This Post is for You, Tony...

I was all ready to write an entry with profound reflections on life, instead, you are going to get a rant on “Lifetime” (“Television for women”). Now, with the exception of the odd “Frasier” episode on a Friday morning I make a point of avoiding Lifetime like the plague. This past Saturday night was an exception, when, after admitting to self that I hadn’t done any real studying for almost an hour, I joined my roommates on the couch.

“What’s on?”

“Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict”

“Oh! Goody!” Interest piqued poured myself a glass of wine and asked Elizabeth budge up on the couch.

My issues with this film are numerous. First, I will confess, I felt deceived. “Secrets of a Sex Addict”’ – how very titillating, how progressive! I was impressed: Lifetime you are joining the Oh! Channel century! This is no longer your grandmother’s station; this is more like Talk Sex with Sue Johanson. I was expecting something more along the lines of the brash and honest I-TV series “Confessions of a Call Girl” or Sex and the City but with soft lighting and bad shoes. Check on soft lighting, check on bad shoes and many chiseled jaws and fluffy hair, missing much on the honesty.


How to describe this film? Anyone who has flipped past the Lifetime channel should have no trouble imagining the set up. The men were so very bad, the women so very good (so very patiently victimized) and the dialogue just painful. At several points I had to stop myself from flinging my – empty – wine goblet at the screen (it may be necessary to be soused to watch a Lifetime movie but you run a risk of property damage). Described as the “true story of a married woman with a shameful secret” the movie is based on the memoir of Sue William Silvermen, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, which document’s the author’s 28 days in a rehab clinic for a sex, or love, addiction. Now, I say based on, but I am actually finding it rather difficult to summarize the plot of this movie as it is so far from accurately depicting the events and emotions recounted in Silvermen’s memoir (which I hastily read afterwards on Google books). Briefly, in the film Sue is presented as a woman unhappy in a stagnant marriage and career. In response to this dissatisfaction she begins a series of exclusive affairs; one with her architect, another with her firm’s client etc. From each of these interactions Sue believes she will find the love she craves. These interactions are hardly the sterile, frantic and frequently anonymous and “dangerous encounters” described in the memoir.
Consider for example, Sue’s opening sentences of her memoir:

“Every Thursday at noon I have sex with Rick in room #213 of the Rainbow Motel. Today, even though I promised my therapist I wouldn’t come here again, I pull into the lot and park beside Rick’s black Ford Bronco. I cut the engine and air conditioner and listen to stillness, to nothing, to heat.”

Instead, we have Lifetime’s soft lighting and music and soulful sex scenes belonging to a romance novel instead of a film on a destructive compulsion and rehabilitation. Much more “English Patient” than any other kind of patient. This 2 hour movie didn’t even dedicate 28 minutes to Sue’s time in the clinic. This distortion of the purpose and focus of the memoir is only the beginning of my complaints. In true lawyer-ly fashion let me itemize these:

(1) It minimized the author’s past trauma and the roots of her compulsive behavior. Sexually abused by her father as a young child (think age 5) and later as an adolescent, this history is only alluded to in brief flashbacks and in conclusory statements from her therapist. Accepting that sex addiction is an addiction (and that one is responsible for one’s own actions and decisions) is one thing; however, the film (ie the character and her psychiatrist) completely failed to address the root of the character’s compulsion or confront her past trauma.
(2) It romanticized her sexual interactions. My assumption is that this was done to make the character more palatable, safe, and likable to the perceived Lifetime audience.
(3) Finally….oh dash it. I have worked off all my ire for now. Long story short: down with Lifetime; check out Sue Silverman’s memoirs; and I am off to polish off some Ben and Jerry’s….