Anthony Weiner Sex Addict?

My name is Duncan and I am a sex addict.

The first time I qualified as a sex addict…I felt like shit.  Attended by my ugly sisters:  Shame and Fear, I sat miserably in my first SAA meeting waiting for the 60 minute nightmare to end.

Imagine what it must feel like to announce to the whole world that your sex conduct has gotten the better of you.

Today Anthony Weiner is shamefully headed for Lord knows where to get ‘treatment’.  Will that ‘treatment’ be for depression, intriguing, internet pornography or compulsive/chronic masturbation?

Is Anthony Weiner a sex addict?

My fellow sex addict friends think he is.  I am not so sure.  Not sure until he is sure.

It is not up to me or anyone else to diagnose his problem, it is up to him.   We live in prescriptive times.  It is certainly not up to my sex rehab therapist Drew Pinsky and ‘experts’ like him who will no doubt castigate poor Weiner dog for his unmanageable sexting/twittering if he hasn’t done so already.

If I were Anthony Weiner I would be feverishly trying to plug the broken sewer that is currently flushing away his political credibility, his relationship with his heavily pregnant wife and his healthy 61% majority.   I too would be heading for a spell in a ‘therapeutic facility’.  Treatment might just mean a little time away from the media incubus that presently seeks to impregnate Weiner with all the evil of the modern world.

What the fuck do we expect of our elected representatives?  That they are no longer entitled to the shortcomings we all share?

Why should congressmen have such unrealistic expectations heaped upon them?

Anthony Weiner has not broken any law.  Not yet.  He allegedly chatted innocently with a 17 year old girl.  What ever improper thoughts he may have had he did not act upon them.   This isn’t, as the media are describing, a ‘SEX SCANDAL!’ because there isn’t any sex.

This might be a Jerk-Off Scandal!  Ostensibly an Intrigue Scandal!  Allegedly a Bare Chest Scandal!  At the very worst a Picture of a Hard Penis on a Cell Phone Scandal!

Monday update: President Obama describes the Weiner sex scandal as a ‘distraction’.  Frankly, I am more distracted by the dodgy shenanigans of the laconic Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas.  The lies, ethical violations and conflicts of interest that, ironically, Weiner was hoping to expose.  

Weiner, unlike Thomas, is no crook.

Nancy Pelosi is demanding Weiner’s resignation when others in Congress have done far worse with real people rather than fantasy folk on the internet.

Internet addiction in all its very many forms is a world-wide epidemic, it affects millions upon millions of men.

Ordinary men, who at this very moment, are ensconced in private places away from their friends and family compulsively exploring the darker side of the internet: in ‘the zone’ as we say in Sex Addicts Anonymous.

There may be minor consequences for those who get caught…unless, of course, their internet use is deemed illegal or so sustained that they have scabs on their penises or they get violent if  taken away from the intensity of the screen.  Most relevantly…if their careers are compromised…jeapodised…lost.

Men take risks that seem entirely manageable until they bust their nut…then they can slink away from their screen to clean themselves up and rejoin humanity.  Real people versus the fantasy that takes them away from the stresses of an ordinary world.

A toxic, ritualized compulsion driving the hapless clicker further from wife and children to unimagined places that only the internet can reveal.

Let us not forget Voltaire’s observation that ‘Illusion is the first of all pleasures’.

I have a huge amount of compassion for Weiner.  He has been caught sending lewd pictures of himself to strangers.  His ‘perversion’ is undoubtedly a product of the modern age.  An age where I too, posting this very blog, live in a world of imaginary readers, little consequence and sexual hopelessness.

Sometime in the near future a contrite Weiner will stand before the press like Tiger Woods before him and admit his powerlessness.  He will, unwittingly, confess for us all.  For the shared sins of viral infidelity, cheating on his wife with the faceless, nameless internet that seems so benign just before ejaculation.