me emotionally), I decided to get up and feel good about myself even with the nothing I have and the nothing I’ve done lately.
I often have low self-esteem. I feel inferior or inadequate. I’m definitely too femme and emotional. I’ve never had a decent relationship that wasn’t online (sadly enough). And I know I have so many great qualities and so many people would be lucky to have me. But why am I attracted to people I cannot have? And why do I attract people that I would not get with? Hopes and dreams are big to me. I am definitely a lover boy and I like to be proper. Exquisite dates. You know, the whole charade. But I often feel like I am being lied to and used by the only guys I meet. I often feel like guys tell me they like me but in the same breath try to push me off. “Oh, sorry, I’m busy. Can we do it tomorrow?” Then I let my emotions take over, and I give them about eight pieces of my mind.
If you have any advice, motivational words, or words of wisdom, such would be highly appreciated. Because I could use all the advice I can get.
Perhaps the commonest cleansing prohibition involves having only virtual sex—displaying an excessive fondness for pornography—which becomes acceptable because it doesn’t involve actual people.
Surprisingly, erotophobic individuals are not necessarily personally cold-blooded types. Outside of the sexual arena, they tend to be normally related people who, though their capacity for sex is diminished, often retain their capacity for personal warmth and affection. Surprising, too, is that unlike individuals suffering from innate sexual avoidance, who claim that “that’s just the way I am,” patients with acquired sexual avoidance tend to be insightful about why they are sexually removed. In contrast to the asexual avoidant who says, “Who knows and even cares why I don’t feel anything,” they often know that they desire sex and have performance difficulties because they have buried their passions, and it is this that leaves them with reduced sexual feelings and ones that they are unable to translate into decisive erotic action.
DEVELOPMENT
More is understood about the development of acquired than of innate sexual avoidance, the latter seeming to “come from out of the blue.” Acquired sexual avoidance in the adult often results when a child’s healthy sexual development is thwarted by unhealthy containment at the hands of rigidly suppressive parents, who encourage the child to carry on his or her parental sexually suppressive tradition, one supported by repressive elements in the society the parents happen to, and often choose to, live in. To illustrate, when he was a child, one avoidant’s mother whipped him whenever she sensed he “felt sexual.” She meted out one particularly intense whipping when she caught him “playing doctor” with a neighbor’s little girl, saying “nice little boys don’t play such naughty games.” After the beating, he “ran away from home” to a neighbor’s apartment, only to be beaten again, this time for disappearing without telling his mother where he was going. After that, his mother tried to make certain that he stayed away from all the girls in the neighborhood so that he didn’t “ruin their lives the way he ruined hers.”
Many parents like this mother are themselves erotophobes, who make it clear that they harbor negative feelings about most or all sexuality. They do this either directly, say, by criticizing the child for masturbation, or indirectly, say, by issuing warnings to “not get married and leave home because your mother needs you.” Children who internalize the parental erotophobia implode sexually and come to view their own sexuality through the eyes of a rigid punitive conscience composed of the adopted harsh, shrill, intrapsychic, hateful, selfdestructive messages antithetical to desire, love, and sex, with no forgiving nuances anywhere to be found to soften the inner blows the conscience rains down on the sexual self.
Sons whose parents humiliated them for normative sexual feelings often go on to develop a fear of masculine sexual activity.
Some Case Examples
A father beat his son and threatened to cut off his funds for school if he did not see a psychiatrist to be cured of being promiscuous, which, according to the father, consisted of his “having more than one girlfriend at a time.” The father’s overall message, “I am ashamed of you for being so sexually preoccupied,” soon became the son’s “I am ashamed of myself and my sexuality.” Next, the son developed a defensive retreat, first into sexual passivity, and then into studied femininity.
As a child, a boy preferred playing with girls. His father, becoming concerned that he would “grow up to be a sissy,” abused him personally by calling him a faggot in order to frighten him straight. Later in
life, the son demeaned himself both for his sexuality and for enjoying almost anything he did, sexual or not. Eventually, the son attempted suicide because “I hate myself so and deserve to die.”
Daughters who grow up with an overly possessive, excessively controlling father may become women with dyspareunia.
A Case Example
A woman’s father repeatedly made the point that he did not want any teenage daughter of his talking to those creeps on the Internet. Then he forbade her to go online at all. Then he declared that she should not date men until she was 30 years old. Then he stopped her from having overnights at houses where there were any men in the household because “who knows what you might do in the way of diddling each other should I leave you alone with them.”
Both parents punished her for “premarital petting” by selling her their house, knowing, but not telling her in advance, that a building project across the way was going to block the ocean view. To rub salt in her wounds, they built a new and better house and gave it to her brother. They also gave him a thriving business they had built up over the years. Almost predictably, their daughter morphed into a selfdestructive, self-hating, remote woman distanced not only from her own family, but also from all potential and actual friends and lovers. She felt too undeserving to enjoy the company of good people and too personally worthless to allow herself to have a great life, especially one that included fulfilling sexual experiences within the context of a happy marriage and big family.
Not surprisingly, early discrete sexual traumata tend to have great lingering inhibitory effects on adult sexuality. In a common scenario, childhood rape or incest experience(s) lead women to view all men as predators, then to detach themselves from adult sexuality because they have come to view all sex, even when consensual, as being forced upon them.
This said, a degree of erotophobia is so common as to be virtually normal. While some is personal due to having introjected negative parental and social messages, some is also innate, part of sexuality’s inherent tendency to elicit guilt in everyone, straight or gay. For reasons not entirely known or explainable, guilt is a universal negative, atti-tudinal mind-set toward having a body and using it sexually, one that makes all sex into something wicked and sinful, unless the sex is between a man and a woman, in the missionary position, in the dark, and strictly for the purpose of procreating—and sometimes even then.
PSYCHODYNAMICS
In contrast to asexuality, which is endogenous, primary, or innate, involving not the presence of conflict, but the absence of discernable desire (and so no determinable conflict), a sexual avoidant’s sexual feelings are there, but suppressed—generally at the behest of a guilty conscience full of shame and embarrassment over having a body and wanting to use it. A belief that sex is sinful develops out of irrational self-criticism for one’s sexual feelings (where rational self-congratulations for being only and fully human are, in fact, indicated). Typically, this guilty conscience is associated with a need for retaliatory masochistic self-torture, which is often additionally externalized to become the sadistic torturing of others, also for their sexuality. Thus a man who hates his own sexuality develops a Madonna complex, where he puts women on a pedestal, while making them feel guilty for being whores, as he makes clear: “You are a woman, and women don’t want sex, or like my mother, may want it but shouldn’t have, and have not actually had it.” (Women put in this nonsensical position often themselves embrace sexual avoidance, hoping that the man will stop debasing and instead start respecting and idolizing them.)