dr. james "tingly" dobson holly mckanna I can safely assume that all of my addictive behaviors stem from having to listen to Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family explain the sex act. I was about ten years old-old enough to know the ins-and-outs of sex; I was practically having sex by then anyway-when Mom came into my room and told me that she wanted me to listen to some tapes about "growing up." I started the first tape, the one about driving your car on a road past the Cave of Inferiority and about the kid who got a straw stuck up his nose at lunch, but I skipped most of the rest of that tape, and all of tape two, as soon as I noticed that Tape Three was about sex. Being ten years old makes that sort of thing intriguing. In fact, I'm not so sure that I wasn't using my Webster's pocket-sized edition to look up buttocks or fart at the time I discovered the title of Tape Three. I listened to about seven minutes of the tape before I felt the tips of my ears turning red from embarrassment even though I was all by myself. The thought of my mom listening to the tape and then giving it to me to listen to, knowing that I would listen to him use those words and think of her listening to him use those words, knowing that she would know I knew. Dr. Dobson, in that distinctive voice of his, had said, "The man's penis gets very straight and hard." It got worse. He went on about how he sticks it into the woman's vagina and moves it in and out and around until they both get a kind of tingly feeling all over. He actually said that. Tingly feeling. Fifteen years later, I still get a little shoulder/neck twitch and my left eye blinks funny when I hear the word tingly. I shut the tape off. A couple weeks later, Mom asks if I'm enjoying the tapes. But she calls them "sex tapes" this time and laughs like it's funny. This is mortifying. "Yeah," I tell her. "Honey, are you OK? What's wrong with your eye?" I got a little bored one day a while later and decided to listen to more of The Tape. Dobson had finished with sex and was moving on to masturbation. He explains an erection in detail, but he doesn't explain the word masturbation. What ten-year-old knows what that word means? "Hey, Shelly [the baby-sitter]!" I yell. "What the hell's masturbation?" Watching TV on the couch in the living room, she yells back, "Playing with yourself!" Well, why didn't he just say that? I knew what that was. He went on. Oh, God, no. I lunged to shut the tape off, but I didn't move fast enough. He defined masturbation as using the hands to stimulate the sex organs to get that same tingly feeling that comes from sex. Again, that tingly feeling. He went on to say that masturbation-playing with yourself-is a perfectly normal, healthy activity. In fact, 99 percent of all boys have done it, and so have 36 percent of all girls. (Later I found out that in addition to being wrong about that tingly feeling-people don't have sex until they both get that tingly feeling; people have sex until the man gets that tingly feeling-Dr. Dobson was also wrong about women's masturbation habits. Thirty-six percent? That's a little low. Every woman who has had sex with a man masturbates.) I had been lying in my top bunk, secretly touching myself now and then through my underwear, for about five weeks when I heard Tape Three. I knew I liked it, but I had no idea about this so-called tingly feeling. I would have to find out more. I wonder if my mom noticed that after Tape Three certain objects came up missing around the house-bananas, toilet paper dowel rods, that glass bottle that Grandma used to cool her angel food cakes-or that I would go to bed at 8:00, come down flushed a half-hour later, eat a bowl of cereal, and watch TV until 11:30. I became an enthusiast. In the shower, on the toilet, in the tub. Standing up, lying down. The car. The tanning bed. The zoo. Who needed sex? I couldn't stop. About the time I couldn't fall asleep without touching myself, I started to feel a little guilty, but I kept reminding myself of what Dr. Dobson had said: it's a perfectly normal, healthy activity. Parents shouldn't punish their children for it. In fact, it's not even a sin. As long as you're not thinking about having sex with a particular person, you're not lusting; therefore, you're not sinning. This forced me to be creative. Mark became Marc, Curt was spelled the German way, and Melissa had two L's. That way I wasn't thinking about that particular person. Sure, the people I had "sex" with every night looked an awful lot like the people I went to school with everyday-they even sounded the same-but they were not the same people. They had different names. And the people in those magazines? I used a black marker to draw thick lines over their eyes. Those girls could be anybody. I went on to cover up the faces in my videos. Pretty soon, though, my mom started to ask me about that five-by-five piece of paper that was always taped to the TV screen whenever she got back from Wal-Mart. That plus her comment about constantly being out of cucumbers when she just bought them the day before helped me to be a little more careful, which helped me to cut back quite a bit. Fifteen years ago, masturbation set a precedent, and now that I'm older, it's not just masturbation. It's everything. I'm not an "occasional" anything. I smoke over a pack a day. Why drink if you don't get drunk? Drink till you get sick, drink some more. What does "monogamous sexual relationship" mean again? A stud in the nose is not enough. I dream of piercing my face. Tattoos? I once got two in three months. Now I want a sleeve. Never one Xanax, always at least two, and never if they're prescribed for me. Cough medicine, sleeping pills, pain pills. Marijuana. It's all or nothing for me with one until I move on to another, and Dr. Dobson started it-this eternal pursuit of the perpetual buzz, that tingly feeling all over.