One way or another, sexuality in the news again?
You bet.
“Repetitive, compulsive behavior.” This is part of the elaborate definition of sex addiction as expressed in an article appearing in Time last week.
The issue at hand?
Is sex addiction real, or an excuse for “bad” behavior? Considering whether or not sex addiction is a “diagnosis-worthy” disorder is the thrust of the article, and the conclusion relative to the DSM-5 is that “a new study provides support for its inclusion.”
Of course, media has been claiming that sex addiction is running rampant for awhile, though personally I don’t buy it. That it’s a disorder? I’m on the fence. That it’s epidemic? That’s where I have my doubts.
As to the gender breakdown, the Time article reports:
95% of those seeking help for sexual compulsion at one of the study treatment centers were male but 40% of those diagnosed at psychiatric and addiction centers were women, suggesting that although the disorder may genuinely be more common in men, women may be less likely to seek help for it.
I have no answers, but plenty of questions – including whether or not a sample size of 207 is sufficient for reliable conclusions. But let’s move along to another topic in the news, shall we?
Female Fear Factor
We have only to look to the recent comments on rape and pregnancy by Republican Robert Mourdock who, having struggled with the issue, expressed his opinion that pregnancy resulting from rape is “God’s will.” He therefore arrives at the conclusion that abortion is out, even in the case of rape, a stance which is (incidentally) part of the 2012 Republican Platform.
Yet one more man commenting on a woman’s body. Go figure.
My body. Your body. Your sister’s, your mother’s, your daughter’s, your granddaughter’s.
Someone commits a heinous crime that results in pregnancy? Throw your hands up in the air, woman! You’re left to accept that it’s meant to be. You are now an incubator, and apparently a woman’s right to own herself or be more than her reproductive system remains too frightening a prospect for some.
Are we really so terrifying as that? Why do some men fear women?
I don’t feel very intimidating. Do you?
Does Everyone Hate Women?
I will not recite the litany of legislation that has been proposed in the past few years, looking to hurl American women back a half century. But the latest, which I couldn’t help but notice, was this item from the Keystone state on a proposed bill in which low-income women with newborns would have to prove rape or their benefits would be cut.
What? Have we lost our minds? Our souls? Our humanity? Let’s take our poorest women who do bear children and slash their benefits!
So why does it seem that the volume on misogyny has cranked up in recent years? Why do so many (outwardly normal looking men) act as though they hate women? That topic was the subject of a Daily Beast article this week as well, at least to a degree, as Megan McCardle writes:
… sexism is most likely to manifest when women are challenging your [male] position in the dominance hierarchy. A woman who agrees with you isn’t challenging your position; she’s reinforcing it…
So what gives? Our reproductive systems are swell when tied up with a pretty ribbon and presented on demand? But otherwise, not so much?
Sci-Fi to the Rescue?
I wonder what it would be like if we could transplant the female sexual organs into every man’s body for one year. Or perhaps a representative sample would be sufficient – one that exceeds 207. Now that would be a fascinating experiment.
Yep. We’ll take the whole kit and kaboodle – hormones, blood, boobs, booty, not to mention the pressure to be beautiful enough but not too much. And while we’re at it, might we sprinkle a bit of cellulite to enhance the experience of insecurity?
We need this body-swapping adventure to include some young men who can worry about being hit on (or not), getting pregnant (or not), and undergoing uncomfortable and invasive medical examinations.
But let’s not stop there!
Care to have us decide what constitutes too much sex or just the right amount? What about being prodded, probed, and poked in humiliating fashion when facing life-altering and wrenching personal decisions? Wouldn’t it be interesting if women could love ’em and leave ’em and never worry about whether or not a baby (or STD) has been left in the wake?
Shall We Toss the Viagra?
Naturally, we need men at middle age as participants as well. Shall we toss your viagra and trade it for a dose of disdain and dismissal? Menopausal symptoms that disorient and distress? Increasing invisibility by virtue of media and the medical establishment reinforcing a message that the women are no longer valuable or sexual at midlife – as is?
Perhaps a few cosmetic procedures to lift your spirits and empty your wallet? Botox? Face lift? Vaginal rejuvenation?
Wouldn’t this make for intriguing sci-fi? Ah, for a wizard who could conjure the spell to transform men into women for a period of time… a few periods of time to be exact, to know that our bodies are our business.
Ours, Gentlemen. Not yours.
Imagine!
Except I for one can’t imagine that sort of irresponsibility, and fortunately, most of the men I have known cannot either. They are accountable for their actions. They are honorable when it comes to their obligations. And they respect women.
“They” Are “Us”
As the waves of recidivist rhetoric (and legislation) continue to hit over and over, I have very few answers and endless questions. When did this happen? How did this happen? Have we been kidding ourselves about the gains in reproductive rights that we thought we made in the past two generations?
I gave birth to sons. “They” are us. Maybe you fathered daughters. “They” are us.
Actions have consequences, but it takes two to tango! Yet as long as it’s the woman’s body (and all too often her life) that bears the impacts, to dictate to women about contraception or abortion makes no sense.
To degrade, dismiss, or demean women, likewise.
Men need women. Women need men. And I stubbornly cling to the belief that men and women can learn to play nice.
That said, I will wholeheartedly concede that in a situation where a man and woman in partnership conceive, ideally decisions are shared. But as long as women carry the physical (and often financial) burdens, the ultimate rights to our sexual and reproductive choices belong to us, and us alone.
My body, not yours.
But for our future as a nation? We need to wise up, together.
Nailed it. It is so upsetting that I can hardly concoct a cogent comment here.
Add to this the fact that insurance companies penalize women for being the ones who get pregnant by charging them more for insurance coverage (or failing to provide pregnancy coverage at all) and excluding birth control from coverage is something that also should be stopped. The burden of reproduction falls so unequally on the sexes, and then women are punished because of it. I want to scream.
I’m beyond wanting to scream, Chloe. I’m baffled. It’s all illogical. It’s as simple as that. Or rather, why isn’t it?
Just found a t-shirt in my drawer from a March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C. that says:
My Body. My Choice.
The year was 1992. Twenty years later my t-shirt is not retro, it is current. Not good.
No BLW, not everybody hates women — at least I don’t. I always loved women, and my book advocates them in many ways I may say.
What that guy says (R. Mourdock) is absolutely outrageous to me! It the kind of thing that makes me cringe at once, that “makes my hair stand on my head” as we say in France. And of course he brings God in the game! Each time that kind of guy introduces God as a parameter, you can be sure that what is at stake is to be in control of the minds and bodies of people he wants to submit to him and dominate. In short you never have a better shot than God when it comes to bullshit everybody and ask them to agree with the unacceptable. The one forcing a woman to give birth to the child of the one who wounded her in body and mind is simply insensitive and inhuman. Why am I not surprised that the Republican Party should protect that kind of man?
In fact the sex addiction issue is of the same kind, and no surprise that you still find God at each corner when dealing with this so called “disorder” which I believe to be essentially an invention of USA. It has this same purpose of controlling people and to limit their freedom under the threat of a moral order. Did you know (I mention it in my book in the chapter on sex addiction) that many of those “sex rehab clinics” leave it to your choice to have a therapist or a clergyman to coach you around what they call your “sex addiction”?
And yes, as you point somewhere there is no such thing as a right amount of sex to have. But listen to that definition I saw on a sex rehab site of the Sexual Addict’s Sobriety: “No sexual activity of any kind outside of a committed marital relationship.”
Isn’t it the patent proof that this question of sex addiction is in fact just related to the moral order that some uptight religious people would want to impose to everyone. Because if you follow the previous definition, a married couple regularly having compulsive intercourse ten times a day, and hardly bothering to leave the bedroom, is sexually sober!
“The ultimate rights to our sexual and reproductive choices belong to us, and us alone.”
Of course it does! And many of us believed it was a settled topic for long ago. But as other topics of the same kind (like comprehensive sexual education for teenagers) we discover under stunned eyes that it’s not settled as it should be. Some men are in the process of turning the wheel of history backward, and not only in USA. We have in France a raise of people (inheriting of Sarkozy) claiming that they are “la droite décomplexée” and it mainly means that they align with our horrendous Front National on many questions.
How distressing! Building a decent humanity looks more and more as a Penelope’s work of tapestry, to me.
You raise interesting points, François – and of course, you have the benefit of the French viewpoint (this issue settled long ago, but with fringe groups raising it?).
I do know, certainly, that everyone doesn’t hate women. I know wonderful men who have the utmost respect for what seems like a no-brainer. A man’s body is his; a woman’s body is hers. It is indeed distressing that we seem to be fighting the same fight over and over again (for decades), when there’s so much more we could be doing as a nation.
As for sexual addiction, I am not qualified to say it is or isn’t a disorder and I wouldn’t claim to be qualified. But I am always concerned with unrepresentative samples being used to make sweeping statements, and as you point out, there is a great deal of variability in human experience.
A disgusting travesty at best…next our government will limit the amount of children we can have (ala China).
About sex addiction I don’t claim to be a specialist either, I just go with logic. In my book I state that of course, since everything can get addictive, no reason that sex couldn’t. But if there is actually such a disorder why would it be totally marginal in France while it seems to be massive in USA. Would there be a US gene rendering American (and among them especially men) very weak in regard of that “virus”?
As a case in hand, I don’t think that you can spot a single sex rehab clinic in the whole of France, while I know that they can be counted by the dozens be it only on the California coast. So you know how to use what’s called the “Occam’s razor”? What explanation do you prefer? Americans are massively subject to a disorder that hardly concerns the French, or is it just a cultural difference making American sexual behaviours look sick that are considered totally normal and even healthy in France?
For me one of the better proofs that it’s not about sex but about uptight religious strictures, is the fact that I constantly see those “sexual recovery” sites, linking infidelity with sex addiction. Damn, what nonsense, if it were so than you can call the whole world “population sex addicts!” The patent fact is that uptight religious and radical conservative Americans don’t want to look at the profound human nature, they deny it in all of its deep truth.
And there I have an explanation for you about men more easily recognizing such disorder and accepting therapies and things like this. What an easy way out is offered to them when they have been convinced of cheating on a spouse! In the general case a man cheating on a spouse has no reason to be a sex addict. He can be just sexually unhappy in his couple or even more frequently in my opinion, one who wants to eat his cake and have it too, all of this going with this famous notion that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
So in short he is just breaking a contract he made, to get some extra pleasures in life. The same pleasures that he would fiercely forbid to his spouse of course! Now if he is caught on such cheating, why wouldn’t he take the wonderful opportunity offered by these moralistic Americans wanting to see it as a sickness. And he will say, yes I confess having this disorder, it’s not my fault, it’s beyond my control. So bye bye mister “deceitful cheater”, and hello mister “I’m-not-to-blame-I-just-need-a-therapy!” How handy, isn’t it?
Make me think to send you the chapters of “Being French!” addressing these topics.
The take away for me from all of this public Republican misogyny is my advice to young women: Voting is easy, having a child you do not want for whatever reason is not.
My overall answer to most of the world’s problems? Mind your own business:
http://thequeenblowsoffsteam.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/ths-solution-to-most-of-the-worlds-problems/
BLW, you have captured the angst and puzzlement and extreme irrationality/frustration of this current issue (too light a word for this) beautifully. Like Chloe says, what more can I say.
I am puzzled at the recent upsurge and for one of the first times, fearful about the world my granddaughters face!
Have you seen this? Go Lesley Gore.
You Don’t Own Me
Excellent!
There is still hope Wolfie: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-kirsten-gillibrand/a-historic-election-for-w_b_2102572.html
In 2012, a record number of women were off the sidelines and running for Congress. 184 women were on the ballot on Tuesday and it’s looking likely that we’ll see women’s representation in Congress rise from under 17% to almost 19% with a record 81 women elected to the House (and counting) and 20 elected to the U.S. Senate.
Steps in the right direction, Gandalfe. Yes.