How Sexual Desire Works- The Enigmatic Urge

by Frederick Toates

  When in the presence of the target incentive, addictive sexual behaviour appears to show features of an impulse control disorder. People describing themselves as sex addicts do occasionally experience spontaneous ‘acting-out’ when finding themselves in this context (Giugliano, 2008). However, this can only be part of the picture. More generally, the sexually addicted person takes such purposive actions as to move towards situations in which subsequently he or she cannot resist. Hours of meticulous planning might be involved in moving to engagement with an incentive and to maximize the size of the hit, as in advance booking of a hotel room and arriving there equipped with a stock of pornographic movies and cocaine.

  The forms that sexual addiction can take

  Some of the targets of the addictions are either illegal or at least strongly disapproved of by society (Carnes, 2001). Activities include incest, child molestation, voyeurism, exhibitionism, child pornography and rape. Others, though reluctantly tolerated by society, are still outside the bounds of conventional morality, such as use of prostitutes and pornography. Impersonal casual sex and masturbation are included as addictions if they reach levels of excess and disruption and are associated with despair.

  Interaction with real humans

  Paraphilias are possible candidates for addictive sex, but there is not a one-to-one equivalence between paraphilia and addiction. Some people manage to live with their paraphiliac desire unexpressed, express it only rarely or integrate it into a balanced life-style. Conversely, someone can show addiction to ‘conventional’ and perfectly legal heterosexual or homosexual sex. So, to repeat, addiction is not defined in terms of the activity itself but rather in the nature of the relationship of the activity to the rest of the person’s life (Goodman, 1998).

  The investment in addiction can be enormous. As Carnes (1989, p. 62) expresses it:

  This kind of preoccupation is time-consuming. In fact, most of the sex addict’s time spent in the addictive cycle is spent in preoccupation. The office, the shopping mall, the bus on the way home – all the everyday situations are transformed with sexual energy.

  The world is scanned rigorously for any cue that is sex-related.

  Family and work might get neglected. Vast sums of money are sometimes spent on sex workers, at the expense of necessities for the family. There is often a risk of disease and violence. Hours might be invested hiding in a neighbour’s bushes, while staring at a window to get a brief glimpse of a naked woman. There can even be a cost in petrol, as the exhibitionist spends a whole day driving around to find the perfect moment for exposure. The risk of being caught and the potential shame in the eyes of family, friends and employer present a terrifying image to addict and non-addict alike.

  Cyber activities and addiction to viewing portrayals of sexual activity

  The phenomenon of altered consciousness is exemplified by a 35-year-old divorced American lawyer, who was addicted to chat rooms, posing as a 13–15 year old boy:

  I would spend up to 8 hours online, trying to escape from my problems and trying to get a porn and sexual fix. I would not eat or drink during this time. Emotionally, I was as detached as though I was in a coma. Nothing else mattered. I didn’t think about the illegality of what I was saying or doing on the computer.

  (Schneider, 2000, p. 251)

  Similarly, consider Albert, an American, a divorced father of three children (Maltz and Maltz (2010, p. 62):

  Porn gives me momentary relief from the pains of life. I don’t care about the future. What matters is I have escaped for now.

  Michael Ryan wrote (Ryan, 1996, p. 339):

  I had watched hundreds of porno-movies, some of them in hellish-smelling booths in adult book-stores pumping in quarters every ninety seconds.

  In some cases, early exposure to pornography can trigger a kind of imprinting process in which the imagery takes on a particular unforgettable significance in the sexual life of the individual and can fuel later addiction (Maltz and Maltz, 2010). In one sample of women exhibiting cybersex addiction, the majority reported relying on abusive fantasy to get aroused (Corley and Hook, 2012). For some people, their first sexual encounter is with porn; the chances of this happening are greatly increased with the advent of the Internet. The Internet has massively increased the chances for addiction to occur, some individuals spending up to seventy hours a week online searching for sexual targets (Schneider, 2000). Consider the following:

  When Jack got married for the second time, he told doubting buddies, ‘I mean it, this time no extramarital secret life.’ One wedding present, a home computer, gave Jack entry to a whole new world – the Internet. Unknown to his friends and new spouse, within six months of being married, Jack was involved nightly in three different online, or virtual affairs, had downloaded more than 1,200 pornographic images, and was spending fifteen to twenty hours a week in sexual chat rooms and ‘membership clubs’, trading and downloading new pictures – all of it a secret from his wife and accessed from his study at home.

  Before their marriage, Jack and his second wife, Jody, had enjoyed an active and exciting sexual relationship, but gradually, as Jack’s hidden Internet life became more arousing to him than sex with his wife, he grew more detached and withdrawn.

  (Schneider and Weiss, 2001, p. 1)

  The Internet and cybersex have introduced new risks, while occasionally reducing others. In order now to achieve a variety of ‘forbidden highs’, addicted individuals might need to venture no further than their own sitting room. Through cybersex, the addict can occupy hours on end in an altered state of mind and heart rhythm, searching for the perfect porno image or virtual partner. The addicted person might spend all night sending come-on messages to a sex chat room. Some people only realize that they were addicted to sex years later, after their cybersex addiction causes them to do a life review (Schneider, 2000).

  Apparently, feeling anonymous and safe, an increasing number of women are becoming addicted to cybersex. Turner (2008) writes of such a person: ‘The intensity and excitement draw her away from her reality and responsibilities.’ In keeping with the argument developed earlier, women tend to be more addicted to chat rooms where there is at least some modicum of reciprocity, rather than viewing erotic images, the staple diet of males with such problematic sexual behaviour (Schneider, 2000). However, some women report addictive sexuality very much like men. Consider the case of a single 37-year-old female executive:

  I’d get in a chat room looking for a man with whom I could have sex. I’d meet him at a hotel or at my house and have sex. When I travelled, I’d set up meetings in towns where I knew I would be staying. None of these meetings were ever romantic interests. I was clear from the beginning that it was about sex and nothing else. I also had pornographic sites which I frequented when on line but not in the chat room. Those sites mainly functioned to add to the file footage which was continually running in my brain.

  (Schneider, 2000, p. 251)

  Similarly, a 35-year-old married American woman wrote:

  My husband could no longer satisfy me. I wanted what I saw in the videos and pictures, and was too embarrassed to ask him for it.

  (Schneider, 2000, p. 262)

  The individual, even one who is unsuccessful in attracting partners, can fantasize that people with perfect bodies reciprocate his desire. As Tim, a librarian in his forties, responded:

  All these women perform for me – dancing, gyrating, and showing their bodies. They’re under my control, performing for me.

  (Maltz and Maltz, 2010, p. 20)

  A drive that is too high?

  Consider those people who led an uneventful sex life until finding cybersex and then got hooked (Schneider, 2000). Surely it adds little, if anything, insightful to say that their drive was suddenly boosted. In some cases, addicts shun conventional and potentially available safer sexual outlets, for example with a stable partner (though in other cases the unsuspecting partner even reports a good home sex life (Schneider and Weiss, 2001)). An American male
of 38 years, who sought help for sexual addiction, wrote:

  I would rather look at porn than be with my girlfriend. Sometimes I resent her presence as it keeps me away from the Net.

  (Schneider, 2000, p. 260)

  Most people with a particularly high sexual interest and activity usually do not display features of addiction. In therapy for addiction, the high drive argument would sound like a prescription for despair – how do you lower such a setting? This line of explanation might even serve to fuel the addiction – ‘I need sex all the time and there is nothing I can do about a design flaw in my basic biology.’

  Contrary to the old drive models (discussed earlier), sexual addiction seems not to be driven by some bodily event that is independent of stimuli, has got massively out of equilibrium and needs the correction of very frequent orgasm. Rather, incentive theory can offer insights. Thus, addiction should be distinguished from the state of simply having a high sexual appetite (‘hypersexuality’) that is realized in the context of mutually rewarding relationships and is not associated with powerful negative feelings.

  An incentive perspective

  An historical shift

  Over the period 1985–2000, there was an important shift of thinking amongst researchers into addiction (Orford, 2001). Prior to this, excessive behaviour was thought to represent an attempt to correct a bodily deficit or aversion.2 Such correction can indeed sometimes be a contributory factor, as in trying to escape from boredom, depression or painful withdrawal symptoms. Evidence suggests that any intense hedonic experience, whether drug-based or not, can be followed by a negative rebound, described as ‘withdrawal symptoms’. However, this is not now thought to be the defining and universal feature of excessive appetites. For example, withdrawal symptoms from drugs do not predict when users will crave drugs or return to drug-seeking (Robinson and Berridge, 1993). Rather, the common feature of addiction, especially at the start, is one of approach, that is pleasure-seeking.3 This fits incentive motivation.

  In incentive terms, sexual addiction represents a massively focused capture of behaviour by a restricted range of sexual stimuli, very often, if not always, involving novelty employed as a means of finding the perfect ‘high’. One or just a few classes of incentive come to assume a disproportionate weight and displace other candidates for control of behaviour. Sometimes the setting of the addictive activity can be highly specific. For example, one patient compulsively masturbated while viewing Internet pornography (Bancroft, 2007). Yet, when brought into the laboratory, the erotic materials on display held no interest for him.

  Central to the incentive interpretation is the motivational pull of things associated with the sexual goal. Thus, the lure of the neighbour’s bushes signalling the chance to glimpse a naked body, the red lights of a region of town or even the sound of switching on the computer can come to acquire enormous incentive salience, presumably as a result of conditioning (Orford, 2001). Some addicts binge, with periods free between binges. This suggests that the addictive activity fuels further activity rather than satiating it.

  Schneider and Weiss (2001, p. 31) note:

  For the cybersex addict and sex addicts in general, the goal of all the looking, cruising, contacting, and downloading is not necessarily the orgasm. In fact, orgasm is not always a welcome or desired part of the process. Most porn and cybersex addicts look at images or remain in sexual chat rooms for hours on end, maintaining the desired level of self-stimulation – but once orgasm occurs, the game is over and reality sets in.

  Proximity to temptation

  There is an important feature of an incentive interpretation of addictions (Orford, 2001), mentioned under the heading of ‘temptation’ (Chapter 12). The addicted person is in some conflict and might wish to quit but simply can’t. This is like the person encountering temptation, but in the case of addiction it is a state of chronic and unremitting temptation.

  The excitatory factors can arise particularly strongly from the physical presence of particular incentives, for example the sight of the computer on which pornography is watched or the presence of a sex worker. As a physical goal (e.g. a brothel, porno cinema or the keyboard of a computer) is approached, so the strength of approach motivation increases with decreases in distance to the goal.

  However, addictive activity does not just suddenly appear when the addicted person happens to find himself in the presence of the incentive. Rather, as with conventional sexual desire, representations are formed in memory and these can be used to guide pursuit of the appropriate incentives.

  So, what offers restraint, albeit ineffectively so? Certain restraining factors such as fear might also increase as distance decreases. If the activity is illegal, the presence of a police officer could exemplify this. However, a number of potential restraining factors, such as catching a disease are hypothetical possibilities, not necessarily physically present and certainly not apparent at the time of temptation. Other factors, such as guilt or fear of a partner’s reaction, are abstract, cognitive and probably only emerge with a delay relative to the time of indulgence. They would not normally be associated with the location and would therefore not be expected to increase in a similar way to the incentive stimulus. So often it appears that they are no match for the lure.

  Proximity would be expected to be an important factor in triggering relapse. It could be that beyond the tipping point, the feeling of being out of control arises. This can trigger panic with a subsequent loss of control, panic that might well be reduced by engaging in the addictive activity and thereby providing yet another factor that strengthens the addiction (Orford, 2001). In this way a vicious circle is reinforced. For feeding, gambling and drug addictions, replace sexual goal with supermarket/restaurant, casino or bar/pusher, respectively.

  Wanting and liking

  As noted earlier, the incentive system has a potentially strong association with pleasure. However, that does not mean that it invariably triggers intense pleasure. Some addicted people report that they ‘repeatedly participate in sexual behaviours despite finding them aversive or unsatisfying’ (Gold and Heffner, 1998). As with drugs (Washton and Zweben, 2009, p. 50), the pleasure of sex can decline over time. Similarly, Doidge, (2007, p. 107) reported:

  Pornographers promise healthy pleasure and relief from sexual tension, but what they often deliver is an addiction, tolerance, and an eventual decrease in pleasure. Paradoxically, the male patients I worked with often craved pornography but didn’t like it.

  Giugliano (2008, p. 146) obtained the reports from two sexually addicted males:

  There was no bad sex when I was 18 to 21 years old. All sex was great sex. The feeling of disgust came in later.

  When I was a teenager, it felt great. I put everything out of my mind. I noticed a change in my 20s. The sex no longer felt great. The way it felt was more empty than anything else.

  Again, such observation underlines the fundamental strength of the incentive-seeking system, even if it sometimes gets uncoupled from pleasure.

  Therapeutic implications

  Incentive ideas give hope for therapy, in terms of teaching addicts about alternative sources of pleasure and fulfilment, often in trusting social networks of the kind that they have feared and shunned. In some cases, faulty reasoning of the kind ‘I am wholly a bad person’, ‘women really want to be groped’ or ‘men can never be trusted with love’ can be challenged. A new cognition ‘others can answer my needs if I am honest with them’ can be learned. As with alcoholics, to some people God can play a role in therapy. In this case, when one admits powerlessness and seeks help, there emerges a new relationship: one with the Almighty. Meditation can be employed to occupy otherwise empty time. In therapy, steps can be encouraged whereby any particularly potent incentive trigger cues to the addicted person (e.g. the sight of a computer in a secluded part of the office or house) are eliminated or actively avoided.

  The link with negative emotion

  General principles

  In incentive te
rms, a sexual object can become particularly attractive at a time when a negative mood is experienced (e.g. anxiety, frustration, loneliness, depression, boredom or stress) (Maltz and Maltz, 2010). After initial contact, the incentive can consolidate its strength through its association with a reduction of negative emotion that closely follows sexual engagement. Contextual factors, such as alienation, difficulty in establishing trusting relationships, a history of sexual abuse when young and low self-esteem, can set the scene for capture by one particular activity. Consider a man described by Trachtenberg (1989, p. 81): ‘When Anthony leaves his home for the cruising circuit, he sloughs off his ennui and comes alive for the first time. His pulse speeds up. He feels vital and witty and desirable.’

  Sexually addicted people commonly suffer simultaneously from disorders such as anxiety and depression (Kafka, 2000). For some, these conditions trigger increased sexual interest (Bancroft and Vukadinovic, 2004). Negative emotions are commonly experienced prior to acquisition of the addiction or in parallel or both. In these terms, consider the description ‘compulsive sexual behaviour as mediated by anxiety reduction, rather than by sexual desire per se’ (Leiblum and Rosen, 2000, p. 471). This appears to be a false dichotomy: in incentive terms, the strength of sexual desire is maintained in part by any associated anxiety reduction.