Lakhana adcteng

Addicted to Sex

Kham Phaka

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dr. Wallop Piyamanotham, a psychologist and professor in the Faculty of Education at Srinakharintrawirot University, reported that sex addiction made its first appearance in Thailand ten years ago, and that since that time the disease has gradually spread. Women and teenagers are the groups most at risk. People who contract the disease pass through four stages: first, they masturbate; then they begin to expose themselves; next, they look at pornography on the Internet and on VCDs, and in the final stage, they prostitute themselves, but for pleasure, not for money. The disease usually strikes people who were exposed to pornographic images when they were children. In the United States, it is estimated that between 3% and 6% of the population suffers from sex addiction. Men of high social standing are sought out for sex by sex addicts, some of whom have such powerful feelings that they can have as many as five different partners a night. Even those who are married regularly seek out new partners.
Ms. Pornnipa Lippayom, Secretary General of the Basic Education Commission, reported that Education Minister Mr. Adisai Photaramik had convened a meeting of relevant officials to find a more suitable term to replace plod rak (necking) to refer to teenagers’ sexual behavior. The new term should make clear that students of all ages should refrain from engaging in sexual behavior in public. It is expected that when a suitable term is coined, Mr. Adisai will decree its immediate use, hoping that it will reduce the number of students who engage in this type of behavior (Matichon Daily, Tuesday, September 7, 2004).

Many of us have probably seen the short news item above. I know when I read it, I was stunned. I squealed to myself, “Ooo…ahh!” (The following day the newspapers reported that according to Dr. Wachira Pengchan, director of Srithanya Hospital, sex addition is not a disease or a sickness – don’t be fooled.) I had no idea when sex addiction had reached epidemic proportions, like bird flu, because the press reported that “every day the number of cases grew.” What’s more, the groups most at risk of contracting the (viral) infection were women and teenagers. If you had the strength to keep reading, you would also learn that in the opinion (or according to the research) of Dr. Wallop, the people who were most adversely affected by the epidemic were “men of good social standing.” These are the men approached for sex by women young and old.

When I opened my own clinic to treat sex addiction, a 30-year-old patient asked to have sex with me, right in front of her husband. She told me that her husband had forced her to ask, but she was lying. In fact, it was she herself who wanted to have sex…. Most recently a girl of about 16 or 17 came to the clinic ostensibly to ask for help, but she really wanted to have sex with me.

Reading the news taught me that not only is sex addiction a “sickness” or “disease,” it is also contagious and is most likely to spread among women and teenagers. Those who are most affected by or who have to bear the brunt of the condition (the real victims of the disease) are decent, respectable men like the good doctor, who reported that an endless stream of horny women had a whole bag of tricks to get him to sleep with them.

In most cases, we contract an infectious disease, such as a cold, cholera, or whatever it may be, when we are weak and our body’s immunity is low. So, based on the information above, we can infer that women and teenagers are those segments of the population that are “weak” and have “defective immune systems” (and since sex addiction, properly speaking, is a psychological and not a physical disorder, this means that these groups have some kind of mental defect, or to put it in layman’s terms, women and teenagers are both stupid and resistant to good sense, and that’s why they fall victim to things so easily). And because women and teenagers are most susceptible to infection, they are most in need of protection. They need to be closely monitored. Men, however, especially those of “high social standing,” appear to be the stronger, smarter sex. They have better immune systems, so it’s difficult for them to contract this disease.

Well! If that’s the way it is, let me come back in all my future incarnations as a man of “high social standing,” so there’s an endless stream of women lining up to sleep with me.

And if we define sex addiction as Dr. Wallop does, I would probably have to count myself among all the other sex addicts out there. After all, if you asked me to make a list of life’s greatest pleasures, I would have to put sex somewhere near the top. I learned how to masturbate when I was eight or nine years old, I can’t really say for sure, but I do remember my very first climax. Accidentally, I had put my fingers “down there,” and all of a sudden I had this incredible, indescribable feeling, and ever since that time, I’ve enjoyed myself countless times right up to the present day. Whenever the guy lying there beside me has refused to wake up, I’ve taken matters into my own hands, so to speak. And as I’ve gotten older, the techniques I’ve devised to get myself off have become more elaborate. I put out my sexiest lingerie, turn on some music, light a candle, and spray on some perfume. Sometimes I moan with the most personal kind of pleasure!

I don’t have to tell you about the times I’ve woken up the guy there beside me in the middle of the night or at daybreak. God! – I mean, all he’s wearing is a pair of underpants. Then he rolls over, and there it is, this tentpole sticking straight out at me. Admit it – doesn’t it just drive you crazy?

Doctor, where can I go for help with my sex addiction? The longer I resist getting help, the greater the risk of my passing on the disease to the people around me. Who knows, maybe all the readers who are addicted to my column will catch sex addiction from me. Oh, no! And if that happened, just imagine. All those men who are doctors, lawyers, engineers, and some of our good-looking politicians like Khun Abhisit, Khun Apirak, and Khun Chaturon, will be hounded by so many sex-crazed women that they won’t be able to get any work done.

All right, enough with the sarcasm. Let me get serious for a moment. Why did this news attract so much attention? Never mind that the bulk of it simply wasn’t true. As the director of Srithanya Hospital explained, “sex addiction” is not a disease. Being addicted to sex is like being addicted to alcohol, or gambling, or the video game Raknarok, or Khun Tomorn’s column, or GM magazine, or Matichon Weekly. Whether it constitutes a social problem depends on your point of view, but it certainly can’t be classified as a disease.

We can also ignore the claim that sex addiction has reached “epidemic” proportions over the past ten years since we don’t have any idea how the comparison was made. If people are watching more pornography today than they were twenty years ago, it may not be because there are more sex addicts out there. Instead, it may be because the porn industry has grown or because VCDs are cheaper than they used to be. In fact, it doesn’t seem impossible to believe that people are having less sex these days because they’re afraid of getting AIDS. So they beat off to porno videos at home instead. These are just a few of a hundred possible explanations that have absolutely nothing to do with sex addiction.

Or… judging by the increasing number of people seeking treatment, we might conclude that mental illness is more prevalent in Thailand today. There are more people going to psychiatrists; there are more patients in psychiatric wards. But here again, the fact that more people are being treated for psychological disorders doesn’t necessarily mean that there are more mentally ill people in Thailand today. Maybe it’s because people’s attitudes toward psychiatrists and their understanding of human psychology are changing. Thai people are starting to realize that going to a psychiatrist doesn’t always mean that you’re crazy. Maybe, too, Thai people are losing their faith in fortune tellers and religion and are turning to psychiatrists for help instead. In the same way, the growing number of people seeking help for sex addiction may be due to the fact that people in the past didn’t see any reason to get help for the things that happened to them. If I’m feeling horny all the time, hey, that’s my business. If I want to jerk off, what’s it to you? If I want to hump my husband ten times a night, it’s nobody’s business but mine and my husband’s. And if my husband can’t deal with it, I’ll find myself another husband who can. What’s it got to do with any doctor? Something like that.

If you think about this news more rationally, you’ll see that sex addiction is possible and that it can happen to people of both genders and all ages, like I’m addicted to sex. But as long as it doesn’t disrupt your everyday life, I don’t see any reason to get treatment. In fact, it makes me feel good knowing I’ve got the vim and vigor to enjoy sex several times a day. But why has this become such a big deal – big enough that the Ministry of Education is looking for a new word to replace the good old plod rak? Meanwhile, it also turns out that sex addiction is only a matter of concern when it affects women, not men. In other words, we’re right back to that old belief that it’s normal for men to feel lust, but abnormal for women to do so, and women’s only role is to serve as an outlet for men’s sexual desire. We’re right back to the old notion of “Venus,” where the duty of a good woman is to wait for the man to rape her, and any woman bold enough to reject this role and say to her partner, “Honey, I’m mad with desire,” has to be suffering from hysteria (as Thai people understand and use the term).

What’s more worrying, though, is the spurious claim that girls who sleep around but not for money do it out of some kind of uncontrollable urge. Aren’t we jumping to conclusions here? Whether you’re male, female, gay, or whatever, the decision to sleep around depends on a lot of different conditions, including your understanding of words like love, sex, money, body, capital, profit, commodity, religion, and birth control. It depends on how you understand pleasure and pain, what you expect from a relationship, and even the extent to which you see yourself as a member of society and the nation.

The reaction to this news has been so intense that you might even characterize the response of the Ministry of Education and society in general to any hint of sexual impropriety on the part of young people as a kind of panic. Interestingly, we don’t have to look too far back in our history to find that during the reign of King Rama V, the law stated that the rape of a 12 year-old constituted the rape of a woman, not a “child.” And if you read the history of the Royal Family, you’ll find that some of the members of the inner court had children when they were only 13 years old. They were 13 when they gave birth, which means that they got pregnant when they were only 11 or 12 years old. In other words, sex isn’t a matter of age; it is a matter of how the role and nature of “children” are defined. It is a definition that reflects political and economic changes, and touches on such issues as class as well.

This irrational panic tells us that as long as we continue to think of sex simply as something filthy or pornographic, and refuse to recognize it as a part of life with its own history, its own evolution, and its own connection with social, political, and economic factors, we will continue to panic and condemn kids for having sex on the bus (while enjoying nothing more than reading about this kind of news).

Tomorrow we look forward to reading about kids fucking in a department store, or on the sidewalk, or in a public park. Did they fuck lying down or standing up? Who put their hands where? What did the girl look like? How did she lure the guy? And as we read, we’ll snicker and moan about how promiscuous kids these days are, just as we did when we were watching Nong Nat’s dirty video. We snickered and moaned then, too, as we called her a slut and a whore. “If she was my little sister, I’d kick her out of the house,” we moaned. “Umm, oh, man! Look at the size of those tits!”

Kham Phaka is a pen name of Lakkana Punwichai, a Thai columnist who writes for magazines and weekly newspapers about food, sex, and politics. Her lastest book is a cookbook for people who live alone. This essay first appeared in the magazine GM in 2005. It was translated from the Thai by Michael Crabtree.

Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia Issue 8/9 (March/October 2007)