Here is a sentence

Writing in Slate Hanna Rosin comes up this beauty:

Most addictions share cultural boundaries with character failure.

You don't really know where to start with a sentence like that. Is that a really trivial point or a really profound one? It could be either depending on what you read into it.

And the very next sentence is also revealing:

It took 50 years for clinicians to convince Americans broadly that alcoholism had other causes besides sin and bad behavior.

Actually, no. The real problem was that it took more than fifty years to get clinicians to accept that alcoholism itself was the disease and not merely a symptom of something "deeper". It took that long for science to recognize that, as Mark Gold once put it, alcoholics don't drink because they are depressed, they are depressed because they can't stop drinking.

The Rosin article is about sex addiction by the way.

A friend of mine who is in clinical practice once told me a funny story that is relevant here. As he was doing his schooling and then training he got progressively more upset because every time he read about bipolar disorder he thought, "That's me." He was so worried that he intentionally dodged clinical training assignments that might bring him into contact with bipolar patients as long as he could.

I learned about this after he reached the point where he no longer could dodge that particular bullet. He was practically giggling with relief as he told me the history of his paranoia and then he told me about how he'd gotten over it. "When you see real bipolar you don't sit there scratching your head wondering if maybe there is something wrong here. It's like the difference between wondering if your car engine sounds funny and seeing black smoke coming out from under the hood."

I suspect that sexual addiction, supposing it exists, is like that; if you saw the way someone with it behaved up close your reaction would probably be to swear in amazement. Meanwhile a lot of this strikes me as only the latest in a long line of efforts to try and stigmatize what is relatively normal sexual behaviour. Yes, women have been the victim of this far longer than men but it doesn't make it right.

PS: Rosin mentions "nymphomania" in this regard and it is true that appalling things were done under the guise of "science" stigmatizing women with strong sexual appetites. That said, I bet you far more damage has been done and is still being done on the other end of the scale by making women who are merely at the low end of the normal sex-drive continuum feel that there is something wrong with them.

PPS: Apropos of nothing, what a beautiful name Hanna Rosin is!