Why Is My Partner Sexually Addicted?: Insight Women Need

While something about love addiction might sound fairy-tale like, such patterning is emotionally destructive to the addict and their partner. Like other addictions, the process of developing an addiction to love or relationships is a complicated one. These experiences lead to avoidance of true intimacy as an adult and an unconscious desire to repeat similar relationship dynamics e.

These resulting behaviors are due to their lacking an accurate, healthy understanding of what a loving relationship looks and feels like. Furthermore, the love-addicted experience a less-developed sense of self or a deep incompleteness, and do not know how to make themselves whole outside of a relationship. Love addicts spend a great deal of time fantasizing about love and their relationship with their love object.

When in a relationship, a love addict becomes intolerably uncomfortable when their partner pulls away, and in some cases, this withdrawal can cause them to engage in unhealthy behaviors, including manipulation, abuse, substance use a co-occurring problem for some love addicts , threats, and game-playing. These behaviors ultimately destroy the relationship and result in the very sense of rejection that they fear.

Women are more prone to love addiction than men , although both can experience the disorder. To better understand love addiction and the ways it prevents long-term, fulfilling relationships , here are some tell-tale signs of love addiction:. For fewer, the separation from or rejection by a partner, can result in a love addict being at risk to hurt themselves or others.

If you are concerned that you might be suffering from love addiction , professional help and support is essential to overcoming symptoms and beginning the process of recovery. Oftentimes the biggest hurdles to recovery are admitting the problem, committing to change, and adapting the necessary treatment e. Understanding the unique experience of a love addict can be a lifelong journey. Both Pia Mellody and Melody Beattie offer wisdom to help love addicts and codependents understand and overcome their tendencies.

Hick specializes in relationship therapy , including the dynamics of love addiction and relationship anxiety. Contact her today to discuss whether love addiction therapy is right for you. Subscribe to our monthly newsletter below and get your free copy of our ebook to discover how fearlessness can transform your life, love, and relationships.

Journal of Substance Use. Giving yourself the power to change the way you love: The love connection to codependence. The psychology and neurobiology of addiction: The evaluation and treatment of Internet addiction. Vandecreek L, Jackson T, editors. Innovations in clinical practice: Professional Resource Press; Kristen Hick specializes in dating, relationship and post-relationship growth and recovery.

She has experience in the following issues that co-ccour or contribute to relationship issues: Mallaree Blake specializes in pregnancy, infertility, and postpartum health and wellness. She also has experience working with clients around sexuality, sexual health, relationship issues, and LGBTQ and cultural identity issues. In , a group of feminists published Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship , which argues that feminists have targeted pornography out of frustration with their lack of progress in reducing violence against women.

The scapegoating of pornography will create new problems, new forms of legal and social abuse, and new modes of persecution. A responsible and progressive political movement has no business pursuing strategies that will result in witch-hunts. Judith Butler examines the role of fantasy in feminist politics and argues for maintaining conditions that permit diverse representations of women.

Curtailing representations will produce new forms of social action rather than protect some undisturbed, preferred version of reality. Butler points out that efforts to censor homoerotic images have led to their greater production and exposure. Butler concurs with feminists who hold that noxious speech can, in most instances, be addressed through action that involves critical and thoughtful speech.

By political action, Cornell means that feminists should form alliances with feminists in the pornography industry to create representations of sexuality that will benefit women. Like Butler, Cornell emphasizes the importance of fantasy for realizing transformative feminist projects. Markets that subvert or erode fundamental moral and political values should be suppressed, according to Debra Satz. These markets tend to exploit the social vulnerabilities of others, lack informational transparency, pose unacceptably high risks for some participants, or contribute to the social marginalization of some groups.

For example, markets in sexual services that i seek providers from stigmatized or disempowered social classes, ii fail to create conditions for informed consent, iii damage the health of participants, or iv reinforce pernicious stereotypes about women or other groups, are of questionable value.

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Although these features of markets are usually contingent, when they persist, states are justified in restricting or regulating such markets, especially if they can do so without producing more harm than good Satz Anne Phillips contends that markets in sexual services arise only under conditions of social inequality.

People offer sexual intimacy, or bodily organs or substances, primarily as acts of compassion, and do not in ordinary circumstances commoditize such bodily capacities. Phillips points out that few customers in such markets would be willing to enter as sellers. Those who do market their sexual, reproductive, or other basic bodily capacities do so only when background circumstance compel them to do so.

Carole Pateman argues that the work of a female prostitute is different from other jobs, as it expresses the inferior social and political status of women. Christine Overall similarly argues that prostitution is a transaction in which one person must be defined as a social subordinate who caters to the desires of another.

Elizabeth Anderson develops this idea and argues that the good of sex is. Shrage argues that sex markets, like other markets, often exploit sexist ideas that relegate women to subservient roles, and their existence in this form can perpetuate pernicious social myths that stigmatize women. Yet, the background conditions of such markets can change, especially as the norms of gender and sexuality evolve in ways that are less sexist Shrage Debra Satz writes that. If prostitution is wrong it is because of its effects on how men perceive women and on how women perceive themselves.

In our society, prostitution represents women as the sexual servants of men. However, if the industry were restructured to be less sexist, then its impact on society would be different. Martha Nussbaum questions whether the sale of sexual services genuinely damages the persons who provide them or women as a whole.

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Nussbaum acknowledges that sex workers are currently stigmatized for their profession, but questions whether the stigma that attaches to their work is justified. By tracing this stigma both to aristocratic prejudice toward waged laborers and to moralistic attitudes and anxieties regarding female sexual expression, Nussbaum challenges the rational basis of this social stigma Nussbaum She concludes that feminists should oppose the stigmatization of sex work, rather than oppose sex work for its contribution to the stigmatization of women.

Nussbaum also questions seven common claims against prostitution: Scott Anderson resists the move to treat prostitution like other forms of work. Prostitutes waive their right to sexual autonomy because their jobs place them under contractual obligations to have sex, and thus diminish their control over when and with whom they have sex. Anderson acknowledges that all jobs, to some degree, diminish various forms of autonomy. In response to Anderson, Hallie Liberto distinguishes three ways of alienating a right or good. First, one can waive a right to x in a weak sense by granting someone access to x with the understanding that, at any moment, permission to use x can be revoked.

Second, one can waive a right to x in a strong sense by granting someone access to x for a duration of time, with the understanding that permission to use x cannot be revoked during this period presumably if other terms of the lease are met. Third, one can relinquish a right to x by transferring that right, as through a sale or gift. In this case, permission to use x is granted permanently and cannot be revoked if other terms of the transfer are met. Liberto points out that those who consider the marketing of sexual services a legitimate form of work assume that the sex worker, like other workers, will only be alienating her right of control over her body and sexual labor in a weak sense Liberto In a society in which any form of forced labor is prohibited e.

Sex worker activists and advocates have long argued that they are not permanently alienating selling their sexual capacities, but rather are exchanging sexual labor for benefits Schwarzenbach Carol Leigh and Norma Jean Almodovar suggest that anti-prostitution laws undermine sexual autonomy by not allowing adults to enter mutually advantageous sexual agreements Leigh ; Almodovar Peter de Marneffe argues for limiting sex worker contracts in ways similar to other forms of dangerous and potentially harmful work.

Some markets in sexual services exploit providers who manifest weak agency Satz , such as people who are young, homeless, drug addicts, poor, oppressed minorities, migrants, undocumented, and so on. It is likely that commercial prostitution derived directly from the enslavement of women and the consolidation and formation of classes. Military conquest led, in the third millennium B. As slavery became an established institution, slave-owners rented out their female slaves as prostitutes, and some masters set up commercial brothels staffed by slaves.

Lerner speculates that prostitutes and concubines were used by rulers as symbols of wealth and power, and this practice was then emulated by other men of wealth and status Lerner Paupers were often forced to sell children, adding to the supply of labor for this purpose. In short, women who became prostitutes in ancient societies were typically enslaved, captive, or poor.

Gayle Rubin traces the origins of modern prostitution to the rise of patriarchal kinship systems in which women are exchanged as gifts among families to cement social bonds Rubin If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage.

The relations of such a system are such that women are in no position to realize the benefits of their own circulation. As long as the relations specify that men exchange women, it is men who are the beneficiaries of the product of such exchanges—social organization. In other words, in the very creation of society, women were allegedly subordinated through ritual exchange in order to create bonds of kinship among men as the foundation of the social order. It is attractive in that it places the oppression of women within social systems, rather than biology. While consumers of commercial sexual services have been predominantly male throughout history, factors other than gender subordination have influenced whose sexual labor was bartered or sold, such as colonialism and racial subordination Kempadoo By trying to explain contemporary sex commerce in terms of the subordination of women, these accounts overlook important historical and cultural discontinuities.

For example, commercial sex providers have not always been regarded as ineligible for marriage and have, in some places, been integrated into their communities to a high degree Shrage Carol Pateman deploys the concepts of liberal political theory to explain the existence of prostitution in modern societies. In particular, the patriarchal social order includes an implicit agreement among men that grants them sexual access to women Pateman Men acquire sexual rights to particular women through marriage and prostitution.

In other words, men have a class privilege—a right to sexual relief from women—which they can exercise by asserting their rights as husbands or johns. In this way, modern prostitution represents the survival of some aspects of older illiberal social orders within the modern liberal state. Both traditional marriage and prostitution, for Pateman, Lerner, and Rubin, give men access to and control over the sexual capacities of women. Kempadoo examines how histories of racism, colonialism, militarism, and globalization structure the choices of first and third-world women of color.

Although Kempadoo urges feminists to understand prostitution in terms of a broader range of social forces, she maintains that feminist theorizing about prostitution should avoid overlooking the agency of women of color by treating them as mere passive victims of oppression Kempadoo The agency of Brown and Black women in prostitution has been avoided or overlooked and the perspectives arising from these experiences marginalized in dominant theoretical discourse on the global sex trade and prostitution.

Our insights, knowledges, and understanding of sex work have been largely obscured or dominated by white radical feminist, neo-Marxist or Western socialist feminist inspired analyses that have been either incapable or unwilling to address the complexities of the lives of women of color.

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Rather than conceptualize prostitution in terms of the sexual exploitation and degradation of women, Kempadoo advocates understanding prostitution as a kind of labor that is often performed by marginalized people Kempadoo In this way, prostitution is similar to labor performed in other industries, such as agriculture, manufacturing, or transportation. By analyzing prostitution as a form of labor, rather than a form of social decay or evil, feminists can avoid unrealistic abolitionist approaches Kempadoo and Doezema ; White ; Shrage Although poor, third-world and second-world women are often exploited by traffickers, some may be choosing to migrate and work in sex businesses over other occupations available to them factory or domestic work both in their home and target countries.

Harsh laws against trafficking often exacerbate the plight of voluntary migrant sex workers who may be undocumented and working illegally Kotiswaran ; Rajan ; Kempadoo and Doezema Anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution efforts should focus on eliminating forced work and migration, child labor, exploitative working conditions, and hostile legal environments for migrants and sex workers Kotiswaran Because sex workers often come from marginalized social groups, their basic rights as workers and citizens are frequently violated.

Feminist theorists who recognize sex work as a legitimate choice that some people make, among a constricted set of opportunities in order to earn a living, also recognize that sex markets can take many forms. In some cases those who supply the labor are relatively free and empowered agents, and in other cases they are not.

Love Addiction: A Quest to Fill the Void

The challenge is to devise policies that prevent the recruitment of children and socially vulnerable people as providers, and that also protect the rights of those who enter such markets even with informed consent. Trafficking in persons human slavery for any purpose, including sex commerce, is universally condemned and rightly so. Feminists disagree about whether all sex markets involve forced labor and sex.

Those who regard commerce in sex categorically as a form of involuntary servitude and violence against women generally support laws that punish people who exchange money for sex in all circumstances Jeffreys ; Barry ; Stark and Whisnant Feminists who hold that some sex work is performed by people who exert autonomy and moral agency generally support policies that permit exchanges of sex for money among consenting adults Shrage ; Nussbaum ; Ditmore ; Leigh Having such policies is consistent with vigorous efforts to stop human trafficking.

Peter de Marneffe distinguishes four approaches to laws governing prostitution. According to de Marneffe, one can defend decriminalization by appealing to the moral right to self-sovereignty, without supporting legalization, especially of large scale enterprises de Marneffe Most feminists who oppose all sex commerce support abolition rather than prohibition, because the abolition approach treats the provider of sexual services as a victim rather than a criminal. To prosecute women for selling sex, some argue, just compounds their victimization and oppression.

Sweden was the first country to adopt this approach.

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Other feminists support regulation, because abolition can endanger sex workers by forcing their work underground in order to protect customers. The Netherlands and Germany have adopted some form of regulation, which basically aims to reduce the harms of prostitution rather than eliminate it. Some feminists support decriminalization the approach now taken in New Zealand because most regulatory approaches e.

By contrast, regulationists worry that a laissez-faire approach leaves sex workers vulnerable to extreme exploitation, and some explore how employment law and policy can protect sex workers, as well as clients and third parties Davis ; Shrage and When agencies become aggressive and brazen in their advertising or business practices, they are sometimes prosecuted as fronts for prostitution.

Yet, the full force of anti-prostitution laws tends to be felt by women who are destitute, drug-addicted, or just amateurs, who solicit customers directly or in public places. Under regimes of prohibition, anti-prostitution laws are often used against people who engage in survival sex, such as homeless women or minors who are not able to work in safer venues. Rarely are they used against middle class women who serially date men in pursuit of expensive gifts, college tuition, or living expenses Shrage , Other Internet Resources.

Anti-prostitution laws are also used to prosecute men who sexually and commercially exploit women e. Police practices in the U. Women make up the majority of prostitutes and the majority of those arrested, and minority women are overrepresented among those arrested Marganski Over the past few decades, a few countries have moved toward toleration and regulation of the work activities of prostitutes, yet the larger trend has been toward criminalization, often with increased penalties for customers and pimps see countries… in Other Internet Resources.

Feminist campaigns against prostitution and trafficking have mobilized to win approval for abolitionist policies. Essentially, the feminist anti-pornography movement of the s and s has evolved into the feminist anti-trafficking movement of the 21 st century. Both movements treat markets in sexually explicit materials and services as a form of violence against women, and claim that tolerating them perpetuates the social subordination of women. Like the anti-pornography movement in the s, the anti-trafficking movement is finding common ground with social conservatives who have religious objections to non-marital sex, and, more recently, with political conservatives who want to keep economic migrants out of their countries.

Sex worker activists, many of whom are also feminists, have challenged scholarly research about their lives and work, and argue that criminalization renders them less able to protect their health and exercise their rights Almodovar ; Pendleton ; Highleyman ; Queen ; Sprinkle ; Quan ; Bernstein ; Leigh Sex worker organizations are forming alliances with queer activists, labor unions, and human rights advocates to advance their political goals.

In , an influential human rights organization, Amnesty International, approved a resolution calling upon countries to decriminalize adult consensual sex work, which represents a huge victory for the sex workers rights movement. Adrienne Davis argues that the abolitionist movement has had more political victories because this side is more united in their aims. By contrast, feminists supporting sex worker rights are deeply divided over whether to support regulation or decriminalization. Davis shows that advocates for regulation exaggerate the similarities of sex work with other types of work, while advocates for decriminalization exaggerate the differences.

Virtual sex work, where providers are relatively anonymous and meet with customers only online, is relatively safe. Outcall work, where sex workers meet with customers in private spaces, such as hotel rooms, and have physical contact with their customers is significantly more risky. Exotic dancers, who perform in public venues, such as bars and clubs, and have limited physical contact with customers, face an intermediate level of risk. Health and safety regulations need to encompass different kinds of work sites and risks, and include appropriate measures for each.

Davis notes where current employment law in the U. Davis also points out that sexual harassment will be more difficult to define in sex work contexts. Nevertheless, Davis favors decriminalization with regulation, and challenges feminists to improve employment regulation so that there are better safeguards for sex work, and other work performed in non-traditional and diverse work sites.

Middle ground feminism pays attention to the empirical realities of various sex trades and the efforts of sex worker organizations to protect the civil and economic rights of their members. Middle ground feminists are aware of how the sex industry is gendered and, at times, critically and respectfully engage with the proposals of sex worker advocates. For example, middle ground feminists may be skeptical of the alleged needs of men that the sex industry aims to serve, while recognizing that sex workers are not passive dupes but agents who exploit less than ideal background conditions.

Middle ground feminists do not treat sex commerce as monolithic, but pay attention to the different ways that labor and capital are organized in different trades. They recognize that much of sex work, like other low status service work, is menial and sometimes unpleasant, but it is not work that is inherently degrading or violent to those who voluntarily perform it. Middle ground feminists recognize that sex work is continuous with much of the caregiving work women perform, as wives, mothers, nurses, teachers, nannies, and domestics, and do not single out the sex industry for assigning to women a disproportionate share of caregiving work in society.

In this way, middle ground feminists do not treat sex work as exceptional in terms of its risks, difficulty, and larger societal effects. And finally, middle ground feminists are less likely to make common cause with anti-feminist sexual moralists and anti-immigrant conservatives, and are more likely to find common cause with unions of sex workers that are grappling with challenging working conditions and economic realities Kotiswaran The author thanks the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University for providing support while this entry was being updated and revised.

Although she notes some problems with her research design, she concludes that her data do establish that the majority of convicted rapists were familiar with pornography and that their use of such material was somewhat greater than that of other felons. Garry writes, Much of the research on the effects of pornography indicates that any effect it has—positive or negative—is short lived. Strossen claims that the effect on some viewers, including women, may be positive: Allen writes pornography does not have the power to construct our social reality that MacKinnon and Dworkin claim it has, nor do we as individuals have the power to decide to construe pornography as necessarily subversive.

She writes, the Master-Slave dialectic seems to capture the relation between people in pornographic eroticism. Brod applies Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist moral concepts and writes, The female is primarily there as a sex object, not sexual subject. Nussbaum writes, Denial of autonomy and denial of subjectivity are objectionable if they persist throughout an adult relationship, but as phases in a relationship characterized by mutual regard they can be all right, or even quite wonderful … In a closely related way, it may at times be splendid to treat the other person as passive, or even inert.

But Nussbaum concludes that most conventional pornography, such as Playboy , fails to meet the Kantian moral standard, and depicts a thoroughgoing fungibility and commodification of sex partners and, in the process, severs sex from any deep connection with self-expression or emotion.

Center for Shared Insight | Love Addiction: Filling the Void

LeMoncheck writes, sex work is not merely about treating a woman as an object nor merely about dehumanizing her. She writes, an essential ingredient in porn … is the depiction of a subjectivity or personality that willingly contracts its possibilities and pleasure to one—the acceptance and gratification of the male … The woman in porn abdicates her will, her sexual discrimination, her independence, but not to become a mute body for the man. Gayle Rubin elaborates, The scapegoating of pornography will create new problems, new forms of legal and social abuse, and new modes of persecution.

Debra Satz writes that If prostitution is wrong it is because of its effects on how men perceive women and on how women perceive themselves. Lerner writes, It is likely that commercial prostitution derived directly from the enslavement of women and the consolidation and formation of classes. Rubin writes, If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. New York University Press. Robinson, , Night Market: Features, Destinies, Exposures , L. University of Michigan Press. Philosophical Explorations in Light of Feminism , L. Men Possessing Women , New York: Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship , Seattle: The Real Comet Press.

University of California Press. Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, — , New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

1. Tandori: Book 1 in Tandori Series.
2. Mignardises (French Edition)!
3. 1. Pornography.
4. Sex differences in psychology!
5. IN QUESTO STATO Da spread a spread il trompe loeil del governo Monti (Italian Edition).
6. Rainy Day;
7. Travels with Honey: A Modern-Day Pilgrimage, A Gift of Love.

Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition , New York: Sex Work and the Law in India , Princeton: A Feminist Philosophy of Sex , Oxford: A Response to Scott A. Women on Pornography , L. William Morrow and Company. Writings by Women in the Sex Industry , F. The University of Michigan Press. University of North Carolina Press.

The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism , A. A Study of Convicted Rapists , London: Prostitution, Adultery, and Abortion , New York: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Other Important Works Adler, A.