About Don Juanism

In his article about nymphomania (What is nymphomania? - The Straight Dope) Cecil mentions Don Juanism as the male counterpart.

I have an acquaitance that commited himself to Helsinki Universitys Mental Hospital because of sexual overactivity. His problem was that he, working in the restaurant business, had sex with all his female co-workers. This of course made things quite problematic within the work community. So he changed his workplace quite often.

Day before he commited himself, he had just started in a new restaurant making the decision that he would have sex with anyone in that company. What had happened that during the two days he had had sex with seven of the ten female workers in the restaurant.

This happened couple years ago and he still doesn’t want to come out from the hospital.

For a few different reasons, society has always had problems in admitting that what for want of a better description i’ll call ‘pro-sex’ sexual dysfunction in men exists, and if it does, its clearly not a problem at all.

Society has no such qualms about calling sex-addicted women sick, which interestingly enough was the first step towards legitimizing the concept of sex-addiction at all, just sadly the other side of the equation hasn’t arrived yet.

Mainly that’d be because most of the doctors involved with finding new disorders were (back in Freuds time) middle aged men, who grew up in a very anti-sex culture and so it was obvious to them that overly-active women had something disastrously wrong with them. By contrast, they understood what it was like to be a young man all too well, and pretty much figured that writing about men having sex a lot wasn’t going to get you famous.

Luckily, we live in marginally more enlightened times. We have a firmer grasp on what addiction is, and we understand better that any compulsion beyond your conscious control absolutely is a problem. That won’t change the social ideas of slut vs stud, but at least going to a doctor and saying ‘I can’t stop myself’ will likely get you help.

People do still say that sex-addiction isn’t a thing, mainly because of the perception that talking someone into bed takes a certain je ne sais qua that buying drugs or gambling doesn’t have. But considering that you can buy sex too, and in the age of freely available contraception and cheap booze, plenty enough people give it away for free, that doesn’t really hold water.

Even outside of that, what my countrymen would call ‘chatting someone up’ is a learned skill, and addicts are amazingly good at learning how to get their fix. Gamblers know the odds on every game in the house, drug users learn how to inject into every vein in their body, and sex addicts know what buttons to push to make someone want no strings attached sex with you. Or failing that, just sex. Assuming you don’t really care about hurting peoples feelings (ie you are compelled to seek sex regardless of them) then yeah. Same deal.

My thoughts go out to our friend. I hope he finds some way to cope eventually. It’s a tough thing to deal with. Harder than most other addictions because sympathy is extremely thin on the ground for the condition as a whole, and also because it is extremely difficult to have ‘normal’ relationships even if you do conquer the behavior. Abstinence from alcohol, once you break an addiction, is tough, but with some behavior changes is possible. It’s a different deal to be abstinent from sex while maintaining a marriage.

For some people it is a problem.

A few – a very few, there’s lots more diagnosed as “sex addicts” than actually exist – but there are people out there that truly do have this problem.

For a short time I had a co-worker with this condition – he felt himself compelled to look for (and find) sex partners everywhere. He literally could not do any of the everyday activities of daily life like go to work, go shopping, run errands, etc, without having sex enter the picture at some point. He was constantly having sex with strangers in odd corners and restrooms and parking lots and etc.

(It was part of my job to try and find him when he went out to lunch and didn’t come back, that’s how I knew about it.)

No, I did not have sex with him. But damn near everyone else did.

The few minutes of work he did for the company were brilliant – he was a salesman and he sold, sold, sold … a very charming and driven kind of personality that does so well in sales. (I’m deliberately not specifying the industry. ) If he hadn’t been so preoccupied it’s scary to think what he might accomplished.

Management did eventually get tired of sending me out to find him – I would usually track him down to some bar close to work and he would buy me a drink and then they’d have to send someone to find the both of us – they called in a management consultant from the head office who fired all of us. Problem solved.

I hope things got better for him, though I lost track.

So yeah, I know there’s real people like that out there … not as many as you think, though. Tiger Woods doesn’t count.

Hardly surprising, since that’s the same skill set that enabled him to fuel his addiction. I mean, if you can convince a stranger you’ve just met to have sex with you in the bathroom at the supermarket, then you can also convince a stranger you’ve just met to buy your company’s products.