A few hours before I discovered the double life my then-partner was leading, we were sharing an oyster platter when he asked “do you think your father was a sex addict?”
My father was a lover of women. You might call him a 20th century playboy, a charmer, the kind of man who was never without a wife and a side piece or two. I was always hyper aware of his extra-marital affairs, even as a little girl. It was kind of an open- not open- secret amongst my siblings. Until fairly recently I never discussed this with my mom, who had been married to him for 35 years. She says she genuinely had no idea at the time and felt ashamed that maybe we were all judging her for being naive. But love truly is blind. We see what we want and ignore the rest.
When I was younger I was angry on my mom’s behalf, but as I got older I recognized that my father had a deep void he was trying to fill which he conflated with sex. Even though dad’s behavior was often hard to swallow, it was what it was. I loved him all the same. We all have our flaws, that’s what makes us human. It’s even what makes us attractive to other people. My dad once told me his theory about flaws and beautiful women with “star quality.” He said, “some of the girls try so hard to look like someone else, but by doing so, they disappear. What makes a star is a wonderful imperfection in them, that they are always fighting. Barbara Stanwyck was like that. You look at any movie star, they always have an imperfection you can't take your eyes off of.”
In his later years dad’s taste in women with star quality changed from sophisticated bright cultured chic to overly made up spray tanned with bad plastic surgery. He paid close attention to the local Los Angeles anchorwomen, on whom he developed crushes. He went on to advise me “Make sure when you make a movie you make the women look like individuals, otherwise it's just another whore hanging around. Like those girls who are pretty but look alike, on TV at 7 o'clock.” It wasn’t the first time my father referred to women as “whores” or “gold diggers” which explains a lot about how I ended up in a career trying to make sense of sexuality and gender.
Back to flaws. Sometimes our flaws are physical, sometimes they are emotional or psychological. Sometimes they can manifest as addictions. There’s a lot of debate in my field about the term sex addiction. There’s arguments on both sides as to whether an obsessive need for sex is the same as an alcohol or drug addiction. That said, I know plenty of folks in a 12 step program for Sex & Love Addiction (SLAA) and I know plenty of folks who have expressed concern that either they or their partner are a sex addict.
I also know a lot of sex workers and people who pay for sex. You probably do too. Visiting a sex worker doesn’t mean someone is a sex addict; though depending how compulsive the behavior is, it could be an avenue for an addict to find more partners and keep the behavior a secret. I say all this because my father—even with all his access to women—was (at least once to my knowledge) caught soliciting sex. It was when I was an infant and he was picked up by an undercover vice squad officer in LA. My dad was a public figure so the arrest was in the newspaper at the time. I, of course, was not aware of this until way later. After my father died and my siblings and I were going through his possessions, we were talking about our dad’s misbehavior with women. One of them brought the arrest up jokingly and it turned out that somehow they all knew except for me. I later asked my mom about it and she said dad told her that he was set up in a sting operation. She believed him. Again, love tends to be blind.
I think that to really know and love someone, you have to take the blinders off and look at the whole person. Only then you can decide whether their flaws are something you can live with.
Sometimes people need so much sex or love— more than their partner or family can possibly give— that they pay for it. Whether my dad did it regularly or that one time I have no idea. Many years later I ended up in a relationship with a man (the one I was sharing oysters with at the start of this story) who told me very casually that before we were together, he’d regularly visit sex workers with his buddies. Maybe because I had written a book about sex work, had friends who were in the industry and had founded a sex education platform, I didn’t judge him. Or see the glaring red flags. I asked questions about how much he paid and challenged him for denigrating sex workers as “sleazy.” His wounded masculinity was strangely part of the attraction - I was unconsciously familiar with it and his view of women from growing up around the same. At the time I thought I was creating space for acceptance and dialogue around the subject, that we could heal our respective wounds together. Funny how I could spend years studying sex and not see the blind spots in my own relationships. But I am human and learning the hard way. It turns out that I was repeating ancestral cycles that originated long before I was born.
Take any pattern whether it's negative or positive—alcoholism, abuse, attachment or communication styles, etc…and you can chart how far back in your own family these cycles go. Often we aren’t even aware of the behavior or know how to name it. There could be a pattern of family feuds where people stop speaking to each other for long periods of time, and if you go back far enough, you see this repeated over and over for a couple hundred years. It’s not like these things get consciously passed down son, I want you to freeze out your brother for 7 years over an inconsequential disagreement because you haven’t been taught to process and express your emotions in a healthy way— it just happens. Then we become so rooted in the habit that it feels impossible to break.
I’ll give you a concrete example using my own lineage:
My father described my great-grandmother’s personality to me as "retired ex madam,” saying, “she had some of the trade oh sure- she had these three astounding looking girls. And she was always figuring how to use them to get them somewhere else in life- Frances, my mother, Constance, who really looked like a movie star, and Virginia, who was just beautiful. And all of them had guys just crazy about them. All of them. “
So, let’s say that my great-grandmother did view her daughters as high priced courtesans, wanting to marry them off well. It’s not out of the realm of possibilities that my grandmother Frances might have her sexuality imprinted by these ideals. My grandfather’s biographer, Scott Berg, told me that, based on his research, my grandmother Frances, “was undersexed. More interested in security than anything else, including love or sex. She once said "I have a cash register where my heart should be."”
Let’s pass this down a generation and onto my dad who then becomes entangled in his own version of what sex and love look like. And then onto me who ends up projecting all these complicated ideas around sex that the adults in her family have into my professional, and personal life—resulting in being in a serious relationship with the aforementioned oyster-eating man who was secretly spending over 60k on sugar babies he’d met off of the Seeking Arrangements website.
But if you want to hear the rest of that story, including how I discovered the sugar baby skeletons in his closet and how I made him quite literally, pay, you’ll have to wait until next week to read it. And I’m going to charge you for it.
I keep thinking it takes some real guts to write about some of these topics. Post after post are all great reads. From old Hollywood to skater culture, you're got it covered.
Woof I was going to ask when I could get the book and I’m thrilled I only have to wait till next week.