Against Nature
Barry Reay, Nina Attwood & Claire Gooder (eds.), Sex Addiction: A Critical History
Polity, 200pp, £15.99, ISBN 9780745670355
reviewed by Francis O'Gorman
How far are we in pathologising human personality? It's not unfamiliar to hear the scientific existence of, say, autism or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder disputed. These are not, the argument runs, clinically diagnosed states but simply part of the continuum of that multiply diverse unknown quantity: human nature. To turn them into 'disorders' is to use a supposedly medical diagnosis as a tool to impose a rigid sense of what is 'normal' or properly ‘ordered.'
I remember as a child hearing a young woman being described by an older family friend as a ‘nymphomaniac.’ This was said with confidential, hushed earnestness – as if we should all know what it meant while being virginally innocent of exactly what it did mean. But this category has changed. Gone is the allusion to the nymphs of ancient Greece. There is, instead, a tormented contemporary man or woman – nearly always heterosexual – allegedly suffering from a pathological disorder. The sex addict. We don't need any more confidential reticence: we can make tearful public confessions about this, write self-help books and make money from clinics that treat this new contagion alongside other well-known addictions. The nymphs have become satyrs. And a sizeable industry is ready to help them metamorphose back into acceptably 'normal' human beings.
The idea of a 'sex addict' (seven orgasms a week is, apparently, a qualification for treatment) – or someone suffering from ‘hypersexuality' – has struggled to make it into the formal taxonomies of 'mental disorders.’ ‘Hypersexuality' has yet, in fact, to appear in that extraordinary document, which seems to many critics the handbook of conservative surveillance, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Nevertheless, the figure of the sex addict has established itself in film, fiction and the therapy culture. It's a 'disorder' that appears peculiarly to affect celebrities. Bill Clinton had it, we are asked to believe. He was suffering from a sexual disorder when That Thing happened in the Oval Office. Tiger Woods, the golfer, had the disorder so badly that it put him off his stroke. (Tiger allegedly spent £40,000 at a treatment centre and that only after paying a separate enormous bill for being diagnosed as a sufferer in the first place.)
Sex Addiction: A Critical History is bracing in its understanding of 'a critical history.' This is history that is very critical. The authors, all academic historians at the University of Auckland, deny the existence of the condition. Tiger Woods was unfaithful, not mentally ill. As historians, the authors trace the emergence of the ‘condition' into familiar language over the past 20 years. They chart its enthusiastic uptake by some of the new priests of the modern world: the clinicians and therapists. The authors believe that pathologising individuals who either have a lot of sex or talk as if they do, is, for lack of a better word, bonkers. It is, they argue, an embarrassingly obvious attempt by the conservative right to police not only our bodies but our desires. They don't mean to deny that real people are badly hurt by infidelity or fickleness – this is not a book that advocates an ideological position about sexuality. But it does advocate critical scepticism about the pathologisation of yet another aspect of the incalculable variety of human lives.
The authors trace the emergence into language of a concept they do not believe in. They write with rigour and are persuasive. A literary or cultural critic could nuance their argument by thinking more about the imaginative work the 'sex addict' is doing in contemporary culture. What does he or she tell us about ourselves? There is a conflicted self-awareness hidden behind our fascination.
The disability studies scholar Lennard Davis remarked in 2008 that 'Obsessive Compulsive Disorder' has become so noticeable in the contemporary West because the hectic nature of advanced capitalism has made it so. ‘Obsession,’ Davis says, has established itself as a compulsory state for a 'successful life.’ He thought the visibility of OCD was a cultural indicator of what we were doing to ourselves as a society. I agree. And I think – to give an example of my own – that the representational and medical visibility of dementia is also a clue. This condition is not merely a cultural invention, far from it. But its visibility is partly a reflex of a culture that is deeply bothered about forgetting. It's bothered about forgetting literally who we are and what our pasts are. Advanced capitalism privileges amnesia in favour of the new, of innovation, and the future. It makes of 'transformation' its great good, and in turn encourages us to break bonds with our pasts. In dementia sufferers we see not only a terrifying individual predicament. We see, even if we don't know it, a gaunt emblem – cryptic, but still real – of what abstractedly we are doing to our own roots, our continuations with history, our sense of belonging to and in time.
So why are 'sex addicts' so visible to us? This powerfully focused book offers only two reasons. One is flat and ahistorical: 'We all like sexual stories,’ the authors say. That does not take us very far (even if we accept it as true, which it arguably isn't). Their other more substantial argument is the idea that the conservative right are policing sexual normality – 'heteronormativity' in that clumsy but invaluable word – through sexual pathologisation. The right is telling us what 'normal' people do. The language of sex addiction, then, is a discourse of conservative power.
But there are, perhaps more subtle things to say.
It could be that the cultural visibility of the 'sex addict' is a half-pointer to some more complex damage we dimly know we are doing to each other. Is the 'sex addict' – in the news, the cinema, the novel – a new fascination in part because the sexual culture of the contemporary West has changed dramatically in the last 30 years? I wonder if, in making so much of that 'addict,' we are actually indirectly trying to punish ourselves for our casualisation of sex. That casualisation involves, for instance, the emergence of 'fuck buddies,' of oral sex on the first date, of sexting at 13, of the noticeably visual fracturing of the link between sex and emotion. Here is the transformation of sex into an unremarkable, taken-for-granted gratification, like a video game.
To say this is neither to be a sexual 'conservative' nor to join in with the prudish policers of desire. It is, rather, to speculate about a 'societal conscience' and where it's gone. It is to wonder where our guilt hides, what fascinations that guilt inhabits in disguise, and what really we might be trying to cure in pathologising men like Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton. The 'sex addict' in his or her representational and therapeutic prominence might be an odd, furtive acknowledgement that we recognise what we're doing to human relations in a world of competitive individualism where what primary matters is, it seems, the (immediate) satisfaction of the desires of the ‘consumer.’
I remember as a child hearing a young woman being described by an older family friend as a ‘nymphomaniac.’ This was said with confidential, hushed earnestness – as if we should all know what it meant while being virginally innocent of exactly what it did mean. But this category has changed. Gone is the allusion to the nymphs of ancient Greece. There is, instead, a tormented contemporary man or woman – nearly always heterosexual – allegedly suffering from a pathological disorder. The sex addict. We don't need any more confidential reticence: we can make tearful public confessions about this, write self-help books and make money from clinics that treat this new contagion alongside other well-known addictions. The nymphs have become satyrs. And a sizeable industry is ready to help them metamorphose back into acceptably 'normal' human beings.
The idea of a 'sex addict' (seven orgasms a week is, apparently, a qualification for treatment) – or someone suffering from ‘hypersexuality' – has struggled to make it into the formal taxonomies of 'mental disorders.’ ‘Hypersexuality' has yet, in fact, to appear in that extraordinary document, which seems to many critics the handbook of conservative surveillance, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Nevertheless, the figure of the sex addict has established itself in film, fiction and the therapy culture. It's a 'disorder' that appears peculiarly to affect celebrities. Bill Clinton had it, we are asked to believe. He was suffering from a sexual disorder when That Thing happened in the Oval Office. Tiger Woods, the golfer, had the disorder so badly that it put him off his stroke. (Tiger allegedly spent £40,000 at a treatment centre and that only after paying a separate enormous bill for being diagnosed as a sufferer in the first place.)
Sex Addiction: A Critical History is bracing in its understanding of 'a critical history.' This is history that is very critical. The authors, all academic historians at the University of Auckland, deny the existence of the condition. Tiger Woods was unfaithful, not mentally ill. As historians, the authors trace the emergence of the ‘condition' into familiar language over the past 20 years. They chart its enthusiastic uptake by some of the new priests of the modern world: the clinicians and therapists. The authors believe that pathologising individuals who either have a lot of sex or talk as if they do, is, for lack of a better word, bonkers. It is, they argue, an embarrassingly obvious attempt by the conservative right to police not only our bodies but our desires. They don't mean to deny that real people are badly hurt by infidelity or fickleness – this is not a book that advocates an ideological position about sexuality. But it does advocate critical scepticism about the pathologisation of yet another aspect of the incalculable variety of human lives.
The authors trace the emergence into language of a concept they do not believe in. They write with rigour and are persuasive. A literary or cultural critic could nuance their argument by thinking more about the imaginative work the 'sex addict' is doing in contemporary culture. What does he or she tell us about ourselves? There is a conflicted self-awareness hidden behind our fascination.
The disability studies scholar Lennard Davis remarked in 2008 that 'Obsessive Compulsive Disorder' has become so noticeable in the contemporary West because the hectic nature of advanced capitalism has made it so. ‘Obsession,’ Davis says, has established itself as a compulsory state for a 'successful life.’ He thought the visibility of OCD was a cultural indicator of what we were doing to ourselves as a society. I agree. And I think – to give an example of my own – that the representational and medical visibility of dementia is also a clue. This condition is not merely a cultural invention, far from it. But its visibility is partly a reflex of a culture that is deeply bothered about forgetting. It's bothered about forgetting literally who we are and what our pasts are. Advanced capitalism privileges amnesia in favour of the new, of innovation, and the future. It makes of 'transformation' its great good, and in turn encourages us to break bonds with our pasts. In dementia sufferers we see not only a terrifying individual predicament. We see, even if we don't know it, a gaunt emblem – cryptic, but still real – of what abstractedly we are doing to our own roots, our continuations with history, our sense of belonging to and in time.
So why are 'sex addicts' so visible to us? This powerfully focused book offers only two reasons. One is flat and ahistorical: 'We all like sexual stories,’ the authors say. That does not take us very far (even if we accept it as true, which it arguably isn't). Their other more substantial argument is the idea that the conservative right are policing sexual normality – 'heteronormativity' in that clumsy but invaluable word – through sexual pathologisation. The right is telling us what 'normal' people do. The language of sex addiction, then, is a discourse of conservative power.
But there are, perhaps more subtle things to say.
It could be that the cultural visibility of the 'sex addict' is a half-pointer to some more complex damage we dimly know we are doing to each other. Is the 'sex addict' – in the news, the cinema, the novel – a new fascination in part because the sexual culture of the contemporary West has changed dramatically in the last 30 years? I wonder if, in making so much of that 'addict,' we are actually indirectly trying to punish ourselves for our casualisation of sex. That casualisation involves, for instance, the emergence of 'fuck buddies,' of oral sex on the first date, of sexting at 13, of the noticeably visual fracturing of the link between sex and emotion. Here is the transformation of sex into an unremarkable, taken-for-granted gratification, like a video game.
To say this is neither to be a sexual 'conservative' nor to join in with the prudish policers of desire. It is, rather, to speculate about a 'societal conscience' and where it's gone. It is to wonder where our guilt hides, what fascinations that guilt inhabits in disguise, and what really we might be trying to cure in pathologising men like Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton. The 'sex addict' in his or her representational and therapeutic prominence might be an odd, furtive acknowledgement that we recognise what we're doing to human relations in a world of competitive individualism where what primary matters is, it seems, the (immediate) satisfaction of the desires of the ‘consumer.’