Addiction Does not Have a Gender
Having a “man’s addiction” means I don’t belong anywhere
I made a call to Sex Addicts Anonymous to find out where the meeting was and what time and they told me they would be uncomfortable with a woman in the group, because they were all men and I wouldn’t possibly understand the addiction from their point of view.
I suppose they are right, because I’m not okay with hearing about men who sexually abused women talking it through. The least they could have done was list is as a closed meeting. That closed the door on the only local Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting.
I used the SAA book for a while in trying to work the steps, but I was working them alone. That doesn’t work out so well, the concept of sponsorship exists for a reason.
I was not even allowed to attend in the first place, simply because I wasn’t a man. It was the only group within a four hour radius.
I really started consuming porn intently when I was tricked into acting in dirty videos sold by a guy out of the back of his truck. His “girlfriend” who I worked with in a cafe, recruited me, which is how she got free housing and a “boyfriend.”
In other words, she lived in a dirty caravan. She was a seventeen-year-old runaway and grateful for a roof over her head and food to eat. I, too, was a runaway, two years older than Marla. I had been homeless and recently found an apartment that I needed to find a way to pay for.
Tristan had work I could do, it was easy and paid well.
It’s not like I hadn’t already turned enough tricks to know it would make money. So I did what I had to do in order to survive.
The other group that was for addicts of my kind was an Evangelical Christian group, whose definition of sobriety was quite narrow and wouldn’t work for me. They believed any sexual behavior outside of a heterosexual marriage was a sin and therefore this was their definition of sobriety.
Seeing as I’m not straight, had sent nudes to randos on the internent recently enough that I was embarrassed, and had no desire for marriage, I wasn’t accepted there either. I wasn’t their type of Christian woman.
I was a seductress because of the nudes, never mind the fact that men were asking for them.
I was the devil, painting my face with makeup, and luring poor, white, middle-aged, “good Christian men” into a trap, and ruining them and their families.
I had no idea people would see me as a victim of anything, as I had technically chosen to fuck cheap, nasty dudes for a quick twenty while I was homeless, or acted in videos I was tricked into making.
Nobody had put a gun to my head after all, as the saying goes. I would be in my 30’s before I ever realized that this was exploitation, that I had been groomed and preyed upon.
Marla had shown me certain kinds of porn on her computer and I was mesmerized. It’s not like I didn’t know what it was, but I’d never really sat there and watched it myself before.
It gave me a rush that I just couldn’t get enough of. Addiction never has enough.
I tried Celebrate Recovery, a group that found it necessary to add to the 12 steps because they weren’t Christian enough. These days that makes me laugh, but back then I didn’t know any better.
Their rules for meetings were strict and unreasonable, the biggest one causing an issue for me being “no swearing.” I don’t think it’s possible to put a group of addicts in the same room and have no swearing.
Since the twelve steps weren’t considered “Bible based,” they used the the beatitudes and had a Bible study on one of them at every meeting. They were ruining a good thing and I wondered how they got away with using the twelve steps but “making it better.”
I was unwelcome at Celebrate Recovery. I wasn’t Christian enough.
Men are visual, but women are not, the argument goes. I think that’s bullshit but even if it was, it isn’t about the sex at all for me, in fact I’d describe my current understanding of myself as asexual, and aromantic.
The sex doesn’t matter, but the adrenaline rush from seeing violence I am used to being subjected to is real. On the other side of it though were the women who were being exploited for my pleasure.
Others who had been groomed, or trafficked, or tricked. I realized that in consuming porn myself, I was also exploiting other women and I was disgusted.
I knew how it felt to be exploited and I had become both the oppressed and the oppresser.
In my more conservative, fundamentalist days, I attempted Reformers Unanimous. It was mostly online at the time unless you were involved in a local Independent Fundamental Baptist church that had a group. I had the books, with Bible verses and study in the King James Version only. I wasn’t welcome with them either, because I was a rebellious shrew.
Christian fundamentalists are obsessed with modesty, but only for women. I was only allowed to wear skirts and dresses, nothing above the knee ever, but holiness was measured by the length of my skirts.
I had to be mindful of cut, pattern, and style, because women have the potential to lure a man into looking at our bodies unless we conceal them carefully.
Another reason for it was so that married men had “easy access” to their wives vaginas at all times.
The fact that porn was my main vice made me trash to the mostly men in the group.
For a long time, I believed their assessment of me.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I tried an online AA meeting that wasn’t listed as a closed meeting. I was a group of people all over the wold who had been sober for years and strictly alcoholics only.
These people all knew each other and didn’t want newly sober or struggling to stay sober people in their group.
Trying on online video meeting had been hard enough for me, without the extra bullshit. They said people like me shouldn’t be having video meetings anyway as it would hinder sobriety.
Like a lot of other people, I threw away sobriety at the beginning of the pandemic, and had to essentially start over. I’m learning that sobriety isn’t a one and done thing, it takes work.
I admired people who had been sober a long time and were happy for them, but being looked down on by them was difficult. It’s as if they had completely forgotten that they too had been in active addiction at one point.
I began to think I would never be good enough.
I finally found a space online that I could be, or so I thought at the beginning. Porn Addicts Anonymous only meets online, and they had a daily check-in. It was mostly a bunch of fucking obnoxious men who resented the few lone women.
One of the men felt it necessary one day to to be a bully and throw his weight around and tell everyone else that they kept struggling because they didn’t work the program exactly the same way he did.
All of the women and several of the men were upset, and called him out for his bullying. He was one of the top people running the group and so he got away with it, and several of us, including all the women, were forced out.
It was hard sitting there and listening to the men go on about why they felt the need to rape women, and how they had managed to stay out of prison, but I had done it because I was committed to being there.
It turned out that I didn’t fit in there either.
There are people who insist that nobody can be addicted to porn, because porn isn’t immoral, as if that’s the standard for addiction.
I would argue that porn is immoral but that’s not the point.
Having porn addiction mansplained to me because as a lowly women I couldn’t possibly understand that it’s strictly a man’s addiction is insulting and it puts me in the position of being deeply ashamed of who I am.
I felt like I had to hide because there was no place to go. That I was a person who didn’t deserve help, and that I was a deeply fucked up human being who couldn’t even do addiction right.
