Valerie realized that sex was wrecking her life right around the time her second marriage disintegrated. At 30, and employed as a human-resources administrator in Phoenix, she had serially cheated on both her husbands—often with their subordinates and co-workers—logging anonymous hookups in fast-food-restaurant bathrooms, affairs with married men, and one-night stands too numerous to count. But Valerie couldn't stop. Not even after one man's wife aimed a shotgun at her head while catching them in flagrante delicto. Valerie called phone-sex chat lines and pored over online pornography, masturbating so compulsively that it wasn't uncommon for her to choose her vibrator over going to work. She craved public exhibitionism, too, particularly at strip clubs, and even accepted money in exchange for sex—not out of financial necessity but for the illicit rush such acts gave her.

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Meet the highly respectable women who claim they’re SEX ADDICTS and it’s almost ruined their lives
The number of certified sex-addiction therapists has more than doubled since , according to the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals. Hookup apps like Tinder 26 million matches per day and Grindr 1. Today it is thoroughly assimilated into the culture. But even now, sex addiction seems to exist in parallel realities: one in which millions of people are struggling with it, and another in which it is barely studied and not even clinically recognized. Research has yet to confirm that extreme sexual behavior really is addictive in the same neuroscientific sense that, for instance, habitual heroin use appears to be. For this reason, many clinicians prefer the term hypersexuality, even though they concede that the distinction is mostly semantic. But the practical effects of such uncertainty are enormous.
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By Laura Hensley April 19, Erica Garza first masturbated when she was 12 after tuning into an episode of late-night sex and relationship talk show, Loveline. The preteen listened as a female caller talked about the mind-blowing orgasms she was having in her bathtub by turning on the faucet and opening her legs. I was hooked from the start. Shortly after she discovered the pleasures of water pressure, Garza was regularly watching softcore porn on TV. The Los Angeles-native says her sexual habits were healthy until she was diagnosed with scoliosis in grade seven. I started to use sex as an escape route. Soon, things got out of control. She lost her virginity when she was in high school to a man a decade older.
The term sexual addiction hypersexuality is frequently used to describe the problem some people have when they act out sexually in ways they feel they cannot control, and which are detrimental to their health and relationships. Sex is a normal part of the human experience, and one that modern society now embraces and encourages. Our media is flooded with sexualized images, from advertisements in magazines, billboards, and TV commercials to sexually explicit lyrics and music videos, to sex scenes in television shows and movies. Sex is not a problem for most people, but it can become an issue for some. The term sexual addiction is frequently used to describe the problem some people have when they act out sexually in ways they feel they cannot control, and which are detrimental to their health and relationships. However, there is no official clinical diagnosis of sex addiction, making consistent identification and treatment of this issue a little murky.