I throw around words in highly specific ways in reference to myself, and in recent days, in a couple of different conversations, I’ve realized that I’m not always clear about what I mean. Without any claim to “correctness” or “accuracy” that extends beyond me, here is what I mean when I use certain words: Compulsion: [...]
I know I’ve written about it before, and I doubt I have much new to say, but it’s the nature of this blog that from time to time I circle back and reiterate things previously said, only slightly differently. You can never step in the same river twice, right? Anyway…. I was reading Maggie McNeill’s [...]
I was at a bat mitzvah. There were something like seventy-five young girls and boys. The boys were unremarkable, small, squeaky, awkward. The girls, much less so. Teetering on three- and four-inch heels, wearing revealing dresses, made up (some garishly, some tastefully), and porting breasts and hips to which they hadn’t yet grown accustomed, these [...]
Even more than sex, or commercial sex, during my days of “addiction,” I was compelled by web sites about sex, web sites that promised sex. There are a few categories of these, ranging from the utopian ones that promise free and easy sexual connections with an infinitude of willing partners (Craigslist’s “casual encounters” section, Adult [...]
I remember walking into the Harmony Theater. As I approached, my heart would beat a little more quickly. Adrenaline would pulse through me. Excitement, sure, but also shame, embarrassment, fear. I must have craved all of those things; we don’t do the same thing over and over because of just one feature of it. Generally, [...]
If you’ve spent a lot of time in therapy (or maybe just if you pay attention to yourself a lot), you’re familiar with the following phenomenon: the situations, relationships, behaviors, which you tell yourself you most want to avoid, you most fear, dislike, etc., are, seemingly coincidentally, the things toward which you most frequently gravitate. [...]
For years, I was deeply ashamed. I believed my desires were shameful, contemptuous. I desperately struggled to suppress those desires. And ultimately, I ended up acting them out. And in the end, I was ashamed of the wrong things. I believed that I was a bad person because I wanted to be ministered to sexually, [...]
A funny note about myself. For the vast majority of my life, rightly or wrongly, I believed that – I created the reality that – the only way a woman would find me attractive was if I paid her. In the last couple of years, I’ve traveled in the opposite direction, becoming convinced, for the [...]
I’m just a guy, and, as I’ve written before, we men have fragile egos. Without going too deep into my biography, here are some salient facts about me: I was in my late twenties before the first time I (noticed that I) wasn’t the smartest person in any given room. Obviously, there were at least [...]
I’ve often wondered if and when I would hear from a reader, “Dude, you are just a sex addict, and you’re still acting out. Don’t kid yourself.” Last night, I heard it for the first time in a comment on one of my recent posts on safer sex. Winston is outraged by me, by those [...]
