“Boys are generally not made aware of, nor taught how to know or regulate their feeling states. Therefore, as men they struggle to know their interior experiences, and as a result frequently experience overwhelm. As testosterone is added to the mix, it is like gasoline on a fire. Behaviors of aggression, and impulsivity, including sexual impulsivity, all are enflamed.”

—Gregory Guss, licensed clinical social worker

Bad Boys

Bad-boy biker Jesse James, who like Tiger also retreated to rehab, allegedly turned to as many as four mistresses. Why? Could it have been to compensate for what would appear to be a mushrooming sense of inadequacy in the face of the ever more astounding accomplishments of his very beautiful, very successful, very rich, very talented wife, actress Sandra Bullock? His sex scandal broke just days after Sandra picked up an Academy Award for best actress in
The
Blind Side
, as Jesse sat in the audience looking up at her adoringly. Sandra must have felt blindsided by the women who came out of the woodwork. But in hindsight, the dynamic that led to the deceit seems clear. With an Oscar and a net worth estimated to be north of $80 million, Sandra had more than eclipsed her husband’s fame as the host of the reality show
Monster Garage,
where he supervises mechanics as they soup up vehicles. It would seem that, while married to Sandra, his ego was often in need of a turbo charge.

How does an insecure man overcompensate for feelings of emasculation? By getting the approval of as many “other” women as possible. In the book
Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous,
the recovery program’s founder sums up his sick, addictive relationships this way: “The objects of my passion were seen entirely in terms of their ability to fulfill my NEEDS . . . they were functions not human beings.”
³

In this case, the women seem to be everything his wife was not and would never want to be. Bullock is one of the most private, discreet actresses in Hollywood. Who did he allegedly have an affair with? Michelle “Bombshell” McGee, a heavily tattooed stripper with a penchant for posing in Nazi regalia who enjoys seminude karaoke. This brings us to another driving factor behind chronic infidelity. Remember Hugh Grant’s fling with a sixty-dollar prostitute while he was dating Elizabeth Hurley, one of the world’s most beautiful and elegant women? Yes, folks, we’re talking about
that
syndrome, the Madonna/Whore syndrome
,
which is referenced in sex-addiction literature as a common symptom of sexually addictive behavior.

“When you think about women who erotically dance and give a lap dance—the man sits there and the woman, who is naked or close to naked, gyrates around him, up and down him, as he sits there like a king on his throne.”

—Alison Triessl, attorney and cofounder/CEO
of Pasadena Recovery Center

Secrets and Lies

The Madonna/Whore syndrome is a feature of the sex addict’s “compartmentalization.” That’s a fancy term for living a double life, one with the angel, the other with the devil. That desire to possess both the good girl
and
the bad girl, along with the dueling impulses to be both the good boy
and
the bad boy, is a metaphor for the struggle all addicts face, over whether to follow the call of their higher yearnings or succumb to the lure of their baser instincts. It’s light versus dark. It’s integrity versus cynicism. It’s sobriety versus addiction.

Medical experts estimate there are about 16 million sex addicts in the United States today (many of them undoubtedly fornicating as you read this).
⁴
Unfortunately, many Americans find it hard to believe that any of them—including Tiger or Jesse—really are sex addicts or that such a thing as sex addiction even exists!

“I am so sick of everybody claiming to be a sex addict when they get caught cheating,” fumed a woman on a crowded couch at a party I attended. It was a Saturday night in April 2010. I was at a karaoke-themed birthday bash and had just wrapped up a room-clearing rendition of “Desperado” when an argument erupted among the few remaining party stragglers. The Tiger Woods cheating scandal had reached a deafening crescendo that week, and the seemingly endless media analysis was starting to grate on everyone’s nerves. First Tiger and then Jesse had reacted to their unmasking by running off into rehab (presumably for sex addiction). Many, if not most, people saw it as a cowardly cop-out. “It’s such a ridiculous excuse,” someone else yelled. “These guys are just cheaters and horn-dogs, not addicts!” Comedian and HBO host Bill Maher also pushed the notion of sex addiction being a joke with a New Rule:
“Stop saying ‘sex addict’ like
it’s a bad thing!”
And
“You want to know the surest way that you can spot
a ‘sex addict’? He’s got a penis.”
⁵

Personal accountability is important to people. The public gets annoyed when depraved celebrities try to patch up every monstrous misstep with a recovery meeting. Sex addiction is viewed as a get-out-of-jail free card for men who are merely lustful cads and liars. While people have no trouble accepting alcoholism, drug addiction, and even food addiction, a lot of Americans simply refuse to buy the notion that someone can become a sex junkie. To date, sex addiction is not listed as an official “disorder” in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual.
⁶
Hopefully, that will change.

In the groundbreaking book,
Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous,
the unnamed man who founded the recovery program that bears that name says he, too, was greeted with hostility and skepticism when he began to share his experiences as one of the first self-acknowledged sex addicts back in the 1970s. “Others could not understand my suffering . . . Even as I described the pain brought by these addictive patterns of compulsive sexual activity and emotional intrigue, these people complained that their lives did not contain ‘enough’ of this. They could not seem to understand that . . . insanity is
insanity
regardless of whether it is encountered in drinking or romance!”
⁷

Since all addiction can be described as an overpowering craving to repeatedly engage in an activity that provides temporary relief at the expense of terrible consequences, sex addiction can be defined as an uncontrollable impulse to have sex despite dire consequences to family, friends, and community, and to one’s own self-esteem.

“At the time there is an incredible adrenaline rush . . . it’s a connection that I found I couldn’t replicate anywhere else. But immediately after that experience is over, I mean driving back home, there is this incredible letdown and you’re just in a wash of shame . . . I was trying to get nonsexual needs met sexually, and that was the only way I knew how to meet those needs.”

—Female sex addict,
Dateline NBC,
February 24, 2004
⁸

They key phrase in the above quote is “trying to get nonsexual needs met sexually.” To say that sex addicts have sex for the wrong reasons is a monumental understatement. The addict often uses sex to escape from painful feelings of worthlessness and alienation by reassuring themselves of their value through repeated conquests. For men especially, who account for about two-thirds of the sex addicts in the United States, to “score” is to achieve “success,” which is to be a “winner.” The terrible irony is that the sex addict so cheapens the act of sex with these base motivations that he gradually
robs himself
of his dignity and integrity. As the addiction progresses, the feelings of worthlessness increase.

There is another irony to sex addiction. While the act of sex is, theoretically, about intimacy, the sex addict is terrified of intimacy. He feels much more secure in using sex for the thrill of conquest, for self-validation, to escape painful feelings, for revenge, or to outwit a rival. Sometimes a sex addict will add a new partner as “insurance,” in case one of his other sex partners slips away. For the sex addict, any manipulative reason to have sex is preferable to the purest motivation . . . to express love.

“Men love sex and men say, ‘We think about sex all the time and there is nothing wrong with thinking about sex all the time.’ And they are probably right. But when having sex, watching sex, having multiple partners takes over your life to the point where you cannot function . . . where you spend eight hours in front of a computer . . . where days and nights pass and you don’t even know what day or time it is, then it has literally taken over your life.”

—Alison Triessl, attorney and cofounder/CEO
of Pasadena Recovery Center

A Double Life Requires Secrets and Lies

Secrets will reveal themselves unless they’re protected! The way you protect secrets is with lies. Case in point, presidential wannabe John Edwards. The former North Carolina senator’s sexual obsession with a woman who was not his cancer-stricken wife, while he was on the campaign trail, resulted in a love child, which was a BIG SECRET that needed to be protected with BIG LIES. What already had the makings of a tawdry sex scandal morphed into something much more shameful as Edwards’s long-time aide Andrew Young came forward claiming the candidate begged him to lie for him and say the child was his, even though Young was married with children of his own. Says Young, “He was one of my best friends, we jogged together, our kids played together.” Young says he reluctantly agreed to play daddy in the charade.

It would be more than two years before John Edwards would finally come clean and tell the world
he
was, in fact, the father. But in that time, Edwards repeatedly lied on camera, claiming it was impossible for him to be the father because of the timing of the child’s birth. Edwards insisted, before the nation, that the affair was long over at the time the baby girl was conceived. The extent and complexity of John Edwards’s lies stunned even hardened politicians and journalists who thought they had seen it all. But when viewed through the prism of addiction, it’s really not that shocking at all.

Lying Is How Addiction Comes Packaged

While John Edwards, to my knowledge, never checked himself into rehab, to me he clearly appears to be, at the very least, a love addict. A close cousin of sex addiction is addiction to love and/or romance. Undoubtedly, John Edwards romanticized his cheating and lying and justified it as what he needed to do “for love.” Unlike Tiger Woods, who appears to have played a numbers game, adding up conquests the way he racked up golf majors titles, John Edwards probably regarded himself as being in the throes of a passionate “love affair” that was so intense he risked everything.