For sex addicts living in New York, just walking down the street can be a challenge.
Sexy billboards cover buildings. Hot bodies squeeze together in the subway. Massage parlors and dirty-DVD stores dot the avenues.
Even the street names can be a challenge.
“I knew a guy that, whenever he saw the words ‘Canal Street,’ he got triggered because if you drop the C, it’s ‘anal,’ ” says Tim Lee, licensed clinical social worker and founderdirector of New York Pathways, a sex-addiction treatment service.
No wonder movies featuring the fixation are often set in NYC, including Friday’s “Thanks for Sharing.” The dramedy follows three New York men in various stages of a 12-step recovery program.
Newbie Neil (Josh Gad) is a pornloving chronic self-pleasurer whose sickness gets him fired from his job. Adam (Mark Ruffalo) is five years celibate and hesitant to get into a relationship with Phoebe (Gwyneth Paltrow). Mike (Tim Robbins) is an aging former philanderer who is attempting to make amends with his wayward son (Patrick Fugit).
Writer-director Stuart Blumberg says he was drawn to sex addiction as a topic with real dramatic possibilities that hadn’t been fully explored.
Of course he began work on his film before 2011’s “Shame” debuted. That much darker film starred Michael Fassbender as a Manhattanite who seeks self-destructive sex, be it on the subway, at clubs or pressed up against a giant window at the Standard hotel.
By way of research for “Thanks for Sharing,” Blumberg visited 12-step meetings in Los Angeles and New York. The difference? “People in LA were a bit tanner,” he says. More importantly, those on the West Coast spun their tales with humor and panache, whereas New York sex addicts were more straightforward in “telling their truth.”
Blumberg evidently did his research well: Sex addiction specialist Lee says “Thanks for Sharing” is a fairly realistic portrayal of the condition as it plays out in NYC.
“It accurately describes how it manifests in people’s lives,” he says. “People lose jobs, they get arrested. There are legal consequences.”
In one scene from the film, Gad’s character is busted for filming up a woman’s skirt with a camera attached to his shoe.
“That’s a big one I see. It’s called unlawful surveillance,” Lee explains. “One guy, we told him to bring in all his [filming] equipment. It looked like a bomb that could take out the city, all these wires and things.”
Voyeurism is another problem in a city where the buildings are so close together. Lee says some guys have gone as far as rigging complicated sets of ropes to hang off a building in order to spy on their female neighbors.
As “Thanks for Sharing” demonstrates, dealing with sex addiction sometimes requires extreme behavior modification, including cutting off seemingly harmless activities. Ruffalo’s character, for example, has his TV and laptop removed from his hotel room so he isn’t tempted to access porn. Gad’s character won’t allow himself to take public transportation.
“Riding the subway can become so triggering for people that they have to walk or take cabs or just do something else,” Lee explains. “Or they ride the subway but stand at the end of the car or face the map.”
One client can’t use dollar bills, because he associates them with strip clubs. Instead, he pays for everything with credit cards.
Another verity of “Thanks for Sharing” is that most of those who suffer from (or at least seek treatment for) the addiction are men. In the film, the singer Pink has a supporting role as a 12-step attendee and friend of Gad’s, but only a few women walk through the door of meetings.
Lee counsels about 90 patients a week at New York Pathways; currently, only two are female. Women are more often love addicts than sex addicts, he notes.
“[Sexuality] is a continuum,” says Dewayne Jones, executive producer of “Bad Sex,” a reality series on Logo TV about sex addicts in therapy. “It goes from love avoidance to being compulsive and destructive, and we all fall somewhere on that continuum. No one can say, ‘I’m totally healthy.’ That’s why the topic can be interesting to people.”
Indeed, sex addiction seems to be a consistently riveting topic for movie audiences.
The portrayals are numerous. Sam Rockwell in “Choke,” David Duchovny in “Californication” (and in real life). Then there are the reality shows, including 2009’s “Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew” and last year’s “True Life: I’m Addicted to Sex” on MTV.
And what if your addiction is to watching wealthy, blond, insufferably healthy-eating women dance around in their underwear? You’re in luck. Paltrow has just such a scene in “Thanks for Sharing.” It’s already gone viral, naturally, after the trailer was released a few months ago.
Perhaps Gotham needs a new 12-step program.