![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteeleA Tale of Two Sex Addicts
I know a couple of people who are addicted to sex. One is a woman and one is a man; both are well beyond what is considered their sexual peaks. The woman was raised in a fanatic Christian setting. Her mother was like the non-cartoon, not-quite-as-violent version of the mother of Carrie in Stephen King's novel of the same title. The woman became a nymphomaniac a few years after puberty, catching a venereal disease before having two children, and then having a hysterectomy, yet still going on to compulsively marry over a dozen men, a few of whom she divorced and married again. Her appetite for sex has always been a life-ruining curse. Her Christian upbringing prevented her from doing the logical thing: becoming a highly paid escort. Nowadays, she seems to have gotten her act together and she has stopped her marriage habit.
The other sex addict, the man, was raised in a Catholic in name only, non-churchgoing household. He was a late bloomer who lost his virginity to a woman at eighteen and short time later to a man. He knew himself to be gay from a young age. He felt tormented for his gayness and was depressed for decades over being made fun of for his slightly effeminate bearing in school. Once he felt sufficiently free to do so, he began to compulsively bed different men to the tune of three or four per month. Like in the case of the woman, he ended up with a common venereal disease. For him, the illicit thrill of "getting away with it" has compelled him to cheat while in committed relationships. Unlike her, he still compulsively seeks sex via apps like Tindr -- though I imagine now that he is nowhere near as attractive as he once was, I would not be surprised if he was paying for sex. Sex addictions are the ultimate in diminishing returns.
Satiety
Speaking of diminishing returns, the lust for food is a rough ride. I dated a food addict once, and I was in just about the wrongest of wrong places to be intimately involved with a food addict at that time in my life. Perhaps because I starved to death previously in other lifetimes, I have never been able to sustain a personal addiction to food. I leave chocolate in the cupboard until it gets chalky on the edges. This is not out of willpower; I just don't care enough about it to eat it in the middle of the night. I have never met another woman who does this, including the skinny type of woman who watches her waistline. My food addict boyfriend thought about food all the time. There was never a moment when he wasn't peckish -- I don't think he ever said "I'm too full to eat anything else," not even after a feast.The problem with excessive lust is that it makes you want to go in a thousand directions at once. All of the lusty people mentioned above are exceptionally creative and self-motivated individuals. Their misfortune is to have lust spill over into areas that earn them venereal diseases and hundreds of pounds of adipose tissue. Lust and creativity have the same driving force, I am convinced, and that is why lust is a key to perpetuating the human species.
I was terrified of getting pregnant from age 12 until age 31, when I was sterilized by my request on the operating table while undergoing a routine uterine surgery. Though I knew better as an adolescent, I always had the paranoid suspicion one could somehow get pregnant from a toilet seat. My predicament while young was to want sex with a boy yet to be profoundly disgusted and disappointed by the burden of fear I would have to carry on my shoulders as a result. When you fear getting pregnant as I did, there is no joy in sex and it is impossible to relax.
I learned early on that lust has dire consequences. As a female child of the Professional Managerial Class, it was instilled in me at an early age that certain paths led to surefire ruin. One of those dark avenues was drugs: I came of age in the fried egg, This Is Your Brain on Drugs era, and my superstitious fear of them was almost as ridiculous as my trepidation about toilet seats. I was also told that having a baby before my late twenties or early thirties was life-ruining doom. I was supposed to have a career, you see, and to do that, I had to go to college. I was supposed to have lust in the proper order, for my degree, my career, and then my lawfully-wedded salary class husband. I was supposed to join the ranks of mostly-barren thirty-something women who jacked themselves up on pricey fertility treatments. All so I could have kids graduating college just as I collected my first social security payout...
There Can Be Only One
Lust is a condition of appetites. You want to go down every path because of it, to screw and/or marry every sexual partner, to eat one of each at the buffet and then vomit and do it all again. You want to be Aleister Crowley, gobbling up experiences and shoveling money and your reputation into the roaring fire with abandon. But the path of any single Lust is the Highlander: there can be only one. You can't take every path; this is the predicament of being human. Sleeping with the guy in high school or college (without tons of prophylactics and birth control drugs) means pregnancy and a baby human to whom you must relinquish your freedom. Eating the marijuana brownie means hanging out with the crowd that eventually does heroin, so best to opt out while you still can.From Bad To Worse: Chastity
The absence of Lust is perverse too -- Elmer Milquetoast, who subsists upon the bland pablum of other's castoffs and what is already put in place. As much as I abused by my overeater boyfriend, I would have treated an Elmer Milquetoast far worse. For the life of me, when I was young, I could not empathize at all with a person of diminished appetites. There are plenty of these people: mamma's boys and girls content to shuffle along, collecting the privileges and prizes of life without fighting for them, doing exactly what is expected of them and nothing more. There are also vast classes of people who give up too early: settling for less in love, in work, in the place where they are situated. Nature abhors a vacuum.When people reject their appetites, the result is cowardice. The well of integrity is the same one from which appetites stem. Anorexia is a study in fear of the appetite. The anorexic seeks an excess measure of control because their normal appetite for food scares them. Had I rejected my truth and settled and married my overeater boyfriend, who was an is a very decent guy, I would have done so because I thought I could control what I wanted to want.
The sexually lusty are often drawn to the Catholic priesthood or nunneries because they crave a system of order for their appetites. This is a "from the frying pan into the fire" situation most of the time because it fails to deal with the astral plane conditions that drive desire. Channeling lust in such a direction is one of the reasons priests have such awful reputations for being pederasts and why nuns have reputations for being cruel and mean.
Balance: Enjoyment
I don't think I could have achieved a balance of my lusts as a young person. I narrowly avoided the life-ruining pregnancies and addictions that I feared, and had I been forced to face them by having a baby or becoming addicted to crack, I don't know whether it would have helped or hurt. It is only on the other side of libido and sterilization that I am able to look at my younger years with a critical eye.
Like many in this culture, I rarely enjoyed myself when I was young, despite having a good home, plenty of money, and oodles of entertainment designed to amuse me. I was too preoccupied with either guilt or wanting to get to the next thing to enjoy the moment. That's our culture: when you are doing a thing, always think of the next thing! Progress! And if you have any extra, you'd better hoard it and save it because you wouldn't want anyone else getting in on that action. It's no wonder I was so stunted when it came to normal human stuff like enjoying time with friends or working behind a sales counter. I had no idea how to enjoy any part of my life.
Our materialistic culture insists we must always be the pawns in a push-pull game of denial and indulgence. Financial gurus shame us for buying a latte while commercials goad us into thinking we need to have one in hand in order to be hip. My thoughts are that if you want a latte, just buy one and be done with it; nobody can reasonably be held accountable for every purchase. Poverty's root cause is not the occasional four dollar drink and beating oneself over it is pointless.
Enjoyment is a balance of the way one perceives time. The lusty perceive time as fleeting and scarce, so that's why they have the urge to jam an entire apple pie down their throat in one sitting or to boink the entire football team because they can. The chaste shrink in fear from the idea of having a sliver of pie or kissing the star quarterback despite the fact he asked. The chaste don't suspect time will run out and they wouldn't want to take a risk. They are masters of delaying gratification, and they end up missing the opportunity for it altogether. Balance takes into account the moment as ephemeral. Kissing the quarterback behind the bleachers may not be the wisest idea, and the piece of pie might cause a couple pounds on the thighs, but since some moments only happen once, you go for it, damn the consequences.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-03 07:46 am (UTC)You've got me giggling.
That chocolate. It must come from my collection. I have a bag of chocolates, biscuits, and other naughty foods from my last trip or(and!) two back home overseas, well before the thingademic started. In the same condition as you state. Yes, I can look at it/them, and pine over the tastiness of something I haven't eaten since my 20s or earlier, sitting right there in the bag, and not touch it. Actually now I know it is no good to eat anymore so I don't dare eat it. Ahh, all that effort to acquire it, yeah, regret, no only a little, but a big waste of time (money too). Waiting for garbage day, I'll forget or just not throw out.
I'm giggling again about it.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-03 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-03 09:58 am (UTC)Lust affects my life in the following main areas: sex, food, pornography addiction and sadomasochism. I have managed to keep my life under control in the area of relationships, in that I am in one committed relationship and haven't fallen to infidelity. On the positive side, this has avoided the venerial disease pitfall. On the negative side, I have only succeeded in doing so by making up the difference in food and porn addictions. My sex life is strong, but does not keep up with my appetites due firstly to a gap with my partner's sex drive, and secondly due to the physical pressures of aging. real life BDSM is a useful outlet.
Lust for food keeps my waistline at least 10kg over what it should be, even in the periods I have been disciplined on health and fitness. It makes health and fitness a constant struggle, as gains are made in the kitchen moreso than the gym. I eat much quicker than I should, as if the food will be snatched away from me.
Pornography addiction is the most obvious problem. On the one hand it does keep me from acting out IRL, but on the other hand, I can't seem to stop. I've had multiple attempts at nofap, and 40 days is my high score. I was introduced to it at age 11 at school, and have almost 25 years of pornography experience now. The worst aspect of this is the twisting of sexual orientation; the effect is much stronger when it veers towards the grotesque, and going against your natural sexual orientation brings this aspect very effectively. Initally. Until the tolerance sets in. Before I was in my committed relationship, I explored the possibility that I was gay; turns out I am not, and it wasn't sight or touch that reminded me of that - it was smell. the wrongness and disgust was overwhelming. Thank all the gods I didn't go any further down that path. Note to others with the same problem: hit the gym, the smell will save you. (if it doesn't, the answer is yes you are gay.)
Sadism was not a factor I had considered, but the issue was proven to me while training to work in security. In a workshop environment, we were being taught and were practicing submission and pain compliance techniques, by a ex military instructor. I had impressed the instructor by choosing the largest, tallest and most muscular opponent, and submitting him gave me an orgasmic rush of power. Adding the pain compliance techniques gave me an empathic feedback which was overwhelming - I could feel what he felt, which in the moment consummated the rush of power and multiplied it. Apparently I was a very intimidating visage with the big grin on my face while I was doing that, and I leant in and took it as far as I felt I could get away with, and repeated the experience to a slightly lesser degree with other training partners. (The tables were turned when we all swapped positions, so I got to feel what it was like on the other side of that too. It was the real deal.) On reflecting on the experience (which I adored) I decided that I would not take a job where I would be guarding prisoners, as that was and is not a part of myself that I wish to feed. But now I always know that its there, waiting.
* hic sunt dracones
no subject
Date: 2021-02-03 05:48 pm (UTC)Men do go through a male equivalent of menopause (manopause, chuckle snort) so I wonder what will happen to you when you go through it?
When I was a kid, I used to be in karate. Even though I was tiny and had my butt handed to me in tournaments (I never got good at evasive karate), I was unbeatable when it came to this weird game we had called grappling. Grappling involved crawling about on our knees. The goal was to pin the opponent down and strangle them until they tapped the ground, the karate equivalent of saying Uncle. Obviously this sort of thing would NEVER fly in a modern karate studio; I can hardly believe the things they used to make us do! Of course this was in the 80s. I loved strangling other kids. I always played fair and if they tapped the ground, I immediately ceased, however, if it had been allowed, I would have gladly choked another kid to death. At age ten. I quit karate not long after my second tournament to do more girly things, and it was probably for the best. Karate served to indulge my appetite for rage more than my self-preservation to maintain self-defense.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-04 02:15 am (UTC)The Universe Loves Absurdity
Date: 2021-02-03 01:20 pm (UTC)I've always found it strange that sex as a teenager was only ever penetrative intercourse. The easy and obvious solution is that hand jobs and blow jobs are awesome. I knew Southern Baptist girls who had full-on anal with boys in high school and considered that okay with Jesus.
The management of lusts also ties in with the management of limits, which is surely one of the challenges we are meant to face in the human stage of evolution. Those born with disabilities are well aware of their body's limits, but able-bodied people have to figure it out. I myself wish I hadn't been allowed to play high-contact sports as a child. All of the adults around me knew that I'd be in pain later in life because of it, but nothing they said got through to me. That's a lesson I'm really learning the hard way!
Re: The Universe Loves Absurdity
Date: 2021-02-03 05:57 pm (UTC)It's so sad that anyone thinks Jesus cares about teens having sex! The Jesus they are dealing with is definitely not the same one I encountered after putting in some serious religious study. I can't speak for everyone, but anal sex doesn't seem to do much if you don't have a prostate. It's a sorry substitute.
Yes, you nailed it, I think our messed up relationship with lust is part and parcel with our rejection of limits. My brother has messed up knees because of the sports he played as a boy; sadly that's a common predicament.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-04 02:01 pm (UTC)"When you fear getting pregnant as I did, there is no joy in sex and it is impossible to relax... I learned early on that lust has dire consequences... it was instilled in me at an early age that certain paths led to surefire ruin."
My experience was from the other side of the colonial wealth-pump, in a working class town sliding down into poverty, drugs, and despair. There were plenty of examples of girls having babies in high school and lives being ruined by drugs (which is even worse these days, with the opioid epidemic). The sentiment was - if you have sex, you will get pregnant, and you will never get out of here. It took me a very long time to let go of those inhibitions and when I did have sex for the first time (much, much later), there was tremendous sense of guilt after the fact. Our approach is as messed up, in its own way, as the Victorian one, no matter on which side of the lust/chastity binary it falls.
"I was too preoccupied with either guilt or wanting to get to the next thing to enjoy the moment. That's our culture: when you are doing a thing, always think of the next thing! Progress!" This is what I am working on now. I accomplish something but it's forgotten within seconds because I need to move on to the next thing, or feel guilt about what I neglected in order to accomplish it. There's a sense that we need to DO rather than BE, and if we aren't actively DOING, then we should feel guilty about it.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-04 04:34 pm (UTC)People nowadays are oddly prudish. Masks and social distancing never could have taken off without neo-prudery. There is a deep fear of physical intimacy of any sort riding the subconscious waves of the masses.
"There's a sense that we need to DO rather than BE" Right now, I am feeling that. I have to go to work in a couple of hours, so I know I have to cram in a bunch of items on my to-do list before I leave the house. It's winter here, plummeting to zero degrees Fahrenheit tonight. We should all be hibernating; that's what a sensible animal would do. If I cancel my day, I will start the short process of losing everything I own, including a place to live. Imagine the pressure on somebody with a salary class job who has kids. My job is both portable and protected: it is a rare individual who can even come close to doing what I do as a singing, multi-instrumental music teacher/arranger. I also have the advantage of Stoicism -- if I lose my creature comforts, I'll deal with it. The salary class parent whose highly specialized job is a game of dwindling musical chairs with a huge mortgage who has dependents used to a certain lifestyle is in big trouble. The second they truly relax, it is OVER.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-08 02:09 pm (UTC)"English is a language with few words that speak directly to that dimension of human experience called being, which can be simply defined as what one can assimilate and bear. The 'world' in which we contemporary people live is kaleidoscopic, fragmented, the product of fluctuating states. We are encouraged to take things as they come, to cultivate a degree of existential panache in the face of future shock. We think of contemporary life as somehow at the cutting edge of an as yet unrealized future, and we live life accordingly: cutting through, sloughing off, being razor-sharp, traveling light."
no subject
Date: 2021-02-07 01:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-08 07:15 am (UTC)If Gwyneth Paltrow was abducted by aliens, never to be seen again, this would be a relief. I'd feel sorry for her kids though... hell, with a mother like that, I feel sorry for them now!