Ellen Makkai -- Lechery’s new label

LECHERY'S NEW LABEL: SEX ADDICTION

By Ellen Makkai
March 3, 2010

NewsWithViews.com

Lechers of late escape the age-old stigma of debauchery. They are no longer simply wanton ones. They now have a psychiatric disorder, sex addiction. How convenient. Not quite nice, but not as nasty.

Tiger Woods, the latest high profile, newly revealed letch, spot lit the sex addict pretext when he entered Pine Grove Behavioral Health & Addiction Services in Hattiesburg, MS.

He joins other serial fornicators such as entertainment libertines Errol Flynn, Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson and presidents Warren G. Harding, John Kennedy and Bill Clinton among others.

Then there is the stratospheric number of professional athletes who can’t resist all that cleavage awaiting them at airports.

Braggadocio Wilt Chamberlain claimed in the autobiography, A View from Above, to have had sex with almost 20,000 women. “At my age,” he wrote, “that equals out to having sex with 1.2 women a day, every day since I was fifteen years old.”

These vintage roués, unlike our latest crop, never stooped to the addiction excuse. They bed-hopped with abandon and a devil-may-care lust.

For a while Eric Benet, Halle Berry’s ex, thought his excessive adultery indicated addiction but he later decided, “In retrospect, it’s not what I would label my situation,” explaining it all as “making some stupid-a**, stupid-a** mistakes,”

Bravo, Eric, a candidly up-front lothario.

I first heard the sex addict bleat when actor Michael Douglas’s womanizing was tagged as sex addiction. Since then, David Duchovny, Charlie Sheen, and Kanye West have signed on.

Way back when, those who voraciously played around were recognized as a randy bunch. No obfuscation. They knew themselves to be reprobates though often without remorse. And society didn’t mince words; promiscuity, while provocatively interesting as gossip fodder, was recognized for what it is, indiscriminant and unrestrained sexual behavior leading to cultural, emotional and spiritual corruption.

Not to mention the unwelcome collateral kids.

“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know, “ said Lady Caroline Lamb, of her lover, flamboyant English poet and legendary womanizer George Gordon (Lord) Byron. He fathered several illegitimate children thanks to his proclivity for bedding the many women he fancied.

At the risk of Judaic/Christian indignation, my nominee for another sexual scoundrel is King Solomon. Wisdom aside, the man was a polygamist without equal as well as an adulterer in perpetuity. The man had 700 official wives and 300 concubines.

But let us not forget lechery’s female counterparts. Lust is an equal opportunity employer.

Russia’s Empress Catherine the Great was a sexual glutton. She used sex as a stress reliever and cure for boredom. Her rung-out lovers went on to screen and select new candidates for the insatiable monarch.

Margaretha Geertruida “Grietje” Zelle, the delicious Mata Hari, avidly played the international field before her execution for espionage during World War I.

Present-day British singer-songwriter and druggie, Amy Winehouse, inches up the slut scale as she romps from lovers to husband to lovers with sexual stamina that rivals Warren Beatty’s. Some label her a sex addict but her rank behavior doesn’t rate the new homogenized lingo.

The psychiatric community is always happy to coin a new addictive disorder when it invites professional voyeurs into another personal catastrophe.

And now comes Tiger Woods looking for an out that will rescue his shredded family and reputation. But there may never be restoration, even should he target the truth and defeat his propensity for sexual excess. The multiple adulteries severely breached a marriage covenant and degraded this supremely gifted and admired athlete. Pitiably, that obstinate fact will shadow him and become a permanent apostrophe attached to his remarkable career.

The very week of Tiger’s mea culpa, an enormous memoir by Giacomo Casanova, was sold to Bibliotheque Nationale de France (France’s national library).

Casanova, the 18th century Venetian rake, whose name is synonymous with seduction, penned the manuscript that numbers 3700 handwritten pages. In “Histoire de ma Vie” (Story of my Life), Casanova claims a paltry (in light of Chamberlain’s boast) 122 conquests.

Label it what you will, vice still stinks. That ethereal laughter you hear is Giacomo’s response to our attempts to spit ‘n polish sin. Habitual peccadilloes become a ferocious snare especially when they engage all five senses. A fact he well knew.

Subscribe to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts!

Casanova called his unabated sexual pursuits, not addiction, but rather, “my ruling passion.”

Passion, yes, but sex addiction? Please, spare us the charade.

Bible Byte: Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me… see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139: 23, 24)

Former syndicated columnist, Ellen Makkai, is a Bible-reading grandmother who lives in the Denver foothills and blogs again at ellenmakkai.com