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"Is Tiger Woods a sex addict?"
"What do you think about Tiger?"
"Aren't you going to write about Tiger Woods?"
The questions have been peppering my inbox, but I've been avoiding the topic.
On the one hand, I love a good celebrity sex scandal, both because I can relate and because I see it as an opportunity to educate people about what sex addiction can look like. I remember when my husband disclosed his addiction, I realized that his words and actions bore an uncanny resemblance to Bill Clinton's (even down to the "oral sex is not sex" line). And I was pissed, not at Bill Clinton or at my husband, but at the media. Why were there all these stories about how Bill Clinton was a cad and a liar and a womanizer and a bad person and a bad husband and a man who believed he was "above the law" and absolutely none about how he was (in a way that was now glaringly obvious to me) a sex addict. Why hadn't I heard of sex addiction before? Why hadn't anyone told me that this was what it looked like?
But on the other hand, while some people are begging for a Tiger story, I know (from years of blogging experience) that other people are absolutely going to hate it. It's going to send half the Internet into spams of delight and the other into paroxysms of rage if I use "Tiger Woods" and "sex addict" in the same post, and dealing with that kind of conflict is simply tiresome. So I've been weighing whether or not writing about Tiger Woods was worth the drama of writing about Tiger Woods.
But as I was considering this question last night, it occurred to me that I wouldn't be wondering this at all if news had just broken that instead of having a dozen mistresses at points around the globe, Tiger Woods had a dozen different heroin dealers. Would there be similar quibbling over what to call his behavior if, instead of risking his marriage and his family and his lucrative endorsements by spending time and money on tour having sex with porn stars and models and cocktail waitresses, he had risked them by spending time getting high on cocaine? If there were rumors that he might give up touring because he was spending all his nights getting drunk when he was traveling rather than having affairs with other women, would the debate over addiction be the same?
Sex addiction is hard to recognize precisely because it's tied up in behavior that doesn't seem so clear cut. It's harder to see where the line is drawn or should be drawn when it comes to something as basic to who we are as sex. It's more complicated for us to discern someone's motivation for having an affair than smoking crack. But regardless of what we think of Tiger's actions or speculate about his motivations, in the way the story has played out in the media, we can see a degree of unmanageability that addicts and their partners can all relate to: the desperate attempts to cover up, the car crash, the hemorrhaging of money. As Mark said when we discussed it this morning, "All you have to do is take the news clippings and put them together to have a pretty good First Step."
This post was originally published at The Second Road.
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