Last night I watched a terrible film called “I am a Sex Addict” in which writer / director / star Caveh Zahedi details his sex addiction. The thing is, the film is a misnomer. It becomes increasingly clear as the stories unfold, that Caveh visits prostitutes in order to punish the women in his life. He compulsively visits street prostitutes, brothels, massage parlors, and strip joints. But the real “fix” comes from talking to his girlfriends afterward.
He wants to be honest, and make a genuine attempt at polyamory, but for some reason it always fails. The women take him at face value and engage with him to make the enterprise work.
He’s delighted when they’re accepting, but compulsively transgresses their stated limits. When one girlfriend says that it is OK to talk about his attraction to other women, he begins pointing out every woman on the street to evaluate this or that sexual characteristic. Even when he begins a relationship with a woman who openly encourages him to flirt, gives him space and time to do it in, he begins to insist that she watch him with a prostitute in order to cure his addiction. She responds by going to pieces and indulging her coping mechanism: alcohol. Caveh gets off scott-free because his girlfriend’s alcoholism is a bigger problem than his bastardry.
It was horrible to watch the gaping wound of all this relationship trauma. It is awful to see the repetition, the need to punish, to push for more and more power and less and less responsibility in the relationships.
Caveh tells us that when he is alone, and uses sex with prostitutes as a band-aid for loneliness and depression, he always feels empty returning home afterwards. The second half of the fix is missing. The audience watches each trainwreck approaching, and hopes for the girlfriend to escape intact. None of them escape unblamed, and none of them retain their privacy.
Caveh isn’t a sex addict, he’s a control freak.
