I went to the theatre
already pretty cynical about big-screen depictions of hypersexuality (my
preferred term for the phenomenon). On the one hand, I've seen very many people
in my clinic seeking help in controlling some aspect of their sex life. On the
other hand, I have read very many commentaries about what hypersexuality means, usually
based on hypotheticals or tid-bits from celebrity cases. None of those
discussions, however, ever seem to describe the actual people I see.
So, popcorn in hand, I was
expecting a re-telling of a daytime, self-help cliché: abuse in childhood,
causing addiction in adulthood, hitting rock bottom, resolved by confronting
past abuse. (Probably followed by falling in love for the first time,
after finally completing some period of sexual abstinence.) Instead, I
saw situations very close to what I do see in therapy.
Most of the discussions I
have read, of the movie and of hypersexuality, focus on the sex
itself. But Shame made another, much
more important, point. When it comes to hypersexuality, we have a
habit of falling into frank judgmentalism, deciding whether self-identified sex
addicts deserve any sympathy. The issues usually under the
microscope are those such as whether sex can count as an addiction at all and
whether sex being out-of-control is literally out of
control. However, I suspect those are just different ways of trying to
get at the same thing: deciding whether to devote our sympathies.
To its
great credit, Shame takes us past all the actual sex
to bring our attention to what rarely gets any airtime at all: Sullivan is
in profound pain, not perpetual orgasm. Rather than
bringing joy, sex brings (at best) momentary relief or distraction from unhappiness.
Although most men would imagine delight with so much sex, Sullivan is instead
in so much pain that even that much sex cannot make up for it.

There is still only very
little science about hypersexuality, and we have not yet worked out even a
shared vocabulary. Until then, we can continue to debate the nature of
hypersexuality and its meaning for society, for ourselves, and for mental
health.