FORGET about the old maid, the fatso and the nerd: a rash of books and films about men or women with uncontrollable cravings for instant gratification suggests that the latest American figure of fun is the “sex addict”.

A new book by Susan Cheever, the novelist, biographer and self-styled “recovering sex addict”, is certain to intensify this already burgeoning national obsession.

“Whenever there was a crisis,” she writes in Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, “I found a man to help me take the edge off the feelings of helplessness and pain . . . moving men, doctors, lawyers, book salesmen – any man associated with a threatening change in my life became erotically charged, with predictable results.”

Cheever has fallen in with fashionable company. David Duchovny checked into a clinic for treatment as a sex addict in August, just before the start of a new season of Californication, the television series in which he stars as a troubled sex-obsessed novelist.

Once an eyebrow-raising rarity, sex addicts are popping up everywhere these days. In his memoir My Booky Wook, Russell Brand, the comedian, admitted that he had received treatment for the condition.

“One day,” he wrote, “I had to write a victims’ list – a litany of the women I had wronged as a result of my sexual addiction. I felt like Saddam Hussein trying to pick out individual Kurds.”

There is no escaping sex addicts on the big screen. In Blades of Glory, an ice-skating comedy, one of the characters attends a sex addicts’ meeting in which the traditional alcoholic’s “serenity prayer” has been rewritten.

“God, grant me the serenity to not have sex with my friend’s girlfriend,” it goes, “the courage to go home tonight without having sex with my friend’s girlfriend and the wisdom to walk away from my friend’s smokin’ hot girlfriend.” Many of the participants in the meeting end up coupling in the bushes outside.

Choke, a film about a sex addict’s struggle to overcome his demons, is no comedy but this did not stop the distributors from handing out sex toys as gifts for those attending last month’s previews.

Does the condition exist or is it simply being used to sell books and fill cinemas? The psychiatrists are divided. According to one wing of opinion, the idea of “sex addiction” implies a moralistic, narrow view of what is acceptable.

“There are millions of people stuck in unhappy relationships who go to massage parlours,” said Marty Klein, a sex therapist in Palo Alto, California, “and to demonise their sexuality is terribly unfair.”

The term “sex addiction” was officially listed as a mental disorder in 1980 but was removed from the list in 1994 as the belief took hold that only substances, not behaviour, could be addictive. However, a medical task-force is considering restoring it to the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A lively debate is expected.

Patrick Carnes, author of Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction, defines it as “any sexually related, compulsive behaviour which interferes with normal living and causes severe stress on family, friends, loved ones and one’s work environment”.

That would certainly seem to apply to Cheever. She writes that she found adulterous affairs so irresistible that she could avoid them only by refusing all contact with married men. She slept with her mother’s oncologist. She fell in love with her divorce lawyer.

In a previous book she had described spending a week in Cuba with the alcoholic love of her life while her young daughter was ill. She also described sleeping with three lovers in one day.

That book was called Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker and, as the title suggests, she blamed alcoholism for her troubles with men in those days, not sexual addiction. She denies any contradiction, however.

“In 1999, when I wrote about alcoholism,” she said, “I had no idea that there was such a thing as sex addiction. It’s only in writing this book that I’ve come to see that all addictions are one addiction.”

She went on: “Addiction isn’t about substance – you aren’t addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings. And if that substance is taken away, you’ll replace it with another substance.”

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