Addicted to Love
Addicted to Love
Few issues in women are more hidden than sexual addiction. Depression, anxiety, even childhood sexual abuse and eating disorders receive more attention. Neither the clinical field nor the recovery community has directed much attention to this secret struggle in women. A Google search reveals only a handful of professional articles and far fewer books about women’s experience with sexual addiction. The vast majority of material on the topic is about men and written by men. Categorically, sexual acting out is largely considered a male phenomenon, much like it was first thought that alcoholism primarily affected only men.
Even cultural standards for feminine behavior limit women’s expressions of sexuality more than men’s practices. After all, boys will be boys. For sure, women themselves rarely talk about their personal struggles with sexual addiction. The enormous shame that surrounds sexual sin is experienced exponentially by female strugglers. Madonna or whore? Society, and especially the Church, allows for little room in between. Few women are willing to risk the possible judgment of disclosing this issue, even to counselors. “I’ve been in therapy nearly two years and I like my counselor. He’s a good Christian man and he’s helped me a lot. We’ve talked about my family and my sexual abuse, but I could never tell him about my sexual addiction.”
This female caller to Bethesda Workshops, a national ministry for treating sexual addiction and co-addiction, is not unusual. More often than not, women say, “I thought I was the only one.” I know that when I personally entered recovery from sexual addiction in 1991, I was convinced no other Christian woman struggled with out-of-control sexual behaviors. Shame keeps women silent, and thus still shackled in their sin. Christian counselors and the Church at large must respond by breaking the silence that surrounds this growing problem. The challenge is to speak from a base of empathic knowledge, rather than ignorance or misunderstanding. Differences Between Female and Male Sex Addicts Current statistics indicate at least one-third of sex addicts are women. I believe eventual information will reveal women comprise nearly one-half of those who are sexually addicted, just as alcoholism is fairly evenly divided between the genders.
While some women are represented in each presentation of sexual addiction, in general, women’s acting out is more relational. Addicted to love. Females often are “addicted to love,” and two-thirds of female sex addicts fall into this category of love or relationship addict. These women are promiscuous before marriage and move from relationship to relationship, sometimes even simultaneously. They have affairs after marriage, both sexual and emotional. Women in droves, however, are joining men in sexual pursuits on the Internet. One in three visitors to an adult web site is female, and nearly 10 million U.S. women access such sites each month.1 Although women are online significantly less than men according to a study done in early 2000 (14% females as opposed to 86% males), women are over-Mar nie C. Fere represented among those who progress beyond “recreational use” to the realm of addiction.2 Typically, women’s pattern of wanting romance and relationship as part of their sexual activities translates to the Internet. Female users strongly prefer chat rooms where they can “relate,” instead of solitary activity like accessing pornography, which is preferred by most men. A major study found women were disproportionately represented in the interactive mediums, such as chat rooms, which were preferred by 70%.3 Even those women who want the same thing as most men—the casual sexual encounter— tend to couch their activity in some semblance of a relationship (however fleeting) instead of anonymous sex.
A key difference between the genders surfaces in the way women progress in their Internet sexual activity. According to a small study, females who frequent sexual chat rooms are more likely than men to seek real-life meetings with their online sexual partners. An astounding 80% of female cybersex users admitted this behavior.4 This escalation of sexual activity clearly has enormous implications and risks. A growing number of women, though, are looking online at the more traditional kind of pornography. Generally speaking, most women who choose visual material are younger females, ages 18–34. This generation was raised in a media-saturated culture and is more accustomed to visual stimuli. Advances in neuroscience indicate that our mediadriven culture is literally altering the human brain—and not just men’s.
Today’s young women seem equally