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Sex Addiction in Chicken Shops—This Week On VICE: Members Only

Behind the paywall this week: two stories from the UK underbelly.

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It was a rainy evening in November 2025 when journalist Maya Oppenheim found herself cruising down the freeway with a sex addict. The driver, Paul*, was an interview subject in her latest report for VICE—a wide-ranging deep dive into Sex Addicts Anonymous, and the growing but under-discussed issue of sex addiction in the UK.

Historically, sex addiction has flown under the radar due to the absence of an established criteria for diagnosis, lack of obvious symptoms, and pervasive social stigma. Recently, though, there has been an uptick in research “attempting to grapple with the reality, and scale, of what many believe is a hidden epidemic of sex addiction, at a time when novel new tech and social pressures are throwing our relationship to intimacy into disarray,” as Maya puts it.

Spending time with multiple people in recovery, from a young woman based in London who found........

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