Thanks for Sharing is not a romantic comedy, nor would I call it a dramatic comedy, and I don’t know why it’s being described in these terms. It is a gritty, intense and humorless drama about all kinds of addiction and addictive patterns, focusing mainly on sex addiction. The various stories told are captivating, its presentation of addiction is fairly dignified, and its characters are well-drawn and well-acted (Robbins, Rufallo, Josh Gad, and Pink are all excellent; Gwyneth Paltrow is just okay.) I particularly liked the father-son relationship involving Robbins. If you are in the mood for an emotionally draining movie about addiction and people’s lives falling apart, this film would be an okay choice.

But when you step back from the technical execution of this film, you realize that it’s playing fast and loose with the idea of sex addiction. Much like that other recent film on sex addition, Shame , Thanks for Sharing presents a confusing, specious, and manipulative portrait of this malady. Benign things like masturbation, watching porn, and renting hookers are roundly condemned as the moral equivalent of committing actual criminal acts where people get hurt, or their rights get violated – groping women on subways, harassing women in the workplace, stalking women, and much worse. The film’s implication, clearly, is that masturbation and porn are “gateway,” similar to the (completely debunked) idea of gateway drugs. But we are not shown any evidence for this in the film. What we are shown is a Mark Ruffalo character whose “disease” (whacking off to porn, hitting on women, and renting hookers, to paraphrase his own words in the film) is somehow the same disease as the Josh Gad character, who is an overt sex criminal, a disease directly comparable to drug or alcohol addiction.

Clearly the Josh Gad character has a serious problem – the guy had been arrested for sexual misconduct, for heaven’s sake. But what about Mark Ruffalo? He’s not hurting his career and he’s not hurting other people. You might argue he’s hurting himself, but if he wants to spend a bunch of time jacking off to porn, or banging hookers, if that’s what he really enjoys doing, why the fuck shouldn’t he do it? And further, how are these sexual habits akin to alcohol, heroin, or methamphetamine addiction, which in contrast could very easily kill him, kill other people, or at the very least completely destroy everything in his life? Frankly, Mark Ruffalo’s problem seems closer to playing video games all the time, or being what used to be known as a “player,” out for fun and uninterested in commitment. If he decides he wants to redirect his energy, fine, but that’s not a moral issue, and it should not be blurred with activities that are truly harmful to others or to society.

Indeed, the filmmakers seem to sense this, because late in the film they try to make a case for the “gateway” theory by having Ruffalo make a booty call to an old one night stand, some young woman who wants kinky “daddy” sex, and who then (when he denies her what she wants) freaks out and tries to kill herself. It’s all very impressive during the movie, because it’s very well-acted. But the question lingers: what if Mark Ruffalo had simply called some woman who was not mentally ill and inches from a suicide attempt? What would have happened is they would have had sex screaming “daddy, daddy,” and then they would have gone about their business. However, the film’s answer to this question would undoubtedly be that anyone wanting anything but mechanical and emotionless missionary sex performed for the purpose of procreation, is in fact mentally ill, quod erat demonstratum.

And here we hit the crux of the matter. It’s no coincidence that there is a strong religious undertone to this whole film. Organized religion has always been in the business of demonizing sex as a method of control. These people in the movie pray daily for God to stop their evil sexual thoughts, and their distant, almost chimerical, goal is to eventually be able to enjoy sex the “correct” way. Rather than dealing exclusively with real problems (sexual harassment or sexual assault of women,) and rather than exploring the root causes of addiction disorders (scarcity, vulnerability, and the incredible cruelty of our society toward average people,) these filmmakers instead chose to take the opportunity to push the amorphous and stupidly moralistic premise that people are filled with the “devil’s thoughts,” and need to flagellate themselves until they “find God.” It’s all very disturbing and unhelpful in the extreme.

There may be a good movie to be made on the topic of sex addiction, but Thanks for Sharing most definitely isn’t it.