Except... Joe isn't a sex addict. When leaving the support group, after seeing her younger self sitting in audience and making her realize that she was in the process of buying into societies view that women are supposed to be chaste and opposing her own nature, she points out that there are legitimate sex addicts, and gives a list of the reasons why those in attendance are addicts while she is not.
Addiction is generally clinically defined as when a desire prevents a person from living the life they want to live. This was not Joes problem. Joe didn't want to live the life of a mother, a ladder-climbing workaholic, or anything like that. Joe just wanted to have sex. Her problem was that society was preventing her from living the life she wanted to live.
I can certainly see interpreting it as a film about addiction - Joe's scene leaving the support group might have been simply a case of denial which addicts are very skilled at. However, we never see scenes where she pines for a life where she can have LESS sex and instead excel at work or get her child back or find a husband and settle down - none of that. She doesn't have any of that. Sex is not getting in the way of her living the life she wants to live.
Now, addiction is defined very different in non-clinical settings, but colloquially the concept of addiction is almost totally meaningless. People either define it so vaguely that any desire whatsoever would qualify as an addiction, or they define it against their own value system - saying that if it interferes with work, for instance, that it is an addiction. But that pre-supposes that work should always supercede other personal desires, which is not a universally-held value.
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ciprianl
10 years ago
This generally accepted clinical definition of addiction is kind of daft. A drug addict's addiction does not prevent him either from living the life he wants to live. What he wants, above all else, is the dope. (I do not know this from personal experience, but it was something similar when I used to smoke - I seem to remember distinctly that in the mornings when I woke without having cigarettes I would have almost killed for a smoke.) Just saw Drugstore Cowboy (1989)and that is exactly its message.
Do you remember Joe's final speech before the sex addicts support group? She accused the psychologist there that she represents a burgeois mind police. I've taken an organizational psychology course while studying for my master's degree(it was mandatory) and I totally subscribe to her opinion. That's also what Michel Foucault wrote in Psychiatric Power.
The hidden meaning of this clinical definition is that addiction is defined there as when a desire prevents a person from living the life as the psychologists themselves consider it to be worth living.
I do not imply that living the life of an addict is a good life. But, on the other hand, are we not all, those of us living, addicted to life itself? I know I am.
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DwarvesAreVeryUpsetting
10 years ago
she points out that there are legitimate sex addicts, and gives a list of the reasons why those in attendance are addicts while she is not.
Just because Joe's addiction isn't driven by a pathology doesn't mean she isn't legitimately addicted.
Pretty much any repetitive desire that turns destructive, that a person becomes physically and/or mentally dependent on can be an addiction. Whether or not it's "interfering with the life you want to have" is not always relevant. If you gotta have meth in order to survive, you gotta have meth in order to survive. Joe literally runs on sex, and cannot live without it. She is an addict, just one who simply doesn't want to get over her addiction because she enjoys it.
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