David Duchovny, star of Californication, has apparently been told by his wife, the lovely Tea Leoni, that he must receive treatment for his sex addiction, or she's packing her heels and lipstick and hittin' the road. The film Choke, to be realsed in Australia soon, features a sexaholic protagonist who, during his 12-Step meetings designed to treat this addiction, can often be found 'shtupping' other similarly addicted members in the bathroom. In Will Ferrell's Blades of Glory, he plays a sex addict who uses such meetings as a bragging forum of what he's done to various nymphettes, given his druthers, and some of theirs.
Why is sexaholism so damn funny?
When ppl identify as alcohlics, or drug addicts, this is rarely met with gales of laughter. Indeed, the ppl living with and around these very ill ppl usually don't find anything funny about it at all. Both these conditions are recognised as serious, very dangerous, and very likely to shorten your life expectancy. Very rarely are they percieved as 'glamourous' conditions.
Sexaholism, on the other hand, seems to generally evoke a gritty, noirish fascination - can a disease really be so bad if all it consists of is bedding beautiful women, and living life at the edge? I would argue a bloody big YES. An addiction by definition is a relationship with a substance or process that is all consuming. Sure, sex is fun, but how much could you really enjoy its pursuit and practice if that was what constituted your entire life? What if that was what it was all about? It sure doesn't leave much room for establishing healthy relationship, functioning at a high lvl in other aspects of life, such as work or study, and probably alienates a fair few ppl - generally, friends don't stick around if you continually make sexual advances towards their partners.
This is the side rarely shown - it seems that public depictions of this addiction prefer stories that involve a blonde masseuse, a 40-gallon drum of baby oil, mood lighting, and a parrot. But sexaholism is real, just like alcholism and drug addiction. Yet no one seems overly prepared to make jokes about heroin addicts, or ppl so drunk they forget to check for traffic step out into the road, only to be knocked down and killed.
What's the answer, ppl? Do we need to recognise sexaholism as a serious illness, and then treat it, and its sufferers, with a little more respect? Or does someone need to come up with some awesome funnies about the one time, this heroin addict walked into a public bathroom, and...
Or is sexaholism just intrinsically funny?
Long Live Bone Crawford
4 hours ago