Dirty Little Secrets (12 page)

Janet was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as an adult, which is a mood disorder, considered more treatable than personality disorders. But when Janet was a teen, few people had even heard of such a thing. She was a heavy drinker and pot smoker from a young age. She knows now that those things were a way to self-medicate, to stop the fast-moving, obsessive thoughts that plagued her day and night. She had a lot of sex, too, usually with strangers, and she berated herself for it later. Sex drive can increase a great deal while manic. The problem comes later, when the person—usually a female—realizes she wants more than just sex in her life. Because men are trained to think of women who are easy to sleep with as not relationship material, the sexual behavior rarely turns into more than a night or two.

Add this rejection to the shame people often feel after manic episodes. For women, promiscuity connected to mental disorders is particularly hard. The shame that comes with having a mental health disorder in the first place multiplies the shame that many girls feel about having and wanting sex, and the ways in which they get punished for it through rejection or derogatory labels (“slut” and “whore,” for instance). This sort of shame is pretty prolific, of course, when it comes to young women and promiscuous behavior. A culture that finds sexual behavior among young women unconscionable will only further punish girls who have sex because of an unresolved pain.

Gigi’s and Janet’s loose-girl behavior does not stand on its own; for them both, it’s affected by all of the issues that arise from having a personality disorder and a mood disorder. For most loose girls, it’s the same: their promiscuity does not exist in a vacuum. Promiscuity is commonly associated with almost every disorder you can imagine—bulimia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, borderline personality disorder, and bipolar disorder, to name just a few. Promiscuity in teenagers is also typically associated with adolescent depression. Sexually active girls are more than three times more likely to be depressed than girls who are not sexually active. They are also three times more likely to commit suicide.
¹

Behaviors can compound these conditions. In middle adolescence, we see the highest levels of coexisting behaviors with promiscuity, such as substance use, alcohol use, and arrests.
²
We know, too, that those adolescents engaged in more promiscuity also tend toward more risky sexual behaviors, such as not using condoms.
³
Likewise, with other types of risky behavior, we are likely to find negative behaviors around sex.

Teens fourteen and older are twice as likely to have sex under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Older teens who drink alcohol are seven times more likely to have sexual intercourse and are twice as likely to have four or more partners. Drug-using older teens are five times as likely to have sex and three times as likely to have four or more partners.
⁴
A Washington University School of Medicine study found that alcohol dependence and conduct disorder contribute to having a higher number of sex partners among older teens.
⁵
And a relatively notorious study that came out of a U.K. university noted that women who drank were 40 percent likelier to have abortions—notorious because pro-choice parties were dismayed by the researchers’ choice to point to abortions rather than something less politically charged, such as sexual activity.
⁶
The other criticism leveled at this and the previous study was the lack of attention to the stigmas applied to drunkenness among women and how that relates to abortions or sexual intercourse. There is a long history of the alcoholic woman as an acceptable target of sexual aggression, with more than one court proceeding leading to the “blame the victim” status given to women who drink and then become victims of rape.
⁷

Eighteen-year-old Niesha told me she only has sex when she’s drunk or high. For her, all the activities together are what she’s after. She likes the whole experience, the sense that she can get pulled out of her life, which currently has very little direction. Her parents made her move out the day she turned eighteen, and so she lives with a couple of friends in a tiny apartment. They all work in chain restaurants during the day, and at night they party. They invite some of the guys they work with, who bring fifths of liquor, cocaine, and pharmaceuticals, and they party until four or five in the morning. Invariably, one of the guys winds up in Niesha’s bed. It’s been a rotating cycle; she sleeps with whichever one gets there first. The next day she is always late for work, with a pit in her stomach about what happened the night before.

When I talked to her, she asked me whether I thought she had a drug and alcohol problem. I told her it sounded as though she were using a number of substances and situations to try to soothe something inside.

Of course, adolescence is a time of risk taking. Most adolescents use these years to experiment with their own boundaries, with what they can handle, and with identity. Promiscuity is, in many ways, a perfectly normal part of that experimentation. But as with substance use, because sexual behavior is stigmatized, many teens turn it into self-destructive behavior. When we see other types of self-harming behaviors in teenagers, we tend to also see sex used in negative ways. This is important, because it describes the difference between normative sex—normal sexual exploration—and sex used to harm oneself.
⁸

In almost every email I receive from readers, girls ask me why they can know their behavior hurts them, and yet can’t seem to stop. They know they are having sex for the wrong reasons. They know they need something from it that they won’t actually get, that they are setting themselves up to feel even worse. There are many answers to why loose girls have trouble stopping the behavior, but an important one to consider is that the behavior is an addiction.

ADDICTION AND THE LOOSE GIRL

I’ve gotten some flak for using the word
addiction
attached to the idea of loose-girl behavior. While promoting
Loose Girl
, I gave a number of readings from the book with follow-up question-and-answer periods. Inevitably, there was one person in the audience who was unhappy with the fact that I’d suggested that being a loose girl was an addiction. One man said, “I almost died from my addiction. Did you?” Of course, I could have said defensively that I could have almost died from HIV or some STD. I could have died when, as a young girl, I put myself in danger by going off with strange men. But this isn’t really the point. That man in the audience was angry because he had surely seen a number of issues showing up lately as addictions: sex addiction, love addiction, relationship addiction. And perhaps he felt that calling these issues addictions took away from his own struggles with chemical addictions.

But these issues are rightfully addiction, too—they are not chemical addictions, no, but process addictions, which is an addiction to an activity as opposed to an addiction to something that is ingested. Process addictions include spending money, gambling, Internet use, and—you guessed it—sex and love. A person with a process addiction is after psychological gratification and will indulge in their “drug” of choice enough that he or she build up a sort of dependency. The danger of process addictions occurs when the activity gets in the way of one’s daily life functioning or leads a person to harm his or her body, as with eating disorders. Sex and love addictions are example of pseudorelationship addictions, a type of process addiction, which are so integrated into our society, often considered the norm, that it is tricky to decipher what is truly an experience of addiction and what is simply a bad relationship.

Perhaps it helps to define addiction. Craig Nakken, author of
The Addictive Personality
, defines addiction as an attempt to control the uncontrollable cycles we all experience in our lives.
⁹
We all experience loss and heartache. We all don’t get what we want plenty of times in our lives. But when a person uses a particular object, event, or another person to try to control how that feels, to produce a desired mood change, and when that person
has
to use this thing to feel better, that is addiction.

Those mood changes can also be thought of as intoxication. So when a sex addict experiences an uplifted mood while in a sex shop, that is a sex addict acting out her addiction. Or when a boy looks at a loose girl and smiles, and she winds up forgetting all the other plans she had for that evening so she can focus on making that boy hers, that is the loose girl acting out her addiction. The point that crosses this behavior over to addiction is the loose girl’s inability to attend to anything else in the face of feeding her desire. When her life has become unmanageable, to use the language of the twelve-step programs, when she has lost something that ultimately matters more to her, such as a long-term, loving relationship, a chance to have children, a career, she has entered into a phase we can frame as addiction. Or, perhaps put best, when she keeps doing it even though she really, really wants to stop, she has entered the world of addiction.

One way that loose girls are different from, say, girls who are just moving through a phase, or from girls who really want sex and are only troubled because it’s not accepted by society, is that loose girls know that what they are doing hurts them, but they can’t seem to stop. This is why I classify the behavior as addiction. This is where it is different from healthy sexual behavior. Loose girls don’t have sex for the right reasons, or at the least for reasons that will benefit them. They have sex to maintain the addiction, which is the same reason smokers keep smoking long after they want to quit or that pot smokers keep waking and baking long after they’ve decided their drug use isn’t working for them anymore.

Beth wrote to me after coming out of rehab for heroin use. She said her addictions to men and heroin are remarkably similar. If a man rejects her, she turns to heroin to get that good feeling back, and she has spent many months homeless and on the streets as a result. If she is off heroin, she man hunts to get the feeling back again. The pain she feels, she said, is so deep and awful that she cannot stay away from one or the other. She had two years of sobriety from both, after which she felt like she’d really done important work to move on.

She met a man she thought was different. But it turned out he was just like the others in her pattern. He was unavailable, unable to give her what she needed. He treated her like he cared for her, slept with her willingly, but said he wasn’t interested in more than friendship. So she wound up on the streets again for seven months. She slept with five random guys, feeling deep pain about the guy who sent her on a bender. She wants so badly to break free, to stop turning to things that hurt to try to get away from hurt. She recognizes the irony. She sees how irrational her behavior is. She knows, too, that she should never talk to that guy again, erase his number, stop answering his texts, but she can’t. She feels trapped in the cycles she’s built for herself because her only other option is terrible despair.

The object of a person’s addiction—the heroin, the drink, the boy, the porn—is always a stand-in for a real relationship. It becomes, in fact, an addict’s primary relationship, meaning that the addict finds it much more difficult to have successful romantic relationships. The main point here is that, while those with pseudorelationship addictions desperately want some sort of real relationship, they actively avoid intimacy through their addictions. In general, too, like any other addicts, they head further into their addictions because of the shame and pain their addictions cause them. Every time they prove to themselves that they can’t have love, they act out further, digging themselves even further into their inability to have love.

Also, it’s important to acknowledge what is beneath the addiction, which is always the kind of tremendous pain and despair we saw in Beth’s story. So many addictions are attempts to escape anguish. The more the addict escapes it by pursuing his addiction, the more tremendous and unmanageable that pain seems to be. With chemical addictions, that sense becomes reality because the addict literally changes the brain’s ability to feel pleasure. With process addictions, that sense of terror about one’s pain is largely a result of anxiety. When a person avoids the thing causing her anxiety, the avoidance becomes evidence that the thing is worthy of feeling anxiety about. It’s a sort of circular reasoning we do when it comes to anxiety. In reality, the thing causing the anxiety is rarely as horrible and terrifying as our anxiety makes us believe it is. So, while the pain behind addiction is very real, it is usually not as insurmountable as we feel it is. It might be initially, because it’s been unattended to for so long and because it’s a new thing to feel it, but over time we desensitize to its false strength.

It is very human, this desire to categorize and label and understand. We’ve seen a fascination with process addictions in our media over the last decade or so. David Duchovny was one of the first celebrities to admit his sex addiction after playing the role of a sex addict on the television show
Californication
. Russell Brand admits to being a sex addict. Tiger Woods went to a treatment center for sex addiction after revealing his long list of female sex partners while married. Dr. Drew Pinsky produced and starred in
Celebrity Sex Rehab
, which followed a number of celebrities through their rehab for sex addiction (and one for love addiction). Sex and love addicts are also prone to voyeurism and exhibitionism. Although one can imagine feeling tremendous shame while shooting up on-screen, if you’re a sex addict, you probably don’t mind acting sexy in front of a camera.