Scan barcode
A review by suddenflamingword
Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction by Erica Garza
1.0
All the platitudes of bravery and openness aside - and acknowledging the reality of this book's gesture towards frankness in a patriarchal society is a valid point - this feels like a memoir for the Eat, Pray, Love and Goop audience. It grips like a PG-13 version of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Which is to say it reads as deeply bourgeois, monotonous, and penny wise pound foolish.
For the good, maybe one could say with Garza that "if there had been more research and more discussion about sexual addiction in women, would I have changed my behavior?" This is her rebuttal to that question.
But then you see a list like this (all of which came out before Garza's book) you realize it's not a matter of another book to stock store shelves, but social norms which there are explicit political attempts to uphold conservative ideas of society. Norms which Garza herself grew up with, but which are never explored in Getting Off.
Much like how her privilege is given the obligatory check, but skimmed over otherwise. Which becomes more obvious at the end when she and her to-be husband go through the Hoffman Process after spending a week in Thailand, after months earlier meeting in a yoga class in Bali. A Process which costs ~$5,000. But I digress.
Perhaps the main problem with the book is hinted at by all this. On one hand it has no core. Her conclusion for the reader is "when you have a chronic fear of ordinariness, you can convince yourself that your trauma actually isn’t trauma at all" so you must assign proper blame to this trauma. But we are resistant to this because "we’re scared of what comes next. Change." There is no "cure." Only "things [which offer] opportunities to know [yourself] better" (like the $5,000 Hoffman Process). And this is what we have to aim for. It's a fine yet impressively milquetoast conclusion for a memoir about the travails of sex-addiction.
The other hand, though, reveals that this moral development is at odds with what actually happened. What actually mark the moments of Garza's change throughout the book is bucking the oppressive social anxieties which she had held onto and which opened her up to social interactions with accepting ears, alongside people who equally wanted no truck with these oppressive norms and equally struggled against them. As her Bali teacher said, "'in the West, to behave like this might land you in an institution. But in India, you’re revered as a guru.'” Were this more a psychological memoir than a self-help travelogue, this would easily lead back to the adoption of a strictly suburban Catholic upbringing within a patriarchal, racist culture. It does not.
It's not for no reason that she says that the Hoffman Process (to reiterate, $5,000) "taught me to reclaim the girl I was at twelve, her insecurities, her self-hatred, her coping mechanisms, all of her" at the end of the book. It's in these socially enforced insecurities, self-hatreds, and toxic coping mechanisms that these problems develop. Garza's solution of jet-setting to 'exotic' locales - which she implicitly partly attributes to her improvement - is quite literally the opposite of this. It's a very American solution to internal conflict whose conclusion of not being "cured" (and ending in a bisexual shower threeway) smacks so much of neoliberal doublespeak around "not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" that I had to double-take.
I'm glad that Garza acknowledges that "I’m a girl and I am sexual. I’m a girl and I have desires. I’m a girl and I am proud. Look at me looking at you" in the end. However, I'm not sure what was accomplished in acknowledging this. Nothing, I suppose, but the mirror of social acceptance.
For the good, maybe one could say with Garza that "if there had been more research and more discussion about sexual addiction in women, would I have changed my behavior?" This is her rebuttal to that question.
But then you see a list like this (all of which came out before Garza's book) you realize it's not a matter of another book to stock store shelves, but social norms which there are explicit political attempts to uphold conservative ideas of society. Norms which Garza herself grew up with, but which are never explored in Getting Off.
Much like how her privilege is given the obligatory check, but skimmed over otherwise. Which becomes more obvious at the end when she and her to-be husband go through the Hoffman Process after spending a week in Thailand, after months earlier meeting in a yoga class in Bali. A Process which costs ~$5,000. But I digress.
Perhaps the main problem with the book is hinted at by all this. On one hand it has no core. Her conclusion for the reader is "when you have a chronic fear of ordinariness, you can convince yourself that your trauma actually isn’t trauma at all" so you must assign proper blame to this trauma. But we are resistant to this because "we’re scared of what comes next. Change." There is no "cure." Only "things [which offer] opportunities to know [yourself] better" (like the $5,000 Hoffman Process). And this is what we have to aim for. It's a fine yet impressively milquetoast conclusion for a memoir about the travails of sex-addiction.
The other hand, though, reveals that this moral development is at odds with what actually happened. What actually mark the moments of Garza's change throughout the book is bucking the oppressive social anxieties which she had held onto and which opened her up to social interactions with accepting ears, alongside people who equally wanted no truck with these oppressive norms and equally struggled against them. As her Bali teacher said, "'in the West, to behave like this might land you in an institution. But in India, you’re revered as a guru.'” Were this more a psychological memoir than a self-help travelogue, this would easily lead back to the adoption of a strictly suburban Catholic upbringing within a patriarchal, racist culture. It does not.
It's not for no reason that she says that the Hoffman Process (to reiterate, $5,000) "taught me to reclaim the girl I was at twelve, her insecurities, her self-hatred, her coping mechanisms, all of her" at the end of the book. It's in these socially enforced insecurities, self-hatreds, and toxic coping mechanisms that these problems develop. Garza's solution of jet-setting to 'exotic' locales - which she implicitly partly attributes to her improvement - is quite literally the opposite of this. It's a very American solution to internal conflict whose conclusion of not being "cured" (and ending in a bisexual shower threeway) smacks so much of neoliberal doublespeak around "not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" that I had to double-take.
I'm glad that Garza acknowledges that "I’m a girl and I am sexual. I’m a girl and I have desires. I’m a girl and I am proud. Look at me looking at you" in the end. However, I'm not sure what was accomplished in acknowledging this. Nothing, I suppose, but the mirror of social acceptance.