Lynne Schultz
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Compulsive Sexual Behavior affects one out of 20 people, according to the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research. People diagnosed with Compulsive Sexual Behavior spend “inordinate amounts of time” on sex-related activities and neglect important aspects of everyday life such as work. They are believed to lack control of their behavior because they repeatedly fail to control their “sexual activities or desires.”
The Mayo Clinic wrote that symptoms include: extramarital affairs, participating in phone or cyber sex, exposing oneself in public, repeated soliciting of prostitutes, masturbating up to 15 times a day, frequent use of pornography, engaging in sado-masochism (the use of otherwise painful sensations to enhance sexual pleasure), feeling compelled to have sex “when you’re stressed, anxious or depressed” and using sex as an escape from problems.
Sexaholics Anonymous, patterned after Alcoholics Anonymous, said on their website that "sexaholics" have lost control. For them, masturbation and sex outside of marriage is addictive and destructive. According to several of the Twelve Steps, adapted from those of Alcoholics Anonymous, part of the answer is to turn one's will over to God "as we understood Him," be ready for God to remove the character defect, ask God for forgiveness and pray.
According to marriage counselor and sex therapist Marty Klein at www.sexed.org, there is no such thing as sex addiction. It has become a blanket term to include: poor decision making, poor impulse control, obsessive-compulsive behavior or sociopathy.
"Being out of control" is a just a metaphor. He argues in Issue 1 of his newsletter that encouraging people to admit they are powerless prevents them from examining how they've come to feel powerless and what they can do to take responsibility and do something about it.
Further, he argued that the concept of "sex addiction" is "a set of moral beliefs disguised as science" that assumes sex is dangerous. The examples he gave are: that sex should be within the context of a committed and monogamous heterosexual relationship, that masturbation should be confined to once a day, and that having sex to escape problems is unhealthy.
Sex addiction has also been used as a political justification for censorship, eliminating sex education and birth control clinics and opposing equal rights for gays and lesbians, he wrote.