Recent revelations about how women have been harassed, or worse, by men, have been brought to the fore by the Harvey Weinstein scandal. But they are the tiniest tip of the iceberg. I’m talking not just about the entertainment industry, but about the earliest raping and pillaging of our barbaric beginnings, to the violent and sophisticated forms of it today.

Generations of women have shown immense courage in both enduring and sharing such traumatic episodes. Alongside empathy for women, and challenging men’s complicity and denial, something deeper needs to be talked about. We need to look further than the knee-jerk condemnation of men. It may be an important stage but it won’t stop the toxic pattern.

It’s not just because men are ‘bad’. I do think, though, that we may be addicted. Nothing I write is to excuse or condone any harassment of women anywhere by any man, ever. But to fully deal with the issue, we need to consider how heterosexual men are addicted to women and femininity in a way that women are not addicted to men and to masculinity.

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It’s clear that among the three or so billion men in the world, there is a wide spectrum; from those who would never harass a woman, all the way through to those who are weak, ignorant and would even boast with a proud sense of entitlement about grabbing women’s genitals.

But looking at us humans as an alien might see our species, I would have to conclude that on this planet, the men as a whole seem significantly more affected, moved, spellbound, touched, even driven madly into addiction by women’s sensuality, form, and sexuality than women are, generally, by men’s. Is that too far-out to say?

Evidently, a huge number of the men of this planet are untrained and ill-equipped for this degree of all-consuming attraction or desire. Many men need to gorge on pornography or fantasy to temporarily tame that desperate feeling of needing and wanting sensual, sexual and intimate contact with the feminine.

Evidently, a huge number of the men of this planet are untrained and ill-equipped for this degree of all-consuming attraction or desire

This is exacerbated by consumer culture, which backs up the belief that women’s sexuality is a commodity. It promotes an attitude that all a woman really is is something to be bought, sold or simply taken. Look how much of the mainstream media and advertising is blatantly and unapologetically exploiting this same ‘weakness’ or ‘tendency’ in men to be so hooked in and captivated, even bewitched, by women. Not to mention the staggering percentage of daily internet traffic that is to porn sites.

If men are subject to a bigger challenge to keep their addictive compulsion under control, then let’s break the taboo and educate the men to deal with this properly, without shame, as they are growing up. Is our culture ready to do this?

I see a new wave of men who are not so blinkered when it comes to respecting who a woman really is, in her entirety. Men less disempowered by the traumatised impotency of their fathers and grandfathers. But they seem, to me, to be far from the majority.

When a man feels powerless – and especially disempowered, as so many men do – his ego can react by compensating elsewhere to readdress that felt imbalance. He may begin to abuse and disempower someone or something else. Women have been dehumanised for centuries.

If we want a culture where men have any hope of getting this Niagara of desire and disrespect under control for themselves (and for women) then let’s begin by stopping feeding it so much. Let’s stop using the power of it to sell things to men. Let’s stop using it to manipulate men or women, either in our media and culture, or in person. Let’s never use it to get what we want from men. Let’s not, through repeating this toxic abuse of men’s ‘addiction’, educate men that they’ll get more of their fix if they part with their money, buy this product, or do what you want.

If men are subject to a bigger challenge to keep their addictive compulsion under control, then let’s break the taboo

How can men and women forgive the past and step forward with our whole hearts together? Do we need to do a reparations-type process like at the end of apartheid in South Africa, or as seen post-genocide in Rwanda? What would be enough for men and women to move forward as partners and team-mates in this ultra-challenging subject area of attraction and desire?

It’s time for a new chapter of compassion and collaboration. We can all teach each other and our children to understand and work with ‘what is’; being open and non-judgemental about the unique predicament that both men and women have to deal with. I’d love us to melt the taboo and start now.

Featured image: Tim Gouw

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One day, my doctor said to me ‘Dariel, I really envy you. I can imagine you and your beautiful wife sitting in your resort watching the sunset, drinking cocktails and looking out over the Sierra Nevada mountains. Except that I know you won’t be there. You’ll be dead.’

At that moment, I realised how unhappy I was. I weighed 166kg (26st) at the time and I recognised that I was eating myself to death. The fact that I was unhappy came as a surprise. It didn’t fit into the concept of being extremely successful, which I was, at least as far as society saw me.

One evening when I was going to dinner in my private dining room at my private club, the hostess there touched me on my shoulder as she was seating me. No one really touches very rich people – you’re set so far apart from people that it’s like you’re a totally different class. Her touch made me recognise that I was human: that I could be loved, and that I could love. The next day I started losing weight, and began a process of transforming my life.

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I went from being in the top 100 of the top 1 per cent in terms of wealth in the US, to way down somewhere in the bottom 1 per cent. I’m now extremely poor by financial standards. But I don’t need anything any more. My life is so much richer in every single way because I’m connected to life itself: to the people and to the environment around me. I enjoy reading, walking, growing food and my work in social activism: I’m truly alive.

It’s not just dollars that define wealth: it’s also power, linkages, and the ability to make much more money. You end up forming a cohort of other extremely wealthy people and become tremendously disconnected from society. I never thought of wealth as an addiction but one of the signs of addiction is denial. I used to sign pay roll cheques for my staff every week because I felt in doing so I would have some sort of communication with them. I’d see their yearly earnings and realise I made that in an hour. I couldn’t comprehend how they could live on that. When I left it all behind, people became people again.

Her touch made me recognise that I was human: that I could be loved, and that I could love

Our society idealises wealth, money and the symbols that come with it: diamond rings, vacations to the Caribbean islands. Wealthy people are idealised and idolised – but also hated to some extent. When I was incredibly rich, my heart was completely closed to everyone around me. How can you maintain wealth when you see someone who’s starving and eating out of a garbage can? When you know that everybody you see has less than you, and you can so easily share? Only by closing your heart down. When I see people like that, I hurt for them. But I know there’s a way out too.

My life has taught me that change is possible: we can drop the stories we live with. We can change the world and, the way it is at the moment, we have to. There’s no choice about it.

Featured image: Rivera Sun

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“I began drinking when I was 12. Alcohol became my best friend. It turned all the sadness and hurt I had into massive amounts of anger. It made me feel confident and powerful.”

Samuel Bennett went on to spend his 18th birthday in rehab, and then through the doors of eight further treatment centres over the years, as his addiction led him to drug use, homelessness and the brink of suicide.

Now 31, he has been in recovery for two years and is developing a phone app called Meet4ACoffee to try to help others do the same.

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The free app – which Bennett hopes to launch in the summer – will allow people to connect with others in recovery anywhere in the world, as well as access services such as drug treatment centres, mental health teams and support groups. The ‘my circle’ feature will allow those with the app to log clean days and share messages of encouragement.

“Nobody can do recovery on their own,” says Bennett, who lives in Sheffield. “You can’t just wake up one morning out of a life of drinking, drugs, prison and say ‘I’m not going to bother with this any more’. Recovery supports recovery. It really does. This is how it has worked for hundreds of years. All I’m doing is putting that support network into a digital format.”

Bennett’s app will provide support to recovering addicts and improve access to vital services

Bennett has been crowdfunding to raise funds to make Meet4ACoffee a reality. With no technical background – and little formal education due to his alcoholism – it has proved a steep learning curve. “I was homeless when I started this,” he says. “I sketched it up on a piece of cardboard on the side of the road. I was ready to give up. But the app became my recovery. It’s my passion, and my giving back too.”

Recovery supports recovery. This is how it has worked for hundreds of years

Bennett believes he wouldn’t be alive were it not for periods of abstinence over the years. Up until two years ago, he always resorted to drinking again. “I’ve always been an all-or-nothing guy. When I was sober at one point, I got into powerlifting. I went from almost qualifying for the British powerlifting team to sitting in a crack house drinking vodka and smoking drugs I’d never even heard of. Addiction just picks you up and throws you somewhere.”

“But then I got to the point where I’d just had enough. I was either going to drink myself to death or I was going to try to change the world in some way. This was my choice.”

All images: Nigel Barker

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“You’re not supposed to be unhappy. If you’re unhappy, that’s a signal. Respond to it.”

Russell Brand is on a mission to help us find fulfilment. Much of his life has been research; there aren’t many pleasures he hasn’t dived into headfirst. His addictions famously include heroin and crack cocaine, but also compulsive eating and sex. Ultimately, they led him to self-destruction. “Because I had ‘the gift of desperation’ because I fucked my life up so royally, I had no option but to seek and accept help,” he says. With the support of the 12-step recovery programme used by groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Brand has transformed his life. And the programme’s principles, he says, can benefit everyone.

Now a married father-of-one, and 15 years clean from drugs and alcohol, Brand has written Recovery: Freedom from our Addictions. It’s a book to benefit us all, because it’s not just those labelled as addicts who are struggling, he insists. Addictive behaviour is commonplace, whether we’re hooked on coffee, consuming, gambling, hoarding, TV or technology.

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“We’re all on the scale of addiction,” he tells me. But it’s often only apparent that we have addictions when they become extreme, believes Brand, because they have become normalised. “Most of us are able to operate within the culture successfully, to a degree. To use a crude science fiction analogy, you don’t know you’re in the Matrix because you’re in the Matrix.”

This ‘Matrix’ is our culture of consumerism, materialism and individualism, which is “all-encompassing,” he says. It drives the things we do compulsively to feel good: our addictions.

Brand during the 2012 MTV movie awards in California. Image: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Brand is warm, gentle and attentive. He talks slowly, his words considered, before switching gear, speeding into articulate bursts. “We all have biochemistry. We all have drivers, desires and fears,” he says. “And we live in a capitalist society which operates by stimulating fear and desire in us.”

There is a yearning and dissatisfaction that we’re all affected by in some way, he believes. ‘Addicts’ are the “outliers” who struggle to regulate themselves in the face of it. “So, they take drugs or eat food or masturbate excessively, making the phenomena visible.”

What is it then, that we’re longing for?

“It’s a spiritual problem,” Brand says. “People drink because it feels good. People buy too much because it feels good. People drive their cars fast; they do stuff for feelings. That’s somehow become abstracted from the idea of spirit and placed in the realm of the material, where it clearly cannot belong, and can never be resolved.

“I wasn’t taking heroin because it tastes nice, it was a way of dealing with the fact that I couldn’t connect, couldn’t find union. Access to a connection will always be the solution.”

We all have biochemistry. We all have drivers, desires and fears. And we live in a capitalist society which operates by stimulating fear and desire in us

Indulgence was a pitfall for Brand but he’s adamant that beneath such behaviour there are feelings that need to be honoured.

“You’re entitled to feel valuable and valued. That’s the thing that can be confused with narcissism and vanity, I suppose. But if you don’t feel connected, do something about it. Be connected, be contented. Be less tolerant of being unhappy. Don’t be some browbeaten component in a machine where it’s like ‘this is life, I’m on this elevator now, then I’m going home, key in the door, into a relationship I’m not happy in’ – don’t tolerate it.”

Despite his glamorous life, Brand clearly still struggles on a daily basis. “It doesn’t feel very easy to me to be alive,” he admits. “It doesn’t matter what compliments you throw at me: it works for a second, some sort of inner narcotic – ping! – but what sticks to me is ‘you’re nobody’, ‘you’re worthless’, ‘you’re scum’. I have to swim hard to keep above water. There’s a racing inner narrative that often leads me to feeling awkward, uncomfortable, not good enough.”

The 12-step programme

In his book, Recovery, Brand draws upon the 12-step programme, which is well-established in dealing with alcoholism and drug addictions.

“If you belong to the kind of support groups that do to deal with my addiction, you hear people continually say that everyone should have this programme,” he notes. He is convinced that it can be a template to release ourselves from various and subtle forms of addictive behaviour. These can crop up in the way we relate in romantic partnerships, for example, or how we operate in our professional lives.

As such, he wanted to make the programme accessible: “I try to make it colourful and funny, so that you don’t feel this is a self-help book.”

Brand on Wall Street, New York City, in 2014. Image: Alo Ceballos/GC Images

A crucial part of the process is uncovering past experiences that affect how we act in our lives now; digging into what Brand calls the “personal archaeology of our damage”.

“Most of the time, we don’t really go back and think of the times when someone really hurt us,” he explains. “But even today, when I look at quite mundane and trivial events, I realise that they are rooted in historic beliefs. I was a little kid, and then I was a drug addict. There was never a bit where it was like ‘this is me when I’m normal and I’m cool’. Everything was chaos and mad all the time. Now, I learn to recognise it.

“I have deep, deep programming: if a woman says particular things to me, I have a reaction, if a man says particular things to me, I have a reaction. And I think we’re victim to these feelings: we’re living by unconscious coordinates.

“I don’t want to live according to that code any more, I want to be free. I believe it’s possible for us to have an intuitive and a central reaction moment to moment, to see beyond what we appear to be: individuals trapped in time, trapped in motion, trapped in skin sacs.”

Be connected, be contented. It’s different from being indulgent; you are entitled to feel valuable and valued

Although this deeper context is something Brand has often brought to his social commentary, his new book represents a shift away from overt activism. Memorably, the ‘Paxman v Brand’ interview on BBC Newsnight in 2013 turned him, overnight, from an entertaining TV personality into a voice for the anti-establishment.

Now, he’s taking a different route towards change. We can all empower ourselves by trying to understand our own behaviour, he says. “I’ve already tried, in my own limited way, to effect institutional and systemic change. I found that path quite well barricaded. This time, I want to go in at source – what is it to be in this world? How can we meaningfully change? I got a bit tired of talking to people in power about how they should reach out a hand to help people. Now, I’m going to spend my time telling people to take the power, because it’s already yours.”

Helping others

Later, I’m in St James’ church in central London, where Brand is launching the book. Given the venue, he decides to finish the evening with the ‘serenity prayer’. “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the I things can and the wisdom to know the difference.” And it is this serenity that Brand is pursuing as he moves through his various public incarnations. He is introduced at the launch as “the poster boy for someone who has evolved under the spotlight”. What has he learned so far?

“The most fascinating thing I discovered about myself through this process is that the thing that makes me happy is helping other people,” he says. “I find it very hard to accept that, because I have deep, deep roots in performance and in showing off. But something happens. There are places I go where I don’t think about myself. Sometimes it’s around other addicts, sometimes people who have nothing.

Now, I’m going to spend my time telling people to take the power, because it’s already yours

“If you’ve taken your ego as far as I have, to the limits of glistening fame, consumption and literal orgies, and you still feel a bit bilious and awful – it’s a sign. David Foster Wallace says the problem with luxury is that it can’t ever deliver what it promises. Once you’re suspended in amniotic fluid, floating about on a cruise ship, you realise that luxury and material can’t work for you. There’s a horrible, horrible despair in that. So I try to do things for other people as much as I possibly can and I feel better.

“The point at which I connect to you is in your wound, in your fallibility, in your vulnerability. And I feel that if I am as honest and open and revealing about that as possible, it will help me overcome the idea of my own separateness. If there is such a commonality between us and our problems at root and essence, how alone are we?

“I live in the gutter and always will, to a degree. But I’m aspiring to be connected.”

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The 12-step programme (in Russell’s words)

Brand credits the 12-step programme as being key to his freedom from addiction. It is a universal blueprint for personal growth, he says. In his book, Recovery, he interprets the steps to create his own principles for transformation.

Step 1: Are you a bit fucked?

Step 2: Could you not be fucked?

Step 3: Are you, on your own, going to ‘unfuck’ yourself?

Step 4: Write down all the things that are fucking you up or have ever fucked you up and don’t lie, or leave anything out

Step 5: Honestly tell someone trustworthy about how fucked you are

Step 6: Do you want to stop it? Seriously?

Step 7: Are you willing to live in a new way that’s not all about you and your previous, fucked up stuff? (You have to)

Step 8: Prepare to apologise to everyone for everything affected by your being so fucked up

Step 9: Now apologise. (Unless that would make things worse)

Step 10: Watch out for fucked up thinking and behaviour and be honest when it happens

Step 11: Stay connected to your new perspective

Step 12: Look at life less selfishly, be nice to everyone, help people if you can

Featured image: David Titlow, grooming: Nicola Schuller, styling: Amy Hanson-Bevan

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