"any time i'm feeling good about myself or things, along comes a reminder of my physical presence."

I am very much alone, lately, in that respect. So it's very high up in my thoughts.

also, nerve endings serve other distinct purposes. like letting you know fire is bad for you.

a cool breeze on your skin or the feeling of warm water is not a sexual pleasure, by and large

Nickalicious otm. I am fairly confident of my own sex appeal, but it can be a bit of a downer to be walking along all happy on a sunny day and then have a huge gang of children fall down laughing at you. (I am very very tall and this happens. Fucking Baltimore. Nobody got no class.)

I have tried and tried
and tried and tried and tried and
tried and tried. No dice.

I don't know about "higher insight" exactly, but I can understand how not devoting so much mental time/energy to these ends could open your thought-processes & awareness in previously-ignored areas of life. It's the same with anything one would worry/obsess over in that regard, though.

At least you know the difference, Horace. Sometimes figuring that out can be hard.

I've never really worried about my physical presence/appearance, even when I found out it was pleasing to others. As long as I earned others' respect, THAT was important.

yeah but not all to the same degree.

How many people do you see every day who you'd like to sleep with?

Sure it is. You accept that now, but only because you are more mature to understand the value of self-worth. What young male thinks that far with his first brain, instead of his second?

x-post. i dislike the act. because i am a neurotic middle-class white male and it's been drummed into me that it's supposed to be something its not (whatever that something happens to be, for you.) which it never, ever is. the "good sex" i have is rare, mostly because i feel like it comes out of some realization of that something-it's-not. which is obviously fucked up, but is the conundrum i have learned to live with.

and yes, obviously, i do. but really that can come as no surprise.

i think there are limits to how enlightened anyone can be on this, a la our greek monk unchained...i don't even think that's a good option, celibacy seems like a permanent stalemate instead of a solution.

the 'evidence' supporting the evolutionary blah blah of beauty is pretty compelling (basically that It Matters, Cruelly), but beyond that i don't think science or conscience supports our current Maxim-ized culture, where sex is ever more present and public but the idea of participating in it for living people is more and more remote.

as far as 'what could i be thinking about if i wasn't thinking about (my) sex(ual self)' i really have no idea; my brain is pretty well entrenched in this area... tho to pick on monks some more i don't think history or current events give much credit to their approach.

Killing people. Generally. Crashing cars, exploding bombs, that kind of shit. And music. And football. Scoring goals. New shoes. All of which come back to facilitating me having more sex.

Which reminds me. Betjeman, on a hillside, in his wheelchair, being interviewed just before he died;

Interviewer; Sir John, do you regret anything?

Betjeman; Yes. I wish I'd had more sex.

well okay, I'm not sure what's "healthy" per se but I know for sure that the amount that you (meaning you, jess, not a general you) obsess over your supposedly horrid looks is super-unhealthy. How do I know? Well I've been there too, I can empathize. But after meeting you, I mean, jeez, you're not a bad looking dude at all! The idea that you'll "never have sex again" (woe is you!) is laughable. You remind me a lot of my friend Drew that way, who was so obsessed with how ugly he thought he was that it took him a long time to realize that girls really really liked him.

"i think we define too much of our lives around whether or not we are, and who we are or could be or are not, fucking. which is what all this worrying-about-appearance stuff whittles down to in the end, after the age of 14 anyway."

is this true?

This presupposes a collective "we", and thus I have to say "no". For you/someone else personally, the answer might be "yes".

is it necessarily a bad thing, even if it is?

Inasmuch as defining the quality of one's life by only one criteria, yes this is definitely a bad thing.

does divorcing yourself from worrying about sex and your physical attractiveness to other humans allow you into some higher insight, like a monk or ray milland in "the man with the x-ray eyes"?

Inasmuch as divorcing oneself from any unhealthy obsession can help shed insight on one's own life, yes.

(Also, I think the link of personality to sex drive/sexual attraction isn't something that should be ignored in this discussion as the way someone behaves does affect how attractive they are to others.)

(Sometimes I can't tell if I'm going off on some tangent or not - I blame all the psychedelics.)

You can dispassionately look at relationships and dismiss them all as unfair power struggles right up until the day you meet someone who slots into your life, filling in all of the blanks you didn't know you had, at which point who cares about unfair power struggles?

Dan if it helps you
I'll step up and underrate
your intelligence!

"Perry can't be smart,
nature handicapped his ass:
Cure fan? MUST be dumb"

then people react against you, and you can cite the iron rules of physical-sexual attraction as having been against you from the start - "why should i bother being interested in people, i'm ugly what's the point etc etc"

obsessing that it's yr physical presence which is playing the main role in everything = deciding not to bother doing anything about the stuff which is ACTUALLY playing the main role viz yr behaviour towards people

the thing that gives you "higher" insight into other people and what they want and who they are is being interested in them and asking and finding out, or at least observing: if you let your worries abt yr fuckability stop you bothering being interested in other people then yes, i think this greatly hampers yr insight

everyone behaves like a dick sometimes: this is not their "true essence", it's behaving like a dick sometimes

i think thinking abt yr worth to others is no bad thing, but a. don't assume it just boils down to fuckability cz it totally doesn't, b. you're probably overlooking all kinds of stuff abt yourself that comes easy to you and you therefore take for granted, the stuff THEY value which you DON'T (and they're probably RIGHT and you're probably WRONG)

it's silly to pretend that ppl aren't sexual, but it's just as silly to convince yrself that the sexual lens is the only undeluded lens - don't trust undeludedness!!

think thinking abt yr worth to others is no bad thing, but a. don't assume it just boils down to fuckability cz it totally doesn't, b. you're probably overlooking all kinds of stuff abt yourself that comes easy to you and you therefore take for granted, the stuff THEY value which you DON'T (and they're probably RIGHT and you're probably WRONG)

Right vs. wrong is such a subjective term, you could spend centuries in arguments discussing it. Thankfully, fuckability doesn't truly matter in the larger scheme of things. It should matter more about what you can contribute to the world, in the relatively short amount of time you've got.

Jess, I too have become guilty of disappearing on tangents. Sorry, sir.

"Are" does not equal "could be." The POTENTIAL fucking thing is way more central to the your-life-revolves-around-it ego thing than whatever KINETIC fucking is actually going on. Way more. Way way way way more. And ta-da, potential fucking is all in your mind! Have a fucking ball! I know I do.

Jess, I don't give one crap if you hate me or not, because I'm going to be doing some spilling on a thread of yours and I won't be held back, plus it's something that is partially in response to another thread so yay for irritations galore.

I spent the first eighteen years of my life not letting people get to know the inner me. I was all about surface and pretty pictures and small talk. All this left me was a nervous breakdown and friendships built on shaky ground. Now I realize that people are going to pick on me no matter what I do. I'd rather have a few deep friendships and a sense that those few people know who I am inside.

As for the original topic -- yes, I can and do relate completely to looking in the mirror and hating what one sees. I've never been happy with my phsyical appearance. In fact, whenever I experience those moments in which I feel good about myself, it's because I'm secure about my inner self. I still will look at my reflection in the mirror and think how horrendous I look. And no, it doesn't have anything to do with wanting "more sex" in my life -- though "any sex" would automatically = "more sex" in my case -- because I have pretty much given up on experiencing that part of life. No, I think it's rather a case of someone of the opposite gender taking a look at me and *gasp* actually being interested. And all the advice and "wise words to ponder" aren't going to do jack unless I seek professional advice in re: this issue, because this is all part of something that is so much bigger than you or me.

And maybe that's what you need.

but what i always worry about is that i'm too intellectualetc. to just cut loose and have a good time. or rather, that i do have a good time in intense discussions about x,y,z but that it makes it hard for others who i would like to relate to to relate back to me. like the idea of small-talk is completely alien to me, tho i do a great job at it when i feel i'm doing it for a purpose. but to just... do it... as a nice thing to do... i always feel horrible and tawdry and manipulative. okay. not really. but sometimes. its like if i don't get a certain engagement out of a conversation i drift off.

sometimes i feel jerky because of that too, the drifting off thing.

For the purpose of the argument I am going to take Tracer's post here at face value -- apologies if it is more tongue in cheek. Maybe there is fundamental male-female divide here -- forgive the generalization. I think many woman have the feeling that they could "fuck" just about anyone -- so it's not something that they would necessarily fantasize over. Gareth (I mean Charlton) alludes that having someone finding you attractive makes you feel better about yourself. While this is true, it can also get in the way. There could be someone who you just want to be friends with, but they are ruining things by doing silly things to show you that they find you -- I don't known -- "fuckable"?

lauren is way too fucking hard on herself. stop that.

and lemme say that the worst situation to generate the types of thoughts jess mentions to start is within an actual relationship. a relationship that turns essentially platonic and it certainly makes you question yr own self-worth as a sexual object, an attractive person (and not just in the physical sense) and really yr whole sense of self overall. i've had this happen before (as i'm sure most everyone has), and really the only way to get yr head around it is to convince yrself that you don't care at all about sex or human contact or any of that shit, which takes some practice but is absolutely possible!

Y3 OTM. (I love the way this thread is turning into a love fest.)

Speaking from 10 intensive years on the subject, I think you have this backwards. Or at the least, it's a self-fullfilling prophecy.

Its the whole thing of trying to build rapport with someone that is a problem and the more I want it to happen then the more difficult it would prob be.

i sometimes worry that i am the sort of person of whom mary complains, albeit in a slightly less shrill register.