The implication was that standards of decency and professionalism had shifted beneath his feet, and he is a naïve old dinosaur who can’t help how much he loves sex. The answer, apparently, is an (admittedly overdue!) jaunt to rehab for “sex addiction.” Then back with more ideas soon.

The ability to even attempt to sell this narrative is a luxury disproportionately afforded to powerful men—the ones who are not thugs or violent criminals but simply can’t help themselves.

The known facts are at odds with Weinstein’s moment-of-realization story. Weinstein reportedly met with resistance regularly from the people he attacked and people close to them. He was reportedly confronted years ago privately by Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck. He has paid multiple settlements. He has been mocked publicly at the Oscar nominations and on 30 Rock and Entourage. The problem was not new or unknown, and yet it was last week’s revelation that he considered “a wake-up call.”

The more glaring problem with the narrative is the mischaracterization of the incidents as “sexual”—and an addiction to that sex. “Sex addiction” is not included in psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, as the American psychiatric establishment chose to regard sex differently from other addictive behaviors—largely in that there are no serious physical symptoms of withdrawal. This is a consequential distinction. People can have problematic sex-related compulsions that interfere with daily life, but that’s different. For example, in a very real sense, a person approaching the lethal stages of alcohol withdrawal may rob a liquor store to save his life. This would not be the moral equivalent of raping a person to stem an onset of “sex withdrawal.”

Even for the minority of mental-health experts who would characterize sex addiction as a diagnosable condition, the fact remains that sex is simply not the issue at hand.

The acts detailed in the accounts of the many women reporting abuse by Weinstein were often tangentially sexual, in that they involved certain parts of the body and mimicked the motions of sexual acts. But to consider these incidents sex is a mode of thinking that fell out of use even before the “’60s and ’70s.” Sex is defined by consent. This is not a new concept.

The framing of Weinstein’s problem as one to do with sex reflects no reckoning with the nature of the charges. This is a case of excusing something as sex when it is not sex. There are parallels in this misdirection to what happened with the Access Hollywood tape in which Donald Trump bragged about assaulting women, and it was reported in the news as “explicit sex talk.”

These are rather problems of power and status that manifest as a violent disregard for others—a failure to acknowledge the autonomy of women or a problem accepting it and a compulsion to revoke it by force. So it feels especially jarring to hear that same person professing a lack of agency in these acts.