Think back to junior high. Your body was running on a new set of instructions, and your mind couldn’t stop thinking about sex. You probably felt embarrassed about a lot of it, but nobody treated you like you were sick. Everyone understood it was puberty.
Now fast forward. You’re 35 or 45 or 55, 65 and that same drive, maybe quieter but still there, gets described as a symptom.
In The Myth of Sex Addiction, David Ley points out something the sex addiction field has quietly conceded for years. Researchers like Patrick Carnes and Martin Kafka acknowledge a core similarity between normal adolescent sexual development and how adult ‘sex addicts’ are described: constant thoughts about sex, high arousal, strong motivation. Some researchers have even suggested that very few young adults would avoid meeting significant criteria for hypersexual disorder.
If nearly every 19-year-old could qualify, it’s worth asking what the criteria are measuring.
The locker room and the diagnosis
Ley also points at pop culture. For decades, TV has handed us men as clueless, perpetually horny buffoons, with Al Bundy from Married with Children as the classic example. The joke is always the same: these men never grew up.
So men get two messages at once. Your desire is childish, something to be laughed at. And once you’re an adult, if that desire is strong, it might be a disease. Ley’s argument is that this amounts to a cultural discomfort with male sexuality itself, and that the addiction framework can end up labeling ordinary parts of male eroticism as unhealthy. Not everyone agrees with him on how far that goes, but the tension he’s naming is real, and I see it in the men I work with.
High desire is not a disorder
A high sex drive isn’t a problem. Wanting sex often isn’t a problem. Being turned on easily isn’t a problem.
What I pay attention to is different:
- Does the behavior feel out of your control, even when you want it to stop?
- Is it costing you something you care about, like your relationship, your work, your sleep, your self-respect?
- What is it doing for you? Is it desire, or is it a way to numb out, calm down, or feel something when nothing else is reaching you?
Those questions tell me far more than a frequency count or a label ever could.
That’s also why I don’t lead with the word “addict.” It tends to bring a wave of shame, and shame is one of the things that keeps the pattern going. A man who believes his sexuality is fundamentally dangerous isn’t going to get curious about it. He’s going to hide it.
Where this doesn’t mean “nothing is wrong”
I want to be clear about this part. Questioning the sex addiction model doesn’t mean no one struggles. The men who come to me are often in real distress. Something isn’t working, and they deserve real help.
But there’s a big difference between “my desire is a disease” and “my nervous system learned to use sex or porn to regulate, and I want a different relationship with it.” One shuts men down. The other gives them somewhere to go.
The question underneath all of it
The excerpt closes with a question from Sharon Lamb that I keep coming back to: if the only message boys get is that their sexuality is potentially harmful to others, how do we ever raise them to be full partners in healthy relationships?
Men can’t build a good sex life on top of shame. Desire, confidence, communication, and presence all depend on being able to feel your own arousal without flinching from it.
That’s the work I do: helping men stop treating their sexuality as a threat and start understanding it.
If any of this sounds like where you are, my free guide on men, sexuality, and the nervous system is a good place to start. And if you’d rather talk it through, you can book a confidential 20-minute call.