just saw your lovely subscriber note and came here to check out your work on Lembke, this is great! the fatphobia is truly rampant in dopamine discourse, I've been wanting to write more about it but fat activism is not an area where I know a ton, so I'm still doin my reading.
I SCREAMED when I got to the part where she told Jacob he couldn't even look at his own naked body?? I found this book by a sex therapist named Silva Neves called Compulsive Sexual Behaviors, and acc to his work, everything Lembke recommends to Jacob is the exact wrong thing to do as a therapist because 'violating prohibition' is a major aspect of eroticism, so 'self-binding' could just make a sexual behavior more attractive and even harder to abstain from.
he also says that people often come to his office calling themselves sex addicts, but when he digs into it, what drove them to therapy was their partner finding out they secretly watch porn or something and getting mad, which means the real problem is that they're in a relationship with someone who has a much lower sex drive or very different morals around sex. which sounds like the case for Jacob -- his wife threatened to divorce him, but he was able to find people on webcams who shared his sexual interests, and Lembke presents this as dangerous and scary. Neves calls it "digisexuality" and says its totally fine and to be expected that technology would become part of our sex lives. ugh I'm still so sad for jacob!!! (if he even exists and is not just a composite character she made up to convince us masturbating is bad!!!)
Ok first, Jesse, I genuinely just screamed at my computer when I saw your comment, so thank you so much for reading my post.
THIS all resonates so deeply with me. I think that for lots of people, shame is a driving force. Lembke even *names* shame as potentially making you do the behavior MORE at the very end of the book, but just doesn't tie this back to Jacob at all--just to church(?!!!)
Like, if Jacob is truly wanting to change his behavior, okay dude. But I really don't feel it's coming from an internal place, it's coming from messaging in his morals and his relationship that he's doing something Sick And Wrong. His relationship with his wife is totally exempt from analysis in Lembke's position, it's all about this "inability" to control impulse. I haven't read Silva Neves' work but totally will--thank you for the rec! I have emailed on occasion with sex therapist and researcher Justin Lehmiller, who has a great blog where he writes extensively about various sexual behaviors and also societal perception of sexual behaviors, including a skepticism around various types of sexual addiction.
I am also very sad for Jacob. ALSO, the way Lembke writes him with his "Eastern European" accent by leaving out words, as though to evoke that he's this lost, Old World soul that is ignorant to the truths of the world is very strange to me. It's like an othering factor in the writing on top of the already othering factors of how she describes his behavior. I think (hope?) he cannot be totally real.
I could go ON but anyway, thank you SO much for reading. I aspire to write analysis at your level and am so humbled you'd read this! Thank you.
just saw your lovely subscriber note and came here to check out your work on Lembke, this is great! the fatphobia is truly rampant in dopamine discourse, I've been wanting to write more about it but fat activism is not an area where I know a ton, so I'm still doin my reading.
I SCREAMED when I got to the part where she told Jacob he couldn't even look at his own naked body?? I found this book by a sex therapist named Silva Neves called Compulsive Sexual Behaviors, and acc to his work, everything Lembke recommends to Jacob is the exact wrong thing to do as a therapist because 'violating prohibition' is a major aspect of eroticism, so 'self-binding' could just make a sexual behavior more attractive and even harder to abstain from.
he also says that people often come to his office calling themselves sex addicts, but when he digs into it, what drove them to therapy was their partner finding out they secretly watch porn or something and getting mad, which means the real problem is that they're in a relationship with someone who has a much lower sex drive or very different morals around sex. which sounds like the case for Jacob -- his wife threatened to divorce him, but he was able to find people on webcams who shared his sexual interests, and Lembke presents this as dangerous and scary. Neves calls it "digisexuality" and says its totally fine and to be expected that technology would become part of our sex lives. ugh I'm still so sad for jacob!!! (if he even exists and is not just a composite character she made up to convince us masturbating is bad!!!)
(I added a link to your awesome work about Dopamine Nation too -- thank you for writing great critical discourse around these topics. We need it!!)
Ok first, Jesse, I genuinely just screamed at my computer when I saw your comment, so thank you so much for reading my post.
THIS all resonates so deeply with me. I think that for lots of people, shame is a driving force. Lembke even *names* shame as potentially making you do the behavior MORE at the very end of the book, but just doesn't tie this back to Jacob at all--just to church(?!!!)
Like, if Jacob is truly wanting to change his behavior, okay dude. But I really don't feel it's coming from an internal place, it's coming from messaging in his morals and his relationship that he's doing something Sick And Wrong. His relationship with his wife is totally exempt from analysis in Lembke's position, it's all about this "inability" to control impulse. I haven't read Silva Neves' work but totally will--thank you for the rec! I have emailed on occasion with sex therapist and researcher Justin Lehmiller, who has a great blog where he writes extensively about various sexual behaviors and also societal perception of sexual behaviors, including a skepticism around various types of sexual addiction.
I am also very sad for Jacob. ALSO, the way Lembke writes him with his "Eastern European" accent by leaving out words, as though to evoke that he's this lost, Old World soul that is ignorant to the truths of the world is very strange to me. It's like an othering factor in the writing on top of the already othering factors of how she describes his behavior. I think (hope?) he cannot be totally real.
I could go ON but anyway, thank you SO much for reading. I aspire to write analysis at your level and am so humbled you'd read this! Thank you.