An Anatomy Of Desire

Anyway, no, rarely to do with power/control issues but yes, often to do with a need for reassurance of my attractiveness or a need for acceptance by a man or a group of men. It seems strange to me now that I thought I could gain equality or social/intellectual acceptance by shagging someone - it probably had the opposite result if anything.

That was mostly 'non-relationship' sex though.

I've certainly had sex with people more for their own desire than my own and that doesn't seem illegitimate. It's not as if the cycles of people's sexual desire always sync up exactly and I hate to think of a lover as undersexed. Plus, regardless of how I feel when I start, I always manage to have fun. I am a little wary of the power/control aspect as that tends to sour my rapport with lovers.

One was the ongoing discussion about "noyfriending" -i.e. the semantic games that people play when they have all these terms for degrees of relationships. Which led me to ask, well, what was the point of Noyfriending? Was it purely a method of obtaining sex with varying degrees of strings or lack thereof? Or is it an attempt to divorce desire from emotion?

The other thing was a bit more personal. Talking with friends about the idea of "sexual droughts".

I mean, it's always been my way of thinking, that if you are purely physically horny and you are not in a relationship, that's what masturbation is for. But then again, sometimes it is more than that, the skin hunger, the desire to be held, as much as a genital urge.

But my personal experience is that about 3 months into a stretch of not having sex, and one starts to go a bit crazy. Is that purely hormonal? Or is that the creeping sense of "oh no, I'm never going to have sex/be desired again!" ?

So it's just a bit more complicated than simple physical need. (Then again, is sex an *actual* physical need, like food or shelter? Obviously it's not, though a lot of people seem to treat it as such.)

But then again, I must admit that resorting to (my kind of) pr0n is a cure for boredom for me.

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The need for skin to skin contact is interesting, I know there's been a lot of research about the benefits to babies of immediate skin contact with their mother, but I wonder if anyone has looked into any emotional/physical need we have for it with other adults later in life?

Is sex anything more than fun? Should it be?

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This interests me a great deal.

Because, despite my inherent dislike of being touched, I do often find that I have overwhelming cravings to be touched or hugged. I always kind of wrote it off as this thing of "oh, it's attractive because it's my taboo" but then started reading more things about women who got proper massages because it seemed better for them for obtaining skin contact than having one night stands or whatever, when they realised that the physical contact was what they wanted, not actually the act of sex.

I think it's ok sometimes if it's only fun. Not EVERY time for ever, maybe.

But my experience is, that sex which is purely for fun becomes quite dull and unsatisfying quite quickly. Why is this? Am I actually a repressed Victorian prude who hates fun?

Seemed like the thread to revive. I just finished this review of Srinivasan's The Right to Sex, which has a really nice discussion of queer desires in the middle of it.

https://bostonreview.net/articles/me-too-deja-vu/

Then again, is sex an *actual* physical need, like food or shelter? Obviously it's not, though a lot of people seem to treat it as such.

No one is known to have ever died from a lack of sex, although right now I wish I would.

The notion that men need sexual release or they will break loose in some catastrophic way doesn't seem to have any basis in biology. But it has deep roots in culture, as a way to excuse men being "men," and lingering echoes in the legal system.