Sex addiction?

I want to believe.

Yep, Duchovny’s in rehab for it.  (Married to Tea Leoni, too.) I guess that explains the surprising number of appearances in the Red Shoe Diaries series. Maybe they should have called it The XXX Files. Or maybe he was just getting into character for his role in Californication.

A recent CNN article about sex addiction sounds surprisingly . . . Mormonish. Check this out:

A lot of teenagers develop their sexuality with pornography, and then find that relational sex isn’t as satisfying, Weiss said. Porn gives them a “very strong chemical hit,” and alters ways of thinking about sex, somewhat like the classic “ring the bell, feed the dog” stimulus-response mechanism. Addicts thus learn to become sexually attached to objects, and have trouble getting the same kind of satisfaction from sex in a relationship, he said.

Where’s the line between healthy sexuality and sex addiction, anyway? It seems to me that people raised in the hyper-sensitive Mormon culture are quick to call any sort of porn use a sex addiction. And that makes me wonder.

Granting that sex addiction exists, and is a real problem for some people — how do you tell a real sex addict who needs help, as compared to just an otherwise healthy person who chooses to deviate from the hyper-sensitive baseline of Mormon expectations?

Pornography Addiction on FMH

In case you haven’t seen it yet, two posts at FMH today kicked off a series on pornography addiction:

Pornography Series: Introduction

Series: Pictures of Pornography and the LDS People