SGU Episode 430
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| SGU Episode 430 |
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| October 12th 2013 |
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| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
R: Rebecca Watson |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
The claim of alternative practitioners to not treat disease labels but the whole patient...allows alternative practitioners to live in a fool’s paradise of quackery where they believe themselves to be protected from any challenges and demands for evidence. |
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| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| Forum Discussion |
Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
This Day in Skepticism ()
- October 10, 1871: Chicago fire is finally put out.
News Items ()
2013 Nobel Prizes ()
Kansas Citizens Reject Science ()
Science Sting on Open Access Journals ()
Smart Metals ()
Who's That Noisy ()
- Answer to last week
Interview with Marty Klein (42:34)
S: Well we are here at TAM 2013 and we are joined by now Marty Klein, Mary welcome to the Skeptics' Guide.
MK: Delighted to be here.
S: And Dr. Klein is a sex therapist and an author of several books including "Sequal intelligence, what we really want from sex and how to get it" and "America's war on sex". So Marty. I'm a sex addict and I need your help. So, how can you help me?
MK: I can help you by giving you the good news that you're not a sex addict.
S: How do you know?
MK: There is no such thing as sex addiction. Sex addiction is morality dressed up as clinical science. Sex addiction is a concept that was invented in 1986 by Patrick Corns, a prison addictionologist.
S: Is that a real thing, addicitonologist, or did you make up that term?
MK: I think an addictionologist is a guy who specialises in addiction.
E: Works for me.
S: OK.
J: It just seems a little hokey, right?
S: It does come off a little hokey, but OK, we'll buy it.
MK: Just like an athlete is a guy who wears an athletic support. So the thing with sex addiction, lots of people make sexual decisions whose consequences they don't like, and people make the same mistake over and over again when it comes to sexuality. And we don't need a new category for that. We already have categories for that, I mean lots of people, lots of human beings, they make decisions, they don't like the consequences, they keep coming back and doing the same thing. So historically, therapy has a good category for that, it's called neurosis, right? More popularly people say oh that guy, he just doesn't learn from his mistakes. I think the attractiveness of the concept of sex addiction is that it allows people to say, it's not me, it's my addiction, it allows people to say, there's something damaged in me that drives these decisions rather than somebody saying you know, I know it's not good for me to do that but at the time, it's very hard for me to think ahead, it's very hard for me to think about consequences when I'm really hungry or tired or lonely. It's hard for me to think of consequences when I'm angry at my wife. It's hard for me to think of consequences when I feel unattractive. And I got a lot of compassion for people like that, it's part of my job, but to call it an addiction I think waters down the meaning of the concept of addiction so much as to render it meaningless.
S: But what about, are there people who are very compulsive in their sexual behaviours...
MK: Yes, absolutely.
S: ...to the point where it's detrimental to their well-being, their functionality.
MK: Of course.
S: Does it ever get to a level where you think it's reasonable to call that kind of compulsive sexual behaviour a sex addiction or would you just use a different term?
MK: Well I see people who wash their hands 40 times a day. I don't call them hand-washing addicts. I say they have obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I don't send them to a hand washing clinic, I help them get their obsessive compulsive disorder treated. Practically any behaviour on Earth can be done in a compulsive way, in a self-destructive way, in an impulsive way. Certainly we see people use the internet in self-destructive ways all the time as well as shopping or a lot of other things. To separate out the content from that and to focus on the content I think is a really big mistake.
J: But what about the idea though, that we absolutely do have a sex drive. We don't have like a hand-washing drive, but sex-drive is something you can feel come and go, right, feel exceptionally aroused or "horny", right? And as an example though, I have a friend, a guy I'm really close with that is like the horniest person I've ever met in my life. Like he talks about sex incessantly, and he's horny all the time.
MK: That's your brother. You're getting confused.
S: Jay has a "friend". A "friend" in scare quotes.
J: I always said to him and other people that know about it that he's a sex addict that he's just over the top. He wants to have sex all the time.
MK: Right so I see these guys in my practice all the time. They come in and they say "I need to have sex twice a day". I say "aha, so you want to have sex twice a day", they say "no, I need to have sex twice a day". That's the mental construct where it starts: I need to have sex. No you don't. I mean let's be serious here, you don't need to have sex twice a day. You need to eat twice a day, you don't need to have sex. What this guy really means is, when I don't have sex twice a day I feel really, really uncomfortable. Really? Tell me all about that. I feel lonely, I feel unattractive, I feel like I'm not a real man. Well, I have a lot of sympathy about that. And that's not a sex addiction, it's not an addiction of any kind, it's not even about sex. It's about how a person feels about themselves or how a person sees themselves walking through the world and fortuntately we have clinical tools to deal with that, they're called therapy.
B: So it's a coping mechanism.
MK: Typically. Typically.
S: So it sounds like what you're saying is that sexual behaviour can be a compulsion that is a manifestation of some other underlying psychological problem.
MK: Of course.
S: So it shouldn't be singled out, the behaviour itself isn't the problem, it's just a symptom of the real underlying problem.
MK: And what happens is, Bob you mentioned a coping mechanism, yeah so there are people for example, their coping mechanism is to be on the board of their church and the PTA and the home owners' association and 5 other boards. That's their coping mechanism. Other guys, their coping mechanism is to work 88 hours a week. The difference with sex as a coping mechanism is that because our society is so nutty about sex, when the coping mechanism is about sex, society focuses on the sex. When the coping mechanism is about other stuff that's more socially approved, people don't get so nutty about it.
S: So why is there such a big bugaboo about sex and morality, why is that such a focus?
MK: well sexuality is a vehicle to experience and express their autonomy.
Science or Fiction ()
Item #1: Scientists have discovered the first evidence of a comet striking the earth – part of a comet nucleus. Item #2: Researchers have discovered a method for inhibiting the propagation of prion proteins, potentially leading to a cure for mad cow and related diseases. Item #3: Physicists have created stable exotic calcium nuclei (with 20 protons and 34 neutrons), suggesting the existence of a previously unknown force operating at nuclear scales.
Skeptical Quote of the Week ()
'The claim of alternative practitioners to not treat disease labels but the whole patient...allows alternative practitioners to live in a fool’s paradise of quackery where they believe themselves to be protected from any challenges and demands for evidence.'- Edzard Ernst
S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at theskepticsguide.org, where you will find the show notes as well as links to our blogs, videos, online forum, and other content. You can send us feedback or questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. Also, please consider supporting the SGU by visiting the store page on our website, where you will find merchandise, premium content, and subscription information. Our listeners are what make SGU possible.
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