Big day today—-the inimitable Rax King makes her Small Bow debut as she qualifies, testifies, and shows us what life is like inside her brain:

“I’m capable of fucking in the same spirit I drank and snorted, to be sure, but sex addiction isn’t a perfect analog for substance use disorders. Most people don’t yearn to spend every day in a chemical blackout, and I did. That problem may have been hard to correct but it was straightforward to identify. The pathologies of substance use also came with obvious symptoms: tooth-grinding, foot-tapping, arm-scratching, sweating, stinking, babbling. Sex was different. Most people longed for it, and if my partners were as addicted as I was, I never knew it.”

Full story is below. Launch it into the stratosphere across your social networks and help us get this out there if you can.

(Also: after you finish the story, scroll down a few more clicks, and you’ll find our merch link, where you can buy hats and mugs for the TSB fan in your life.). — AJD

******************************************

When I was twenty, I worked in a D.C. gelato shop that flagged its hipness every way it could, hosting barista competitions during off hours and serving unusual flavors like cilantro-lime. Our investors, who often stopped by for free espresso or gelato, seemed to be the only ten rich people in Washington who were also cool. New York and Los Angeles may boast “creatives” who wear full-body athleisure while they earn seven figures, but in my hometown, the serious money was always dorky.

One investor in particular induced an especially undignified response from us at the shop, as he was gorgeous on top of being hip and rich. Mischievous grey eyes and an easy smile and, just in case God hadn’t favored the bastard enough, a dimple you could lose a ring in. His name…man, I badly want to print his full legal name here just in case he happens to read this and decides he’s ready to run away with me. Focus up, Rax. His name was “Jason” and he was a photographer by trade.

Jason was single in a way that doesn’t feel like it warrants the word, because he was never alone. He came in with one doe-eyed, willowy broad after another on his arm—I don’t know where he was even finding all those doe-eyed, willowy broads in a city as famously unsexy as my hometown. On one of the only occasions that he stopped by unaccompanied, my supervisor Amy teased him. “What, here all alone? I would’ve assumed you’d have some beautiful girl other than the one you came in with yesterday.”

He grinned at us roguishly. “What can I say, guys? I just love love.”

When he left, Amy gave me an unexpectedly stern look. “Rax,” she said. “You cannot sleep with him.”

I was dismayed because, of course, I’d been planning to do exactly that since the day I met him. I knew better, barely, than to proposition him at the workplace he technically owned a sliver of, but still I had penciled him in towards the end of my five-year plan. That was assuming things didn’t work out with the fiancé who lived in England or the man in Annapolis who erroneously believed he was my boyfriend. I, too, loved love. I loved it as many times a week as I could, with every body that looked good to me. 

I can’t imagine Amy expected her prohibition to stick, because she knew all this. We liked to close up after work and hit the Irish pub down the street, where she’d explain her latest attempts to be polyamorous, eager for my coaching. She was my boss at the shop and my student at the bar. Sometimes a man would flirt with me and she’d watch like it was game tape. I can’t recall any of these men pursuing her. She was an attractive woman, but I was a creature apart — some underworld demon, a cautionary myth come to life. (Which maybe sounds like a humblebrag, except that both of those epithets were assigned to me by a man who found himself on the wrong side of the cautionary myth.)

What was it they could all smell on me, I wonder? Funny that I’ve never thought to ask the question til now. Sometimes it feels like that slippery hole between my legs bores clear through the center of the earth, a magnetic void. That’s some high metaphoric language right there, and so let me be clear: there are times when I feel literally unfillable. Back then, I’d find myself with my legs wrapped around some man I had begged God for and, aside from the cool triumph that attends the getting of what one wants, I felt nothing. Only the sneaky reopening of the void, further down this time, harder to sound. That’s what they smelled, I guess — the wanting on my flesh, like gangrene.

For many years, the wanting disease made me the sort of junkie-drunk who gets grocery store gift cards rather than cash for birthdays. Heroin, cocaine, alcohol: these were the villains who needed defeating, and it helped that they were so, well, villainous. They were going to kill me. They were my most cherished friends, but they whispered to me every day that they were going to kill me — I could only keep a friendship going under those conditions for so long. I never liked what heroin did to my guts or what coke did to my bank account, and I hated what they all did to my sense of self. Quitting them was an emergency. The only thing I didn’t think to quit was wanting. 

I’m capable of fucking in the same spirit I drank and snorted, to be sure, but sex addiction isn’t a perfect analog for substance use disorders. Most people don’t yearn to spend every day in a chemical blackout, and I did. That problem may have been hard to correct but it was straightforward to identify. The pathologies of substance use also came with obvious symptoms: tooth-grinding, foot-tapping, arm-scratching, sweating, stinking, babbling. Sex was different. Most people longed for it, and if my partners were as addicted as I was, I never knew it.

Sex also felt like something I could earn, in a way no substance ever did. With alcohol and drugs, I was a consumer: I paid my cash, I received an experience. If the experience was fun, cool, money well spent. When it wasn’t—when what I bought was weak or fake or simply no match for my decrepitude of spirit that day—I took my business elsewhere like any pissed-off customer. But I have never paid for sex, and so it felt like a hobby, not a good or a service. Maybe pursuing sex was more like gambling, since part of the fun was hoping for the win. It was like gambling, too, in that hoping for the win was usually better than achieving it.

That’s the depressing way to describe my years of active, unchecked sex addiction. There’s also a lively, swashbuckling way to describe it that makes people envy me (or, worse, look up to me like Amy did). Neither way is wrong, but neither is completely right, either. I had a fiancé in England and a “boyfriend” in Annapolis and high-octane romance combusting in my path everywhere I walked and it wasn’t enough. I didn’t even know what “enough” might feel like. Relief? Pleasure? Trying to satisfy me was like making me absorb all my nutrients through weed edibles: the more I consumed, the hungrier I got. 

The solution to other such problems had been to quit, and I had no intention of quitting love. I had, however, memorized how to tie a noose. Just casually, on my days off. That was my ticket off the ride. I originally wrote “I didn’t want to die” here, but of course I did! When has my void ever been picky with its demands? I wanted to die because I wanted to do everything, because “wanting” had conclusively replaced “being” for me and that meant “dying” was the logical next step.

Alcoholism and drug addiction play out through the intermediaries of substances. Sex addiction, however, can be pursued using nothing but your body and mind — it’s the difference between mastering an instrument and singing whatever your vocal cords are capable of. Even after I quit drinking and drugging, I could sing, and I did. I liked how easy it still was to rearrange and eroticize the energy of a room. Intoxication was a form of sorcery I could no longer practice on myself, but I still had a body and a smile whose effects I knew to be devastating, and I could ensorcell others. My twelve-step friends said amused, concerned things about it. “Hanging out with Rax is a trip,” said one. “Wherever she goes, she’s trailed by this harem of 3-5 men with puppy dog eyes.”

But it wasn’t fun anymore. I’d lost the version of myself who could watch over my foolishness from a distance, laughing. Sobriety had spoiled the twist ending: I knew I would despise myself for my sexual behavior if it stayed unfeeling and compulsive, to the point that I could no longer buy into a plotline that led me there. I cringe to remember how many men openly told me they were sleeping with me out of curiosity, wanting above all to see what it was like. I could relate — I slept with everyone out of curiosity. It was a fun little aberration for them and SOP for me.

I never did sleep with Jason, for the record. That grinning “I just love love,” the rakishness like a garment he never took off — I suspect it would have been a lot like sleeping with me is for other people. There would have been that feeling, soothing but offensive, of being plugged into another person’s seductive routine. Of being added to a tally and then most likely forgotten. 

These days, I don’t have sex to check off boxes, which is a tough thing to say in such a context. It tends to imply that I exclusively do the opposite: express a union of souls through one of bodies. Maybe I’ll only be healed when I can say something like that without shuddering. There’s a version of the public-facing sex addiction narrative that requires the repentant addict to admit she never cared about any of those people, she was just using them, forgive her, Father, and so on…but I had a big tender heart and still do. It frustrated me that I only knew how to use people, that I could not feel or love in earnest. I kept trying to fuck my way there, and it stopped working. I had no choice but to get sober if I wanted to stay alive, and once I decided to stay alive, it stood to reason that I needed to figure out how to love, too. 

*******

Rax King is the James Beard award-nominated author of the essay collections Tacky (Vintage 2021) and Sloppy (Vintage 2025). She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and toothless Pekingese.