Aren’t you getting sick of hearing about all these politicians and other powerful people who can’t control themselves? Are you wondering if they are all just sociopaths? Are all sex addicts also sociopaths?
In the wake of my own dismay at the sheer number of sex crazed politicians, I wanted to share some thoughts with you.
First of all, one of the psychopathy researchers I respect the most is Dr. Grant Harris. He has written a seminal paper COERCIVE AND PRECOCIOUS SEXUALITY AS A FUNDAMENTAL ASPECT OF PSYCHOPATHY He says that promiscuous, coercive and precocious sex is central to the psychopathy syndrome. However, if you look at the statistics on the PCL-R the most studied method of assessing psychopathy, the two items related to sex have the lowest item correlations with the total score and do not even seem to be related strongly to Factor 2 of that test which is a measure of impulsivity. So there doesn’t seem to be a particularly strong relationship between psychopathy and sex addiction. By that I mean not every sociopath/psychopath is obviously a sex addict.
In his book The Mask of Sanity, Hervey Cleckley commented that “impersonal sex” is part of the syndrome. He also noted though that psychopaths didn’t seem to like sex all that much. Many victims I have interviewed have mentioned that. Sociopaths seem to view sex as a weapon to be used on another person or withheld from another person to hurt them.
As Donna pointed out earlier in the week, there is a strong link between sex motivation and the perception of power; there is also a link between a person’s drive for power and their drive for sex that may be related to testosterone.
When I think about Arnold, Anthony, Elliott and Bill, what I find most striking is their ability to do what I would call dissociate because I can’t think of another word for it. In the moment they are conceiving, tweeting, meeting in the hotel or messing on a dress, thoughts about their families and all of us seem to be completely gone from their minds.
Another great thinker about psychopathy is Robert Reiber, Ph.D. who I had the good fortune to chat with about this very topic in person several years ago. He thinks that this ability to dissociate is what makes a psychopath. When I asked him what he thought about the idea that psychopaths are “without conscience.” He replied, “Of course they have a conscience.” He thinks though they have an uncanny ability to dissociate from their conscience and their memories.
Neither the ideas of Harris nor Reiber bode well for our politicians. But I have learned a lesson from my dogs that might be useful here.
My daughter and I have three Ibizan Hounds, they are sight hounds who also have this uncanny ability to dissociate. When they are hunting small prey they become so focused on the moment they forget we are there and run off. We have been able to prevent this from happening through the use of training collars. We very much wanted them to be able to run free in the woods, so we had to figure out a safe way to get them to come back. They easily learned to come to us to avoid a mild shock that the collars deliver via a remote that has a one mile range. There is also a vibrate button, so after the dogs were trained, the warning vibration is all that is needed. But I have noticed that when they wear the collars they do not become as engrossed in the hunt and they readily come back to my voice. Without the collars, I can be shouting right next to them and they don’t hear me.
So the answer is simple, politicians should wear the collar, and their spouses can keep the remote!
For more discussion about sociopaths and sex see:
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well………….I learned from the best here 🙂
LL
My answers are decidedly YES, NO, and NO.
However, I’m not answering “yes” to the first question for the reason some people might imagine. Yes, I am indeed sick and tired of hearing so many of these STORIES. But that’s partly because, if we MUST have salacious stories involving sex, I’d prefer to hear more like the two I’m going to post next, though they’re very different in character.
This first excerpt is from The Last Lion, William Manchester’s monumental biography of Sir Winston Churchill. In his first volume, Visions of Glory, Manchester paints an entertaining background of what Britain was like in the Victorian era, particularly for the upper classes when Churchill was born in 1874. This passage (pp.86-91) is about sexual behavior among the aristocracy. It’s a startling revelation to anyone who imagined Victorians were stuffy about sex.
The “Blenheim” referred to here is the immense English country palace built in the early 1700s by the first Duke of Marlborough, Churchill’s ancestor.
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Today Blenheim and other such shrines of the advantaged, with their marble halls and vast distances, seem intimidating. Their inhabitants didn’t feel that way. On the contrary, they found them warm and convivial, bright, for some of them, with the promise of the greatest social gift they could imagine. It was illicit love. Here, too, the privileged enjoyed special privileges. Seen through the prism of a long century, they are hard to comprehend. Nineteenth-century sex, between thoroughbred lovers, was extremely complex, but like everything else they enjoyed, it had its precedents. The British aristocracy had always gloried in its sexual prowess. Exceptional concupiscence was rewarded; John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, first rose to prominence because his sister Arabella, maid of honor to the Duchess of York, became the duke’s most passionate mistress. When Marlborough returned from European battlefields at an advanced age, his wife Sarah proudly wrote: “Today the Duke returned from the war and pleasured me twice in his top boots.” Had she sought lovers during his absence, the social risk would have been slight. For generations before Victoria’s coronation the patriciate had tolerated promiscuity among its more hot-blooded members. Byron wrote his shortest and most eloquent poem as a testament to a titled woman who had taken leave of her husband for a nine-month romp with him:
Caroline Lamb,
Goddamn.
The Duke of Wellington had his pick of ladies when he returned from his various triumphs, and two of his bedmates expressed their appreciation to him in their memoirs. The duke’s sister-in-law, Lady Charlotte Wellesley, the mother of four young children, left them to sleep with Lord Paget, himself the father of four children by his wife, Lady Caroline Villiers, daughter of Lady Jersey, who was the former “favorite,” as it was then put, of the Prince of Wales, At Waterloo the duke made Paget his chief of cavalry. An aide protested: “Your Grace cannot have forgotten the affair with Lady Charlotte Wellesley?” The duke: “Oh, no! I have not forgotten that.” Aide: “That is not the only case, I am afraid. At any rate [he] has a reputation of running away with everybody he can.” Duke: “I’ll take good care he don’t run away with me. I don’t care about anybody else.” During the Regency, upper-class sexual conduct became particularly flagrant. It was then that ladies diverted themselves with the best-selling Memoirs of Harriet Smith, which opened with the gripping line: “I will not relate the exact circumstances by which at the age of thirteen I became the mistress of the Earl of Croydon. ”
The tradition has continued to flourish in the twentieth century, a colorful example being the beautiful and wanton Edwina Ashley, Lady Mountbatten. When Lord Louis Mountbatten was viceroy of India, negotiating the terms for Indian independence, the sessions went much more smoothly because the vicereine, with her husband’s resigned knowledge, was sleeping with Jawaharlal Nehru. Earlier she had been even more headstrong. At one point she vanished from London society for four months. Friends in Park Lane found Louis extremely vague when asked his wife’s whereabouts. Actually, he didn’t know. Later he learned that Edwina had shipped aboard a fifty-ton trading schooner, bound for the South Seas, as an ordinary seaman. Night after night, as they cruised among the lush islands, she gratified herself with her fellow crewpersons.
Victoria’s reign was a hiatus, not in extracurricular upper-class ardor, but in the flagrant practice of it. Her ascent saw the triumph of the puritans—of what Melbourne called “that d——d morality.” In the 1840s and 1850s debauchery went underground. By the time of Winston Churchill’s childhood and early youth it had become prudent to keep mum about your love affairs. Gladstone in a candid moment said he had known “eleven prime ministers and ten were adulterers”; nevertheless, he joined in the persecution of Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish MP who had been the lover of Kitty O’Shea with Mrs. O’Shea’s husband’s consent. In 1887 Sir Charles Dilke, at one time regarded as a future prime minister, was ruined by a divorce trial. He lost his cabinet post, then lost his seat, and eventually became a social pariah. One modern British scholar is convinced that “Disraeli slept his way to the top,” but Dizzy was too crafty to be caught. Gladstone made a curious practice of prowling the London streets at night and holding long, intimate conversations with prostitutes. Sometimes he brought them home and Mrs. Gladstone gave them hot chocolate. It was assumed that he was trying to convince them to mend their ways. If so, he doesn’t appear to have been discouraged by his failure to produce a single convert. Indeed, after these talks he always appeared beaming, animated, and flushed. No one thought that odd. Nor could anyone pass judgment on affairs of which they knew nothing. The key to successful extramarital sex, therefore, was discretion. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, perhaps the most outspoken woman in polite society, said dryly: “It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom, as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.
The difficulty lay in finding the bedroom. Mrs. Campbell also said, after maneuvering one man out of his marriage to a Churchill and up the aisle with her: “Ah, the peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue!” It was all very well for a Forsyte to tuck away a common mistress in Chelsea, but that couldn’t be done with a lady. In the city she was under observation all the time. Her gown, her coif, her bearing, gestures, and diction testified to her class, and she couldn’t be seen outside her aerie. Her very presence in a hotel lobby would invite scandal. Thus the preference of the aristocracy and gentry for their homes in the country. London society was too ritualized; there was little privacy, unless you were an unmarried bachelor, like young Freud, who informed his housekeeper that he expected a woman for tea and was told: “Right, sir, I’ll change the sheets on the bed.
The servants knew of most dalliances. They even understood why there was one standard for their masters and mistresses and another for the rest of England. Victorian morality arose from the needs of the new middle class. As the lord chancellor explained when divorce courts were established in 1857, a woman lost nothing by her husband’s infidelity and could absolve him “without any loss of caste,” while “no one would venture to suggest” that he could pardon her adultery, which “might be the means of palming spurious children upon him.” This was important; such children shared a middle-class legacy. In titled families it was meaningless. Only the legitimacy of the first patrician child counted. Professor McGregor writes: “The sexual waywardness of aristocrats… did not endanger the integrity or succession of family properties regulated by primogeniture and entail. Countless children of the mist played happily in Whig and Tory nurseries where they were no threat to the security of family property or to the interests of the heirs.” Pamela Harriman, a Digby who was Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law before she married New York’s former governor, takes the traditional light view of such sex: “They went to bed a lot with each other, but they were all cousins, so it didn’t really count.” It was their insularity that largely limited them to cousins; among the great families, Barbara Tuchman notes, “everyone knew or was related to everyone else… People who met each other every day, at each other’s homes, at race meetings and hunts, at Cowes, for the Regatta, at the Royal Academy, at court and in Parliament, were more often than not meeting their second cousins or brother-in-law’s uncle or stepfather’s sister or aunt’s nephew on the other side.
One area of scholarly inquiry being explored by today’s sexologists is how the voluptuaries of the Victorian upper class led such colorful sex lives and produced so little issue. The average British wife then conceived ten times during her childbearing years. But the great thoroughbred beauties, who treasured their figures, carried far less often. After giving birth to Winston, Jennie Churchill was in and out of lovers’ beds all her life, yet she bore only one more child. And she was not exceptional.
It is worth noting that these small victories of desire were achieved not by men, but by prudent women. One would expect that Victorian gentlemen, proud of their protective instincts, would have shielded their mistresses from impregnation. The means were at hand. Condoms, originally thin sheaths made from the visceral tissue of sheep, had been used for two centuries; Casanova mentions them, and so does Boswell. (“French letter” was the term used in England; across the Channel it was “la capote anglaise.”) But Victorian males were also romantics, and they found condoms distasteful. Therefore their partners turned to faithful douching with a solution of sulfate of zinc or alum, rigid austerity during their ripe periods each month, beeswax disks which blocked the entrance to the uterus, sponges moistened with diluted lemon juice and inserted into the vagina, and, increasingly, the Dutch cup, a primitive diaphragm designed to fit longitudinally in the vagina with the forward end under the pubic bone and the back end in the posterior fornix. Aletta Jacobs introduced this device in the Netherlands in the early 1880s. The cup comprised a steel ring with rubber stretched across it—a painful expedient, but passion overrode the discomfort. Mere possession of a Dutch cup was a sign of privilege in London. The vast majority of Englishwomen didn’t know they existed and would have had difficulty acquiring one anyhow; the cups were available, only to those who furnished respectable references, at a Mayfair bookshop.
Partly because they bred less, ladies flourished, They were so much healthier and more active than their unprivileged sisters that they almost seem to have belonged to a different species. Lower-class women weren’t envious; they adored them. An article in Graphic Magazine described in the saccharine prose of the time how such social celebrities were regarded:
For the fashionable beauty, life is an endless carnival, and dress a round of disguises. She does everything and the wings of Mercury might be attached to her tiny bottines, so rapid are her changes of scene and character. She is a sportswoman, a huntress, a bold and skillful swimmer; she drives a pair of horses like a charioteer, mounts the roof of a four-in-hand, plays lawn tennis, is at home on a race course or the deck of a fast yacht. She is aware of the refinements of dining and has a pretty taste in vintages. She is a power at the theater or the Opera; and none is more brilliant at a supper party. Of the modern young lady a la mode, who wields alike the fiddle-bow, the billiard-cue, and the etching-needle, who climbs mountains and knows the gymnasium, none but herself can be the prototype.
Among the most sophisticated of these women, often bored partners in arranged marriages, the affairs which were joyously celebrated during weekends were sometimes launched in wife-to-wife conversations. “Tell Charles I have designs on him,” one would tell Charles’s lady, who would acknowledge the proposal with a nod and an amused smile; she herself already had a lover or had designs of her own on someone else’s husband. But you had to be very secure to take that approach—had to be, say, one of that select circle of ladies who took turns sleeping with Victoria’s eldest son. More often an understanding would have been reached in advance between the primary partners. Some affairs were known to everyone. General Sir Neville Bowles Chamberlain, for example, always slept with the Duchess of Manchester, and the Duke of Marlborough with Lady Colin Campbell. Of course, they didn’t cross a bedroom threshold together. On Thursdays each of the hundred-odd guests was assigned a room; a tiny brass frame on the door held a card with his or her name written on it. Wise and worldly hostesses knew who should be paired with whom. Vita Sackville-West later described how they served as accomplices to Victorian and later Edwardian intrigue: “This question of the disposition of bedrooms always gave the… hostesses cause for anxious thought. It was so necessary to be tactful, and at the same time discreet. The professional Lothario would be furious if he found himself in a room surrounded by ladies who were all accompanied by their husbands. Tommy Brand, on one such occasion, had been known to leave the house on the Sunday morning… Tommy’s motto was ‘Chacun a sa chacune.’ Then there were the recognised lovers to be considered; the duchess herself would have been greatly annoyed had she gone to stay at the same party as Harry Tremaine, only to find that he had been put at the other end of the house… It was part of a good hostess’ duty to see to such things; they must be made easy, though not too obvious.” After lights were out, shadowy figures would glide through the darkened hall and everyone would settle in for the night’s pleasure. An hour before dawn the butler would appear in the hall bearing a gong. He would strike it once and depart. The same tiptoeing figures would reappear. Presently they would all meet at the breakfast table.
Breakfast could be bewildering to outsiders. At the table you were expected to be brusque, even rude, to your companion of the night. “Pass the toast,” you would say crossly, or “I want the salt.” The upper class was always very direct (“I want to pee”), but this went beyond that. It was important to sort out your different roles, to let it be known that you weren’t going to break the rules by being demonstrative, or eloping, or doing anything else rash. One-night stands were very rare, but now and then they happened. The story of one, involving a young Frenchwoman, survives. During an evening musicale a handsome gentleman propositioned her. She accepted, and a memorable night followed. Two hours later she was cracking a soft-boiled egg downstairs when he appeared, took a seat, and arranged his napkin. Still aglow with romance, she bestowed a tender smile upon him. He glowered and growled: “Are you going to hog the butter all day?” She was shocked, then enraged. Hurling the butter in his face, she flew upstairs, summoned her maid, packed, and demanded that she be driven to the station at once. She told their stunned hostess that she would never again visit atroce England. She didn’t. She wasn’t invited.
The second anecdote also originates from Britain—though not entirely—and is very different in tone. Sir Arthur Grimble, KCMG, was born in Hong Kong in 1888. That suggests he may have been the son of some globetrotting British diplomat. Whether he was or not, Grimble himself did follow a Civil Service career, joining the Colonial Office in 1914 when he was posted to the Gilbert islands. In 1926 he rose to become Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, a British protectorate at the time.
In case anyone doesn’t know where these islands are, they’re out in the Pacific. On becoming independent in 1971, they took the name of Kiribati (pronounced “Kiribass,”) which is a mangled form of what the British had dubbed these islands: the “Gilberts.” The capital is Bairiki on the south of the island of Tarawa. The Ellice Islands separated from Kiribati in 1975 and became the nation of Tuvalu.
But that’s all by the way. During his time of service, Grimble developed very close and friendly relationships with the island people he was governing, and became an expert on the Gilbertese language, myths, and customs. Afterwards he had many tales to tell about his life there, which he published in two books in the 1950s. This story about himself and his wife Olivia is from A Pattern of Islands (1952).
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It was pleasant to take small gifts to friends at the happy hour before sunset. The polite approach was to walk up to the side of a mwenga and stand there silent, with one hand resting on the edge of the raised floor as if begging leave to enter, until someone said the right welcoming words.
Usually, a grandfather or grandmother sitting inside spoke first: “Sir and Woman, you shall be blest. Whence come you at the sunset hour?”
“You shall be blest. We come from our house over there in the east.”
“And you will do what in this place?” “We will visit this mwenga and those who dwell in it.” “Aia! It is well. You wish to gossip with us?” “We wish to gossip a little. That is the way of it.” “Ai-i-i-a!”—on a long, indrawn breath of deepest pleasure—“So it is well. Blessings and peace. Mount! Mount!”
On the last words, the young women of the household would dart forward to spread fine mats on the edge of the floor next to us. We would take our seats there with legs dangling over the side, saying as we mounted, “We pray this mwenga may be blest with all of you within.”
“You shall be blest,” answered everyone together, and after that the gossip was free for all.
The gifts we brought would be given only just before leaving. We had a working agreement about how they must be given: Olivia did all the presentations to females, I to males, except where very old people were concerned. This arrangement seemed to guarantee us freedom from the least breath of scandal. Scandalous talk was, as a matter of fact, a thing much more to be guarded against on my side than on Olivia’s. The attitude of Gilbertese men to white women was the perfection of reverent chivalry, wherever one went. The attitude of the laughing, golden girls towards white men was perhaps on the average, a little profane, for the simple reason that, on the average, the white men seldom qualified to be reverenced by them as saints. The idea of my never making a personal gift to a lady was absolutely sound. But there was just one case that our careful technique failed to provide against.
The thing happened when Olivia was expecting another baby early in the New Year, and the whole of Tarawa was agog with delight at the prospect. The new arrival would be the first child of the Breed of Matang ever to be born on their own soil of Tarawa. It was an epoch-making event for all the eighteen villages, but most of all for the people of Betio, who talked with Olivia every day and claimed the right to reckon themselves her private bodyguard.
They treated her like a beloved goddess wherever we went, and hung upon her every word, seeking to find in even the littlest things she said some guide to how they might help and protect her. They noticed me only as her husband, at most to ask how I thought they might ease the feet of Missis—as they were calling her by then—along the road to her great hour. That protective spirit, that eagerness to interpret her every need, was really the key to what followed—not forgetting, of course, the subtleties of custom in connection with gifts of perfumery.
Olivia and I had just finished tea one afternoon when a very sweet village girl, crowned with a wreath of white flowers, came up the front steps and stood with bowed head on the verandah waiting to be invited farther in.
“Why, hullo, Voice-of-the-Tide!” said Olivia. “Do you want to talk to us? Come in and sit down.”
Voice-of-the-Tide crept forward, her head still deeply bowed, and sat on the mat before our feet. “Yes, I come to speak… I come to say…” she murmured and fell silent, nervously clasping and unclasping her beautiful hands.
“Well, don’t be afraid of us. We won’t bite your head off””“–Olivia and she had always been great friends—“What’s on your mind?”
“I come to thank you for yesterday evening. I am very proud… I come to say… ” Speech failed her again. She had not yet lifted her eyes to ours.
“Te raoi (Don’t mention it),” Olivia answered her word of thanks. We thought we knew what that referred to. We had visited her people’s mwenga the evening before, and Olivia had given her a small bottle of scent. But why should a casual gift have left her so constrained?
It was only after a long, long silence that she raised her head and whispered, looking me in the eyes, “The gift of love that Misses gave me…. I am very proud to be chosen… I am ready… when shall I come to the Man of Matang?” and burst into bitter tears. “But my sweetheart will never forgive me!” she wailed. “Alas! Alas! The miserable girl I am!” The ghastly truth took half an hour to piece together between her tempest of sobbing.
It was the custom for a Gilbertese lady of high birth to choose, during her last months of pregnancy, some young unmarried friend of hers for the nightly comfort of her husband. “For look you,” said Voice-of-the-Tide’s father to me later, “it secures the safety of the child. And not that alone. It secures also for the mother the continual loving-kindness of her husband and that other woman.”
But the matter was one of such delicacy for all concerned that no preliminary words about it might ever pass between them. The husband and the not-impossible-shes simply waited for the expectant mother to give the customary sign of her choice. The sign was the handing of a gift of anything sweet-scented—a wreath of flowers, a bottle of perfume—to the chosen girl in the presence of the husband. So high was the compliment, so deeply felt the obligation of kindness to the pregnant, that no girl of good breeding could possibly refuse the charge thus laid upon her.
Nobody in the village doubted for an instant what Olivia had meant by her gift. The place was buzzing for joy at the delicate correctitude of it. Everyone was pleased, in fact, except Voice-of-the-Tide and her sweetheart. I felt that Olivia was a little malicious about that when Voice-of-the-Tide, most earnestly reassured by myself as to the purity of my own intentions towards her, dried her tears and smiled again: “Tell me,” said Olivia, “if you had not had a sweetheart, would you have felt differently about it?”
“I aki (Not I),” replied Voice-of-the-Tide without a moment’s courteous hesitation.
“And why not?” Olivia’s tone simply egged her on.
She eyed me up and down gravely before she answered: “This chief of Matang is very kind… but”—she rippled into giggles.
Nothing, I am glad to say, would induce her to say more. I left them to their laughter.
I have been divorced for almost 3 years after a nearly 30 year marriage — my ex showed many signs of being a sex addict and NPD, but I did not understand the sex addiction component until I was already on the way to divorce.
What you say about them being able to dissociate sounds very familiar to me — while my ex was sneaky and seems to have led a secret life, as time went on he became more reckless and when I would make discoveries, I would be baffled that he didn’t think about getting caught. He is a brilliant man and has become extremely successful in his field, so it is not from lack of intelligence.
I have been active in S-Anon, a 12-step group for the friends and family members of sex addicts for the past 4 years, and the support has been invaluable. I have also learned a great deal about sexual addiction — many of my fellow group members are women married to recovering sex addicts, and some of the recovery stories are amazing in that these men’s behavior was far worse than what the media reports on about the politicians you mentioned, and yet they have been able to turn their lives around.
I do not believe that my ex was capable of the type of self-reflection and spiritual growth necessary to overcome his sexual addictions, but then, because he had been with me since high school, he never had to really be accountable for most of his life. It wasn’t until I became more assertive and less gullible that his true nature became more apparent, and I think he was too far gone at that point.
But the only way I can imagine that he was able to carry on this secret life for so long is the ability to dissociate that you wrote about in your article — even when he was caught, he was able to turn the blame on me and minimize the behavior so that I began to doubt my own sanity.
What you wrote about impersonal sex struck a chord with me as well, since I only understand, now that I am in a relationship with a caring and sensitive individual, just how impersonal my sex life was with my ex. I had nothing to compare it with, so I didn’t realize an intimate relationship is called “intimate” because there is true intimacy between the partners!
I’m glad for this blog because it continues to reinforce my gut-wrenching decision to divorce my husband and move on and heal in my life. I am now happier than I ever recall in all the years we were together.
1day,
I’m sooo happy to hear your story ended with a happy note.
You sooo deserve that and it’s inspiring to all of us here.
Thanks for sharing that.
Your ex was probably a sociopath because he was able to compartmentalize and lead a double/triple/quadruple etc… life for so long. you were his beard.
I don’t know if all sex addicts are sociopaths but all sociopaths are sex addicts, so in my book that’s a red flag.
I believe that sex addiction is about power and not about sex. That’s why, for me, it’s a red flag, since the only thing that sociopaths care about is power and control. They have no empathy for those they control and in fact, prefer to see their victims suffer as the ultimate proof of their power.
1Day
Wow, you’ve been through so much. I am glad he’s out of your life, and I’m glad you are here with us.
SK
Redwald,
Thank you for those interesting excerpts—yea this is nothing “new” and I have just finished reading “evil genes” by Barbara Oakley which talks a great deal about this very thing and I will be doing a Book review on this VERY interesting book in the next week or so….been pretty busy lately with one thing or another….so won’t say WHEN I will have it done. BUT SOON.
I’m not so sure that a person who is “addicted” to sex (and cheating along with it) is like someone who is addicted to drugs or alcohol….I tend to think that there is some sociopathy/narcissism involved there as well. In fact, Oakley’s book talks about that very thing as well.
Thanks for your interesting post, Red. I always appreciate your contributions.
Dear 1-day,
Welcome to Love Fraud. Thanks for an interesting introduction and contribution to the discussion. Again, welcome and so glad you are doing well. Staying with one of these people who are out “ho-ing” around is risking your life and health, just not worth the risk I think.
My X is not a sex addict. For him it’s just a controlling mechanism. Now he has the internet to play on, I wouldn’t be surprised if he never had sexual contact again. I found one of his love letters on line, he was using the exact same phrases to her as he was to me. Much harder to cut and paste in real life! However, he loved to talk, I rarely got to finish a sentence. He was an excellent lover, but after the first few months of living together never initiated sex again. He said it was because he was raised by his mother and sister and taught to respect a woman, not to treat her as a sex symbol. I told him I didn’t mind being HIS sex symbol. When I insisted we have counseling, he claimed he wanted sex more often. I blurted out “So do I!” He was affectionate and cuddly right up to the end, still claiming he found me sexy. I had finally stopped initiating sex, telling him if he wanted to make love to let me know. And that was the end of our sex life. He once admitted it was messy and tiring. My god that man was lazy! But then, he only was in love with himself, so it’s only natural that he preferred no one else to get in the way.
I have ADHD, I hyperfocus. I’ve had herd dogs and to me, it looks like that’s what they are doing. I’m not sure even a training collar would have worked on Bear. He used to round up the landlord’s cows every day, even though he wasn’t trained and we never DID find a way to stop him. The landlord was a perv and would open my bedroom window while I was nursing my baby “to give me my mail.” A couple of times of that and Bear began to herd him away from the house, exactly the same way he handled the cows. I heard him swearing one morning and looked out to see Bear happily jumping and nipping at him. He wasn’t biting, never broke the skin, but I bet it pinched like crazy! Good dog, LOL. Training collars and remotes on several of my landlords would have made my life much easier.