Affirming Accountability: Confessions of a Cyber-Sex Addict

My name is John Altmann, and I’m a recovering sexist and more pointedly, a recovering cyber-sex addict of over twelve years. During the course of those twelve years, I would test women’s boundaries, get involved in their marriages, harass those whom I felt unrequited desire for out of a sense of entitlement, introduce BDSM language in conversations that were purely platonic in their character, and more. My hyper-sexuality is part of a larger impulse control disorder, which also saw me dive recklessly into ill-thought out relationships whether sexual or romantic, that often times ended with one or both parties being hurt. I come from a line of predators and abusers. Most significantly, my father often was (and still is) violent and degrading to the women of his life whether physically or mentally. I won’t run from my own transgressions by saying he made me do what I did, those choices were my own. But witnessing my father abuse his mother, listening to him describe women in the lewdest possible terms and laughing about his sexual misdeeds, all while being situated in a misogynistic milieu socially and culturally? Didn’t exactly help me fashion a model masculinity.

At seventeen years old I tasted that life for the first time, having taken refuge in it from the burnout of community college, maintaining relationships, and the utter brokenness of my home which left me much the same. My therapist a few years ago said that I shouldn’t be angry at my cyber-sex addiction, because it helped me survive. There are days I think I would’ve loved to have told her I wish I hadn’t, that the premium I paid for my survival was too high. So why, all these years later as I near 30 years old, am I trying to hold myself accountable? Ultimately, it comes down to two reasons for me. The first is that I simply no longer want to be like this and I want the women in my life to be able to feel safe with me and trust me to be what they need when they need it. Holding myself accountable is my way of bearing the weight of my past so that it can transform me positively instead of breaking me.

The second reason, however naive it may be to some, is that I hold the view that a philosopher by the very nature of their activity and the mode of life it offers, must necessarily be not only an ethical person, but also be a healer and a protector of the vulnerable. Such a characterization, it will be spiritedly argued, is rosy and unhistorical. Protecting the vulnerable? If anything, philosophy has only rubber stamped and intensified the conditions that make certain peoples vulnerable. For instance, when Aristotelian metaphysics classifies women as being nothing other than deformed men. When one fast forwards to the present things have scarcely improved, with philosophers leveraging their institutional privilege to commit harm to those they stand in asymmetrical relation with. How can one so foolishly cling to this portrait of the philosopher in the face of such overwhelming empirical grimness?

I desired to overcome this substantive argument with my actions as opposed to my words and taking refuge in historical anomalies. If I were to make this vision of the philosopher and the philosophic life a reality, if I were to embody this vision in my own temperament and conduct, it would be imperative that I hold myself accountable and externalize the man who committed all these harms. I needed to confess rather than pray for the waning of social and historical memory, to achieve reconciliation with my transgressions. But this confession that stands before you also comes bearing a story. It’s a story of an encounter I had with a philosopher whose emphasis on the ethical was astounding in its power. Indeed, so adamant are they about the significance of ethics and realizing the ethical within ourselves, that for them ethics is first philosophy. This encounter would break me open and show me a path forward, a path that now sees me over four months sober and striving to help others.

The philosopher was Emmanuel Levinas, and his early works “On Escape” and “Time & the Other” revealed to me a more nuanced understanding not only of accountability, but also a healthier and more substantive idea of masculinity. This might seem ironic to some, particularly feminist philosophers such as Chloe Taylor, who rightly point out the deficiencies of Levinasian ethics when it comes to feminist issues in the fight against patriarchal oppression, sexist ideology, and misogynistic violence. I wish not to argue against Taylor, but to augment the more affirmative aspects of her appraisal of Levinasian ethics. In particular, Taylor affirms Levinas’ construction of a male figure who is more attuned to their femininity, as is evident by them taking on a more proactive role as a giver of care and upholder of responsibilities to the Other, a role women have historically been socially cast to provide following the arguments of feminist philosophers such as Kate Manne in her work Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Feminist care ethicists, and more pointedly for my purposes Levinas, illuminate to us the urgency in killing the sexist/misogynist in ourselves.

This Levinasian masculinity, one that sees men taking on greater responsibilities to the Other and assenting to the femininity within themselves in promoting care and justice in their relations, is just as beneficial for men as the women whom this masculinity centers. For in providing this care, men free themselves from being chained to their being. In “On Escape”, Levinas argues that we are always tethered to our being, that we cannot flee from ourselves by ourselves. We can drink, we can do drugs as my father did, we can become cyber-sex addicts as I have been for so long, yet Levinas says that we will always be who we are. There is no flight from it, we’re fettered to our existence, with no hope from within of being anything else.

In “Time & the Other”, Levinas says that us being chained to our being further reifies our solipsistic ego; this idea that we are the only thing that really exists. All reality is taken in solely by us and flows outward solely from us. A vicious and monotonous cycle from which no liberation seems possible. But then, a rupture happens that disturbs the ego’s condition. It is the encounter with the Other. In the Other, the future exists, and this future is possible because of the pure difference the Other’s existence presents to us. This rupture in the form of the Other, this encounter with the future, is to Levinas a hopeful occasion. Hopeful because, having disturbed the solipsism that defines the ego, the future bears with it the gift of transformation in the form of ethics.

The future bears the fruit of ethics, because for Levinas the Other also has a Face, which for Levinas goes beyond literal anatomy and is instead representative of their lived presence in the world. The Face carries with it the ethical principle thou shalt not harm. Every encounter we have with the Other is an opportunity to do justice to this maxim and realize the ethical nature within ourselves. The future as Other then, is an affirmative experience, an experience of transformation or what is known as becoming. The ego, now standing before the future as constituted by and through the Other, has a chance to emancipate itself from its solipsism, to become unfettered from it, and to enlarge their world in all its possibilities and joys, by the sincere recognition of the Other. But we don’t always affirm the Other, and we don’t always embrace the pure expanse of the future that they bear in the fullness of their presence.

As a cyber-sex addict, every encounter I had was mediated by screens and avatars. The result was a worsening of the solipsism of my ego. The same could be said for the wealthy and powerful like Weinstein and Trump where solipsism is not a curse, but a kind of metaphysical birthright of the powerful and privileged. Power worsens the ego’s condition, the Other becomes undifferentiated from the cigar or the glass of red wine, all becomes a part of the ego. But unlike the wine, the cigar, or any of the objects the ego assimilates into itself, Levinas says the Other is incapable of being fully absorbed into our world. As I said before, the Other has a Face, the Other speaks, and as such the Other will declare their presence and their freedom before being subjected to our own. Thus the future terrifies us, because its presence is a rejection of our ego’s understanding of the world.

To know the Other is often a case of terror. I could recall the anxiety I felt when the women I spoke to went beyond the bounds of being avatars meant to sate my sexual desires. Much the same I’m sure as the fear any man feels when a woman exercises her sovereignty, when the Face bears the mark of the harm to which it has been subjected. We grow desperate, we label them with sexist epithets, we denounce and discredit them when they shatter our ego’s illusion of a self-projected world with the fullness of their being and the injuries done unto it by us. We try and maim the Face into silence, but this is a sad and pitiful reaction. It is a reaction born of a metaphysical malady, we go from being suffocated by our ego’s self-perpetuating isolation, to taking refuge in it and committing violence and denunciations at the sight of the Other. But the Other’s presence cannot and should not be annihilated or subsumed, but should instead see our egos be altered by it and stand in affirmation with it.

It is so easy for I or any man to blame our sexism and our violence and harm against women on anything other than ourselves. I always blamed my addiction and the violence that resulted on my father and my inability to cope with his presence. Cyber sex became for me an escape from the wretchedness that pervaded my home. But the escape was an illusion, and ultimately what I was doing was no better than my father with his mother, by reducing and positioning women in my relations to them online as caretakers for my trauma. The experience of trauma, while deserving of compassion, understanding, etc., still does not fully absolve one of the harms they commit nor does it grant license unto one to do harm to another. But accountability need not be seen as as an appendage of retributive justice, one that will not be sated until the transgressor’s debt is paid with the ruination of their lives, but an urging of emancipation from the solipsistic worldview from which our capacity to harm is born and nourished. It is a breaking through to the ego that our natures, even when they’re informed by the behaviors and practices of past generations, are not immutable.

We can change, we can live in love, solidarity, and fellowship with the Other and assent to the ethical nature in ourselves. This is why it is so discouraging when the apologies of abusers are informed by their solipsistic condition i.e. it wasn’t my intention, I’m sorry if I hurt you, etc. Because this is still indicative that the abuser sees the world as emanating from themselves, genuine recognition of the Other’s fullness in terms of their dignity, autonomy, self-determination, etc., which is what an apology entails, has not taken place. The Other’s presence, and the future it represents, reminds us that we are all fundamentally free. There is a world beyond the designs of our ego, and we can go beyond the confines of that world towards one that upholds the inherent dignity of all human beings, that abides by the ethical imperatives of the Face, and sees justice pervade across whole nations. But that can only happen when we choose to face the future and affirm it. When we choose not fear, but vulnerability, honesty, and courage in making a better world.

The people I hurt in my time as an addict, who often had never done a wrong to me and had even shown me love and encouragement in spite of my sexism and the trauma it sprang from, were worth so much more than the memories I left with them. I have no excuses and I make none. I was a sexist creep, who has harassed, cheated on, discomforted, etc., many women over the course of twelve years. I always had the freedom to do otherwise but I never once had the strength or conviction to pivot from my course. To all of the women I have hurt, so many that it is shameful that some have most likely faded from my mind, I am sorry. I refuse to any longer meet the future you bear with fear or treat my past as an immutable prison.

I am free, as my harms so vividly illustrate to me, and if I am free to harm I am also free to heal, to become better than what I’ve been.

I’m sorry to the friends I got defensive with when they rightfully called me entitled and my behavior abhorrent, or who at any point ever tried to help me and I failed to embrace that help. Such defensiveness shows ill-recognition of your autonomy and dignity, which my ego does not stand above. Women deserve better from me and from all people like me. The self is always determined in a relation with the Other. In this way, Levinas breaks with most of the western canon, who sees the self as solitary and the Other as a kind of abstraction, a void with which to cultivate an ethics. But it is precisely the fullness of the Other, of their pain, of their oppression, of the instances of violence, injustice, etc., inscribed in their Face, that makes ethics possible. Our relations with the Other upon which we ground and assert ourselves, need not be founded upon domination, subjection, etc., but on love, compassion, justice, and care.

In my sobriety and the restoration of my conscience, I strive day by day to fashion a Levinasian masculinity. A masculinity that is vulnerable in the presence of the Other, that meets them with dignity, empathy, and an appetite not for the base, but for the just. A masculinity that does not legitimize itself through violence and alienation of women, but instead through acts of care, compassion, and defending their freedom, fullness, and right to self-determination. Through this masculinity I hope to realize within myself, I will never again reinforce the notion of the Woman solely as caregiver, and certainly not in relations as historically asymmetrical as the erotic. Instead, my Levinasian masculinity affirms the fullness of their being as exhibited by their Face, affirms every encounter with it as a chance to realize justice for them, and the ethical within myself. Accountability is just such an opportunity, and committing to holding myself accountable not only saved my life, but has re-established more ethical and affirmative relations between myself and the Other I had spent so long objectifying and denouncing. The future is ours, and as Levinas says, as long as there is time, there is hope, so let all men make hope a part of a new masculinity for ourselves, for women, and for a more just world for all.

John Altmann

John Altmann is an independent scholar in philosophy and has contributed several essays to the Popular Culture and Philosophybook series published by OpenCourt. He has also published essays with the New York Times including co-authoring an essay with Bryan Van Norden in their philosophy editorial The Stone. John Altmann and Bryan Van Norden also collaborated on an essay to be published in Wiley-Blackwell's forthcoming volume on Public Philosophy in 2022.