Nymphomaniac, the new film by Lars von Trier, recounts the extreme, prolific, and at times risky sexual history of a woman named Joe, a self-proclaimed nymphomaniac. Put simply, it’s one of the best films about being human that I have ever seen. As someone who has, at times, reveled in my high sexual appetite, and at other times struggled with it, while watching, I felt—as one does with great films about the human condition—deeply connected to Joe, her pleasures, guilt and compulsions (albeit, to a lesser degree). Played by both Stacy Martin and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Joe clearly sees herself as a bad person—someone flawed, who’s harmful to the world. Much of the film can be summed up in her statement, “Sexuality is the strongest force in human beings. To be born with a forbidden sexuality is agonizing.”
This idea of dark, overwhelming sexuality has recently become a hot topic in mainstream culture—from a string of Hollywood films broaching the subject to various celebrities checking into sex rehab. Sex addiction: It’s the trendiest new problem! But as I’ve often wondered throughout the course of my own sexual experience: Where, exactly, is the line? At what point does one go from just being really horny to having a legitimate problem? What constitutes too much sex (an amount we’re supposed to feel bad about), compared with the appropriate amount of sex, compared with not enough (which we’re also supposed to feel bad about)?
I’ve always considered myself a sexually curious person. I welcome all alternate labels—horny, adventurous, nympho, slutty, etc. I remember at fifteen feeling that my virginity was like a disease that needed to be cured, impeding my ability to move forward with my intended sexual exploration. I ended up having lots of sex in cars during school lunch breaks, and in the town’s Burger King parking lot. I had minimal backlash from classmates, aside from a never-ending school rumor that I had “the clap” (though no one seemed to have a firm understanding of what the clap actually was). But at seventeen, after getting caught spending the night with a 30-year-old apple farmer, my parents sent me to a Catholic therapist. It was the first time someone tried to convince me that my behavior was problematic. She said I used “sex as a weapon”—against my family, and against myself. In my rebellious teenage mind, however, I thought the concept of sex as a weapon sounded really cool. As if it was the faculty of a sexual superhero or something.
There’s a part in Nymphomaniac when Joe recalls being taught by her friend, as a teenager, how to seduce men. “All you have to do,” her friend says, “is look them in the eye and smile.” Hearing that made me nostalgic. I remember clearly, as I’m sure many women do, the enlightenment that comes with the realization of possessing such inherent sexual power. Afterward, it becomes a kid-in-a-candy-store situation. For some, it can be hard to maintain control.
A lack of control is certainly a prevalent theme in the recent depictions of sex addiction in mainstream media. For starters, there was 2011’s award-winning film Shame, directed by Steve McQueen, in which Michael Fassbender’s character struggles to function in the midst of a dark, harrowing obsession with sex. Then there was 2012’s Thanks for Sharing, which bizarrely handled the topic as a rom-com, starring Mark Ruffalo as a sex addict in the twelve-step program dating a close-to-perfect woman played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Last year’s Don Jon, directed by and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, depicted a man whose porn addiction renders him incapable of forming a real romantic relationship. And, in a recent episode of Girls, Adam tells Hannah that he once saw casual sex as a way to keep him from drinking.
What’s strange is that as sex addiction becomes more visible in the media, the worlds of science and medicine are simultaneously becoming increasingly skeptical of the condition. And actually, nymphomania is a largely outdated term. As nymph is feminine, the term is predicated on the Victorian belief that when a guy wants to sleep around, he’s a virile Don Juan, yet when a woman does, something is wrong with her. Today, when referencing excessive sexual desire, it’s in the context of “hypersexuality,” which applies to both men and women. However, in 2013, sex addiction was rejected once more for inclusion in the DSM-5 (aka the bible of mental health disorders, periodically updated by the American Psychiatric Association) due to a lack of substantial scientific evidence that one can actually be addicted to sex.
For most of my life, I’ve found my sexual curiosity a positive trait, and it’s led me to have experiences I’m certain I’ll be happy to have had when I die—from Eyes Wide Shut–style sex parties in hotel penthouses, to being a spectator on porn sets, to somehow ending up in a prisoner-of-war role play in Munich with a married couple who spoke not a word of English. But there’s also been a darker side to my sexual behavior that has felt less fun, and more compulsive. Although I’ve never been anywhere near as nympho as Joe—at a point, she’s regularly having sex with ten men a day—watching the film, I definitely related to feeling insatiable, and struggling with intimacy. I continually sabotaged my chances of forming real, emotional relationships because I couldn’t not cheat, and felt guilty for hurting people, though not guilty enough to change my behavior. Even when I was in a relationship with someone who loved me, I still craved sexual validation from others. Over time, it’s become clear to me that at various stages of my life, much of my self-confidence and personal validation was (and still is) linked to sexual attention, and that’s something I’m still dealing with.
I have friends who turn to alcohol or drugs during particularly rough or stressful periods—not to the point of addiction, but to a point of excess, as an escape. For me, sex has the potential to fulfill a similar kind of mindlessness—it’s not necessarily done for the pleasure of it, but because it can be obliterating. I feel sort of embarrassed saying this, but for all this sex I was having in my late teens and early twenties, I would never come. Though I could come while masturbating, I didn’t have an orgasm during sex until I was 22. It wasn’t even expected—I would never even get close. And as I watched Nymphomaniac, I wondered the same about Joe. For all the sex young Joe has, you’re never certain whether she’s actually physically enjoying it, or coming. We see her moaning sometimes, but more often she’s just staring into space or lying there like a dead fish. When trying to draw the line between a healthy appetite and a problem, it’s important to be aware of how much pleasure one is actually getting from these supposedly pleasurable acts.
But that can sometimes be difficult. How much of the shame or negativity we feel associated with sex is inherently ours, and how much of it is a social construct? As Zhana Vrangalova, a sex researcher and blogger, recently told me: “It’s hard to pinpoint the cause of the guilt, and shame of highly sexually people, because we live in a sex-negative culture that conflates having a lot of sex with being a bad person. The result is that the promiscuous are shamed, and dogged by guilt and doubt, and often their friends and partners inflate this by expressing worry about them, or treating them as if they have a problem.”
Of course, there are health risks attached to casual sex, from STDs to the potential danger of being isolated with a stranger, and these are all things one must be very considerate and careful about (condoms are an obvious must). And it’s certainly possible to have sex in an unhealthy or obsessive way that’s harmful to one’s life and relationships. But this is also true for other behaviors beyond sex, that don’t get as bad of a rap. Consider the workaholic who works fifteen hours a day, barely eats or sleeps, and is obsessive to a point that it hurts her relationships with friends and family, says Vrangalova. Yet because we live in a society where work is considered a positive thing, very few people attach guilt or shame to this behavior. Or if there is guilt, it’s a puritanical kind of masochism—the gain is worth the pain and sacrifice.
It all comes back to the quote from Joe: “To be born with a forbidden sexuality is agonizing.” The key word here is forbidden. At the heart of Nymphomaniac is a girl who really wants something, yet the very nature of her wanting it makes her feel terrible. But what if it was OK to want it? It’s hard to imagine what that would be like, because we’ve yet to have any real models of a happy, healthy, responsible promiscuous people. Usually, the story goes that the slut gets punished—whether she dies or ends up depressed or alone—because that’s a narrative our society is comfortable with. There has yet to be a character in a movie who says, “I sleep with three different guys a week and feel great about it,” because that makes people uneasy. We prefer successful adults to be sexually privileged, and we associate promiscuity with youth and bad decisions. The “slut” doesn’t get to become a lawyer and live happily ever after (although I hope the Duke porn star proves me wrong).
But as much as I want to promote stigma-free sexual exploration and freedom, I understand that with sex, it’s never that simple. We always run the risk of getting hurt or leaving someone broken-hearted, even if we don’t intend to. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, in a post about Blue Is the Warmest Color, put it well: “Sex is actually never not a big deal, whether in movies or in life. Sex is the joker in the deck, the infinite variable that provokes, on screen as in life, radically divergent and wildly unpredictable responses and consequences.”
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