It’s almost impossible to read about sex and porn these days without coming across the concept of sex addiction—the idea that some people are addicted to sex, porn or masturbation, and that this addiction causes harm in similar ways to dependencies on drugs and alcohol. But what exactly is sex addiction? Is it a true addiction? And if you are worried you might be addicted to sex or masturbation, what steps can you take to help yourself?
In this guide, we’ll cover some of the key questions people have about sex addiction, as well as explore some of the arguments from researchers who say that our obsession with labelling sexual behaviour as ‘addictive’ could be harmful in itself.
What is sex addiction?
This is quite a controversial question, so it’s worth stating upfront that there is still a lot of debate about whether the label ‘sex addiction’ is actually true or helpful. Sex and masturbation are not drugs like heroin or alcohol, and so no individual can form a chemical dependency on it in the same way they would for those substances.
Broadly, the concept of sex addiction is applied to people who have a problematic relationship with sex—it dominates their thoughts and behaviour to the detriment of their personal relationships and other important things in their life such as work. Perhaps they are having unsafe sex without regard for their own wellbeing, or treating the people with whom they have sex like objects to be used, or having a lot of sex that doesn’t bring them pleasure because they feel there’s something missing in their life. When assessing whether someone might be a sex addict, often questions are asked such as:
Does your sexual behaviour or use of pornography occupy large amounts of your time and/or jeopardise your significant relationships or employment?
Similar questions are asked of those with chemical addictions. Alcoholics, for instance, are asked to assess whether their drinking might take up large amounts of their time/money and jeopardise their relationships or job.
Is sex addiction a real addiction?
There is a hot debate about this topic. As it stands, sex addiction is not an official diagnosis in the DSM – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and people are more often officially diagnosed with CSB – Compulsive Sexual Behaviour, or hypersexuality.
So why is there no official diagnosis of sex addiction? Part of the problem comes from the difficulty in establishing a baseline for what counts as problematic sexual behaviour. After all, someone who has a lot of sex within a healthy relationship (or multiple relationships, if they practice consensual non-monogamy) may not have any problem that requires diagnosis—they simply have a high sex drive and have built a life that accommodates it!
What makes this an especially difficult issue to explore is that sex addiction is most commonly associated with sexual behaviours that cause shame on the part of the person having them. Self-identified sex addicts are more likely to have grown up in extremely religious families, or other environments which frown upon sexual behaviour that many others would consider perfectly normal. Including likely you, as a reader of this porn website! If someone has been raised all their life to believe that any form of porn consumption, masturbation, or sex outside of marriage is wrong, then it is unsurprising that they might consider more prolific masturbation or sex as a problem that needs to be cured. Likewise, if they have been told that watching porn counts as cheating. If, on the other hand, you have been given a thorough, shame-free sex education, your moral questions surrounding porn probably revolve around ensuring that it is ethically produced, so you probably don’t feel ashamed of enjoying it in the same way as you’d enjoy the latest TV box set.
On top of this, the term ‘sex addiction’ is often used by people with predatory sexual behaviours as an excuse when they are caught. Perhaps the most notable example of this is Harvey Weinstein checking in to a clinic to treat his ‘sex addiction’ after it was revealed that he had taken advantage of multiple women.
‘Sex addiction’ or shame?
A meta-analysis of porn ‘addiction’ research from 2018 said that:
“pornography-related problems – particularly feelings of addiction to pornography – may be, in many cases, better construed as functions of discrepancies – moral incongruence – between pornography-related beliefs and pornography-related behaviours.”
In summary: the more shameful you believe your porn consumption to be, the more likely you are to characterise it as an addiction rather than simply a behaviour. Psychologist Dr David Ley has written extensively on this topic, and his book, The Myth of Sex Addiction, might be useful reading if you would like to find out more.
This is one of the reasons why mental health professionals are more likely to focus on how someone’s compulsive sexual behaviour could be influencing their life, rather than labelling it sex addiction. After all, although sex can produce a number of the happy chemicals that are associated with other highs, such as oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin, these chemicals are not bad in and of themselves. They are often quite healthy! But there are many contexts in which society has told us that seeking those feel-good chemicals from sex is morally bad. Some of them, in the case of rape and abuse, are truly bad. Others are very natural behaviours that humans, as pleasure-seeking creatures, are instinctively going to pursue.
Hopefully, this has given you a useful overview of the debate around sex addiction and why most mental health professionals prefer terms like compulsive sexual behaviour. And because of the big question around whether ‘sex addiction’ is a genuine diagnosis, we’ll use scare quotes for it in the rest of this piece.
What are the signs of ‘sex addiction’?
Regardless of whether you want to label it ‘sex addiction’, you might still be concerned about some of your own sexual behaviours and wish to understand how they fit within your life. The first important thing to note here is that there is no correct amount of sex to have. As with anything that revolves around your body, your needs and your desires, what is normal for someone else may not be normal for you, and your desires will likely be in a state of flux throughout your life.
How much pornography are you watching, and is it an acceptable amount? Well, that depends on what else you have going on in your life, and whether watching porn provides a valuable and pleasurable addition to your activities, or is a time-sink that’s dragging you away from other things that matter greatly to you. It’s more than possible to spend hours each day watching porn, as you might spend hours watching box sets or playing video games, and for that to be completely unproblematic behaviour.
One of the difficulties when discussing things like sex and porn is that even the conversation we have as a society is suffused with shame. We talk about porn use, as if porn itself is a drug akin to heroin, but actually porn is just a genre of entertainment: some of it is ethically produced and marketed, and some is exploitative, but the genre itself is very broad. It’s important to unpack what it is about your own behaviour that might be causing you problems, rather than relying on external factors to tell you what is normal or acceptable.
Likewise, when it comes to sexual behaviour, there are many different areas where people will feel shame, and often the shame doesn’t come from the behaviour itself but from people’s perceptions of it. If you’re a woman and you have casual sex with multiple people, does that make you a sex addict? Well, no. But shame dispensed to people—particularly women—for ‘sleeping around’ could lead you to believe that your normal drive is something that needs to be ‘cured’.
Am I a sex addict?
With the above in mind, when you’re unpacking your own sexual behaviour, the key thing is to try and separate what’s normal for you from what you have been led to believe your sex life ‘should’ look like by society.
Returning to the question at the start of the post:
Does your sexual behaviour or use of pornography occupy large amounts of your time and/or jeopardise your significant relationships or employment?
What counts as ‘large amounts of your time’ is going to be very context-dependent. Somebody with a lot of free time might see sex and masturbation as a hobby, worth investing plenty of time in to make sure they’re enjoying life to the full. Others might recognise that their drive for sex and masturbation is interfering with other life goals, and they want support to help them stop or cut down.
Over on the sex education website Bish there are some useful questions to ask yourself if you think you might be watching porn too much:
- have you stopped enjoying watching porn (but still watch)?
- do you feel upset or down or angry about your use of porn?
As you can see, the important thing is to assess the impact on you, rather than try to compare your own enjoyment of porn (or sex) to what is expected of you by other people. Extending this to sex, you can ask yourself questions like:
- do you feel compelled to have a lot of sex, even if that sex is not providing you with pleasure?
- do you feel upset or angry about the sex you are having?
- is the sex you’re having negatively impacting other things in your life?
If the answer to these questions is ‘yes’, then you might want to explore some options to help you tackle these behaviours. While ‘sex addiction’ is not necessarily a diagnosable issue, there are many things in life which can provide us pleasure but which may become problematic if we hyper-fixate on them, and it’s completely valid to seek help to explore where you may be able to indulge your pleasures without letting them tip over into causing you harm.
Help with sex and porn
If you’re growing concerned about your own sex and masturbation habits, you might like to begin by asking some of the questions listed above. Explore what it is you want from sex and masturbation, whether you’re getting that, and trying to identify at what points your behaviour is starting to cause you concern. Keeping a diary or notes can be really useful for this kind of thing. By recording and reflecting on your behaviour, thoughts and feelings, you may notice some patterns around what you are doing/feeling and why. This can help you to get to the heart of what aspects of your sexual behaviour are causing the most concern for you.
If you would like to explore this further, then it may be worth talking things through with a specialist therapist who can guide you through more involved work on your relationship with sex and masturbation. The UK Council for Psychotherapy has a database of practising therapists, and you can search for those who specialise in CSB (Compulsive Sexual Behaviour).
Naturally with a topic like this, we want to be cautious when writing about it: no one should walk away from this article with brand new worries that they might be displaying unusual sexual behaviour, because it is not up to a stranger to tell you what’s right or wrong when it comes to your pleasure. However, if this is something that has been concerning you, hopefully, this article will have given you some useful questions to ask and topics to explore, which can help you on the journey to understand your own needs and desires.