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is that one of our most serious problems, collectively speaking, is mentioned very little or not at all, either at meetings or in our literature. That problem is sex, in all its various forms and sublimations. It is involved in, if not the prime cause of, as many as seventy-five percent of slips, according to one rehabilitation center worker I know.
More curious still have been the reactions of various AAs to my rather tentative explorations into the possibility of discussing the subject. While a few have responded in a mature manner, many have reacted either negatively or with smirks and grins reminiscent of a teenage locker room. A few have even branded me as a “sick fiend.”
Nevertheless, my basic aim is still to yank the problem of sex out from under the rug and expose it to some light.
Now, you readers who are hoping for some spicy material might as well quit reading. I am not going to record case histories. If you want that sort of thing, you know where the stores are, although if you read the rest of this piece, you may stay out of them.
To begin with, it is not my purpose to espouse any particular code of conduct, morality, or ethics. The only thing I’m going to talk about is sex in relation to staying off the sauce, which is AA’s primary purpose.
Whether we like it or not, the sex drive is a powerful force in every human’s life, shaping each of us in many ways and providing the next main motivation after survival. In its direct form, it is responsible for continuing the race, and in its sublimated forms it is the power behind all creative arts. In all these things, it is a good force, and a necessary one.
It is not necessarily good when it is turned in directions that either are impossible to accomplish or will, if accomplished, be at direct variance with the person’s own moral code. Such sex is called obsessive sex. It is one kind that is unhealthy enough to get people drunk.
But even healthy sex can be a problem powerful enough to make people slip. For many people (including many AA members) have come to believe that all sex is bad, wrong, dirty, etc. This attitude may be manifested by abhorrence of physical contact or, more subtly, a lessening of regard for one’s partner. When this partner is one’s spouse, the problem can become acute.
Yet even if a person is free of feelings of sinfulness and guilt, he or she may still be so plagued with a sense of inadequacy or inferiority that drinking becomes a prerequisite for sex.
Compounding these hang-ups is the complication that many of them function chiefly on a subconscious level, making them particularly hard to solve. But solve them we must if we are to stay sober. It would be wonderful if we were all suddenly able to talk about these problems with one another. If we were, the problems of sex that bug many of us so deeply would immediately be brought out in the open where they, like all our other problems, would not long survive. But that isn’t likely to happen. The mere fact that we cannot talk about it is one of the main reasons sex is such a problem.
Generally speaking, we are concerned with two categories. First, there is Type A: people whose drives and desires are, by any logical criteria, perfectly normal. Their problem is that somewhere in their early years they were given to believe that sex—any kind of sexual activity—is bad. The moral code that Type A people try to live up to is totally impossible for normal human beings.
Type B people are different: Their moral codes are normal or nearly normal, but their behavior before, during, or after drinking is anything but normal. Such behavior can vary widely, but it has the common denominator that the person condemns his or her own behavior.
It is important to note that according to my investigations and discussions, the power of the sex drive to get people drunk lies in the divergence between behavior and personal morality, not in specific actions or standards.
In my travels, I have met people who followed some really outlandish practices without shaking their serenity or their sobriety. Those activities are not my bag; if I engaged in them, I would be bothered. And that is the key. According to Dr. Ruth Fox, a prominent New York psychiatrist who treats mainly alcoholics, “Sex is a problem only because it is treated as a problem. If people would just go do whatever they are going to do anyway and stop worrying about it, they’d be a lot better off.”
I must hasten to point out that Dr. Fox is in no way advocating behavior at variance with a person’s own morality. What she is advocating is putting things in the proper perspective. While sex may be an important drive, the act itself can hardly be called time-consuming, so why spend all the rest of the time worrying and stewing over what you did and didn’t do? But that, in a way, is only begging the question. Sex is a problem, and just saying that it shouldn’t be is no answer at all.
The answer, or at least the answer for me, was in dragging the whole mess out into the light where I could look at it, and in giving it the same treatment that had taken care of my other, less demanding problems: spelling out to myself just what the score was, and then talking to someone else about it. To my intense surprise, my confidant did not look horrified and condemn me. On the contrary, he was most sympathetic and even felt free enough to talk about his own problems, which were bugging him as badly as mine were me.
That was the beginning of my coming to terms with this basic drive. I will not pretend that I am now a 100 percent winner. I’m not, but most of the time I am indeed comfortable. And on those days when desires I’m not fond of rear their ugly little heads, I can usually remember that it is only today. By tomorrow, they will be only a memory.
As time goes on, the bad days grow farther apart and become less intense when they do come, and as they fade, a bright clean flame of love has begun to burn at home, a flame that was at first just a flicker, but is now a steady, bright light. It is a flame I never expected, but am grateful to see again.
P. S., Greenwich, Conn.
Responsibility Is the Name of the Game
November 1966
When I crept into my first AA meeting, sober, and sank into the corner of a room, it didn’t occur to me that I was finally discharging a responsibility to myself.
Actually I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Yes, I had a wife, a home, and a bank account, but still I had no other place to go. My home had become alien to me; I’d run my wife out of the house on my last day of drinking; the money couldn’t buy what I was looking for. All my life I’d looked for something outside of me, not for the answers to being comfortable within. Some “thing” would make me happy, some person would change my life, and I would find my place. “Seek and ye shall find” meant to me trying to fulfill the distorted values I had come to hold.
It never occurred to me that I was using alcohol as a medicine in an attempt at a self-cure, to make myself comfortable while I was rehearsing my way to the bottom. That knowledge only came to me after I’d “cured” myself into AA. God works in strange ways, and he had allowed me to beat myself almost to mental and physical death in an attempt to get me to face up to the responsibility of becoming a human being. Alcohol was the runaway freight train I used in my no-brakes, downhill ride. Even though I was in the caboose, I rode in the cupola above the rest of the train and had a good view, but I was busy looking down at the book I was writing, Dante’s Inferno.
There are still times when I just plain and simple don’t like responsibility. Responsibility irks me. As a young boy, I wouldn’t enter sports because it carried with it the responsibility of winning. School carried with it the responsibility of studying and making good grades. As a young man, work carried with it the responsibility of making good. Marriage carried with it the responsibility of making a home, being true to one woman, raising kids. I backed off from them all. The feeling of inadequacy was awful. Since coming to AA, I’ve found that my feeling of inadequacy was a rationalization to enable me to escape responsibility. I used the guilts of the past to feel that no matter what I did I would never be forgiven by God, if there was a God. Until I came to AA, I didn’t realize what a magnificent rage and hate I had for people, life, living—me.
I told myself I wasn’t responsible for wars, murder, rape, arson, mayhem. Didn’t people know that was all