Celebrity Rehab with Dr.
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I’m an addiction addict. That means I’m addicted to watching other people struggle with their addictions. People say that’s not a real addiction, but they don’t know how my addiction to addictions has messed up my life! I spend every second of my day, from the minute I wake up in the morning until the time my head hits the pillow at night, obsessing about whether or not “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew” alum Mary Carey will finally kick alcohol and break out of the porn business. My marriage is falling apart because my husband can’t watch another minute of heroin addicts stealing cash out of their grandmother’s purses on A&E’s “Intervention.” And if I urge one more of my co-workers to make a “fearless moral inventory” of themselves in an interoffice e-mail, I’m going to lose my job. I’m destroying my entire life by spending all of my time watching other people destroy their entire lives!

Even as an addiction addict, though, I find it tough to feel sorry for people whose big problem in life is that they’re having way too much sex. Yes, it’s easy enough to see that sex addiction is a real problem, that people who suffer from it have trouble with intimacy, that they find it impossible to make meaningful connections with other human beings, that they compulsively turn to sex and masturbation as a means of escape, that they can’t stop even when it’s tearing their lives apart.

But when Phil Varone, drummer for Skid Row, complains to the “Sex Rehab With Dr. Drew” cameras that he’s slept with more than 3,000 women, when he compares being surrounded by horny groupies to being a cocaine addict who’s offered coke every night, it’s tough to weep big, salty tears for him. When we learn that Kari Ann Peniche, former Miss Teen U.S.A., spends a lot of her time masturbating in her bathtub instead of facing reality, it’s not all that easy to generate empathy for her. When film director Duncan Roy tells us that he sits around in his lovely Malibu home and looks at online pornography from first thing in the morning until he goes to bed at night, it’s challenging to find a deep well of emotion for his plight. When we see the enormous pile of dildos and vibrators that a rehab counselor pulls out of porn star Jennifer Ketchum’s luggage, what we feel isn’t sympathy so much as awe.

via I Like to Watch – Salon.com.

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