Sexual compulsivity has been debated by clinicians and the public for decades. The field has been grappling with defining what is “too much sex.” What is it? An addiction? A compulsion? Something else? Often, the debates become emotive with much moral and/or religious biases and subjectivity, both amongst clinicians and also with the public and the clickbait headlines in the media.

There are several obstacles that make sexual compulsivity particularly difficult to understand in-depth. Firstly, there is a vast diversity of people’s baseline level of sexual desires and interests, and so many myths on what “healthy sex” should look like, which makes it challenging to discern between shame, moral incongruence, and real sexual compulsivity. Secondly, some mental health professionals have been over-diagnosing sexual compulsivity based on their own ideas of what they deem “too much sex”, “unhealthy”, or “sex addiction” for decades, contributing to the confusion. Thirdly, the field has been held back by poorly conducted research, much pseudo-science, religious biases, and a dominant clinical discourse of “sex/porn addiction” even though the evidence for addiction is poor and has not been clinically endorsed. This dominant discourse of “sex/porn addiction” infiltrated the public’s narrative, making people afraid of sex, particularly sex that is not heteronormative, monogamous, and vanilla.

The “sex addiction” clinical discourse became popular in the 80’s, at the time of the AIDS epidemic, so it was a time when people feared sex a lot (for good reasons), when the idea of heterosexual monogamy was highly prized, when Christian values became a central focus, and when strong homophobic narratives were reinforced. It is not a surprise that the concept of “sex addiction” became very popular........

© Psychology Today