Toxic Sex: When "Love" Is Bad For You

WHAT you do in sex is not important. WHY you do it - is. Sex for all the wrong reasons can be bad for your mental health and lead to or enhance preexisting depression, anxiety, and substance abuse.

What are the wrong, detrimental kinds of sex?

Sex intended to regulate affects (emotions), moods, self-esteem, or self-worth;

Sex in situations where meaningful informed consent is impossible (for example: extreme intoxication);

Sex as a form of self-harm, self-punishment, or self-trashing, especially when coupled with addictions and the use of disinhibiting substances;

Extreme self-objectification (for example: group sex with strangers without an intimate partner or friend present);

Reckless, risky sexual practices and encounters;

Non-autonomous sex intended to make the sex partners like you, accept you, or “love” you;

Sex with people you dislike or are not attracted to out of a sense of duty, gratitude, or because they provide you with benefits (e.g., free drinks, or a place to crash for the night).

Participants in such sex often claim to have wanted the sex and to have acted in an agentic and empowered manner. These protestations are counterfactual and intended to resolve the cognitive dissonances, shame, guilt, and traumas that inevitably arise out of wrong sex.

The denials, reframings, and reduced affect display are all variants of defensive emotional numbing and inappropriate affect.

They mask debilitating dissonances, inner conflicts, and traumas. Left to fester, they generate depression and anxiety and lead to substance abuse as a form of self-soothing (though, of course, the abuse of alcohol and drugs has many other functions and cater to multiple psychological needs).

The psychosexuality of such people fluctuates between psychopathic, objectifying individual or group sex (cold, mechanical, exhibitionistic, emotionless, even anonymous) and people pleasing instrumental sex (intended to render potential partners addicted to the sex and to make them “like” or “love” the provider of the sexual services).

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Prof. Sam Vaknin
@samvaknin