Sex Addiction: A Critical History

by Barry Reay, Nina Attwood, Claire Gooder

The concept of sex addiction took hold in the 1980s as a product of cultural anxiety. Yet, despite being essentially mythical, sex addiction has to be taken seriously as a phenomenon. Its success as a purported malady lay with its medicalization, both as a self-help movement in terms of self-diagnosis, and as a rapidly growing industry of therapists treating the new disease. The media played a role in its history, first with TV, the tabloids and the case histories of claimed celebrity victims all helping to popularize the concept, and then with the impact of the Internet.This book is a critical history of an archetypically modern sexual syndrome. Reay, Attwood and Gooder argue that this strange history of social opportunism, diagnostic amorphism, therapeutic self-interest and popular cultural endorsement is marked by an essential social conservatism: sex addiction has become a convenient term to describe disapproved sex. It is a label without explanatory force.This book will be essential reading for those interested in sexuality studies, contemporary history, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, media studies and studies of the Internet. It will also be of interest to doctors and therapists currently working in this and related fields.

Genres: Mental Health, Psychology, History, Nonfiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2015

Reviews

[T Tiller]

This is an excellent, scholarly book for those interested in the subject. This book is indeed critical of "sex addicition", as the title suggests, but it backs it up with much research and evidence. It explores the history of the concept of "sex addiction", where it came from and why, those who made it popular and who profit from it. It is written more for academics (and it's authors are themselves academics from New Zealand) and feels like a research paper, so it is not as quick reading as a "NYTimes bestseller" pop psychology sort of book, but it's still enjoyable.

What I liked about it is the thorough research and the perspective of the authors is that of complete outsiders (they are from New Zealand), so they are not tied to the "sex addiction" industry or the addiction treatment (for-profit) industry in general.

I recommend it for anybody reading about "sex addiction", wondering if they (or someone they know) are a sex addict, as there are many more books out there that assert how sex is indeed an addiction, and this gives a valid point of view from the other side.

[Aurora Grace]

A great work of scholarship tracking out the origins of the "sex addiction" theory.