Origins of Female Sex Addiction: The Middle School Years

July 18th, 2012Addictions1 comment

What is a female sex addict?  Is this someone who likes sex too much?  On the contrary, a typical female sex addict is someone who desperately wants to be loved but doesn’t know what true emotional and physical intimacy should feel like and instead ends up compensating by her sexual acting out behaviors.

Some start young and can remember as early as their middle school or high school years of yearning for a boy’s attention and knowing no other way to get it but through suggestive flirting, texting, or sexual acts sometimes done through channels such as Facebook and other social media sites.

It’s not uncommon from my work to hear school administrators and teachers tell me that girls are highly sexual in middle school and have been caught giving lap dances to boys or oral sex in the school bathrooms.

As these girls mature, they become prime targets for guys who take advantage of their insecurities and demand nude pictures before they will consider “dating” them.

So what gives?  Part of it has to do with the societal shift from traditional families to families wracked by divorce that lack consistent, good fathers to help stabilize their daughters.  The other has to do with the explosion of internet pornography and the idea of Cybersex as an acceptable form of courtship.   Statistics show the average age of the first internet exposure to pornography is at eleven for children.  With men and women I’ve worked with, they report a similar age to exposure and soon getting compulsively addicted to it soon thereafter.  The harm of such early exposure is that the risks for understanding emotional intimacy within a relationship is significantly severed as children equate physical sex with love.  For the girls, they become prime candidates for finding their self-worth, sense of control, and desirability all based on their ability to attract and seduce boys.

As young women, a promiscuous lifestyle with a cavalier attitude towards men, bonding, and relationships may develop.  While they may desire a real relationship with a man, there’s also a paradoxical feeling of deep scorn and loathing of themselves and especially of healthy men who may “want” to be in a relationship with them.  Intimacy to them is based on sexual intrigue, manipulation, power, and control so when good guys show genuine desire and interest in them, these women will tend to lose interest and end these relationships before their feelings of vulnerability can be seen.  In other words, these women would rather leave men first for fear if they stayed in the relationship long enough, the men would know them and possibly reject them and leave them.  Unfortunately, the only solution from this fear is by staying in the relationship long enough so this cognitive distortion can be healed by the truth.  The truth being that these women are made in the image of God and can be known for who they are and be wholly accepted, loved, and desired.