Feb 8, 2018
Is sex addiction real? I was never particularly convinced, until one afternoon spent in a dark theater in Si Racha, Thailand, changed my mind. It was the spring of 2014, and the movie onscreen was called “Thanks for Sharing.” It starred Mark Ruffalo, Pink and others as addicts fighting to maintain sobriety — from pornography, from masturbation, from intercourse before commitment. They attend 12-step groups; they have televisions removed from business trip hotel rooms so pay-per-view won’t tempt them; they struggle for intimacy. They relapse (they hole up and order hookers); then they find strength anew and start counting days again.
I was overseas at a place called Hope Rehab, receiving my own treatment for what was, in my mind back then anyway, a much more “normal” addiction to prescription drugs; the excursion to the cinema was a field trip. My dates for the flick were other clients: a whole row of junkies, alcoholics and even one video game addict from Australia. In the car ride back to campus, we all agreed: It was an interesting movie — an educational movie — and we were glad to have seen it.
“Getting Off,” the debut book by the 35-year-old Mexican-American essayist Erica Garza, is comparably affecting. The memoir shines a light on the lonely (albeit impressively multi-orgasmic) world of a woman who binges not on food or pills, but on hookups and “getting off.” Oh, and porn. Lots of porn. Teenage-cheerleader-and-her-stepdad-on-the-kitchen-counter porn. Wasted-girls-getting-walked-around-on-leashes-at-parties porn. “Bukkake” porn. You get the idea.
Garza, a native of Montebello, Calif. (“the Mexican Beverly Hills”), holds a swaggy M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Columbia, but her prose is appealingly no-frills and accessible. She writes in the style of one who knows better than to linger too long on the eroticism of her memories — one who has learned the hard way how crucial it is to keep dangerous rushes of euphoric recall in check. She recalls, flatly but in explicit detail, a tequila-ridden sexual episode with a Colombian waiter named Andres while on a trip to Hawaii — despite being in a committed relationship with another man back home in New York. Such boudoir scenes abound in this book, and they are both good and mercifully brief. She beds dudes all over the world (naturally, the S.T.D. that pops up on Page 123 is only her first): Los Angeles, London, Paris, Bali, and Shanghai. But these encounters are not without their consequences for her, emotionally. “The adrenaline racing through my body made me feel invincible at the time,” she writes. “And the shame I felt afterward was even better.”
As a narrator, Garza is a master of identifying such dark, postcoital feelings as these. She wallows in the aftermath of sex with a gnarly older man (also in Hawaii), an act she has engaged in not because she wanted to, really, but because he has given her free dinners at his restaurant. “Keeping my eyes on the red taillights of some distant car ahead, I felt the erotic thrill of that moment with Luc slowly drain from my system, leaving behind a big black hole.” We’ve all been there, and in reading Garza’s insight into her own experiences, we better understand ourselves.
“This disease is a … bitch,” Tim Robbins’s character tells Ruffalo’s in “Thanks for Sharing.” He gestures at his crotch. “It’s like trying to quit crack while the pipe is attached to your body.” When Garza — at last humbled, exhausted by years of compulsion and spiritual disease — finally makes moves to get it together, the road isn’t easy. For the person in recovery, triggers are everywhere, even Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous sessions. (“I came so hard I thought my heart would explode,” she writes of one post-meeting masturbation session. “Afterward, I crawled under the covers and cried.”) But the strong final chapters, sublimely set in Southeast Asia, are both inspirational and, dare I say it, still pretty kinky. God bless a lost person who has found her way. Thanks for sharing, Erica.
Source : NewYork Times
