So I don’t think it’s any secret that different parts of my body tend to have a mind of their own. And Lord knows my libido is a strange beast. What turns me on for real and what turns me on in my head are two (or twelve or two hundred) radically different things. And sometimes I see ‘sexy’ in my imaginings in ways that would make Sexy blush.
But normally I do not think about sexy things — or sexual things — in completely inappropriate contexts.
That is, I didn’t.
Until recently.
Like, normally I can carry on a conversation with a colleague and not be in any way tempted to think about that person in a sexual light. For one thing, my colleagues are NOT sexy. And for another, I’m just not ‘doing’ sex/y these days.
But lately, I will be in the middle of something completely unrelated to the body — unless perhaps you consider ‘eating’ to be eligible as ‘related to the body’, because sometimes these thoughts come when I am eating lunch — and POOF!, in pops a random sex thought.
To be clear: I am not *interested* in anyone sexually. I am just prone to clinical-ish mental meanderings into the tangled trip-root forest paths of sex and sexuality.
Case in point —
There is a woman I work with — by which, I mean we are in the same building, we share concerns about the same kiddos, we exchange pleasantries, and we occasionally have ed-psych type conversations — who I would describe as athletic in build and who has a social-emotional focus/drive. She is attractive enough, I guess, but I am not in any way attracted to her. Her voice is Middle School Math Teacher and her fashion sense is 1985. And one day while we were discussing a very cool visual reference I found that depicted autism in a graduated circular fashion…
I thought, “I bet this woman is absolutely frigid in bed.”
Followed by, “But I also bet she dresses in hot lingerie and high heels and makes her partner suffer with her coldness.”
And then we continued on with our conversation while I waited for my subconscious to become un-stunned by that strange set of stray thoughts.
Another example —
Someone else I work with — tall, Nordic, very fit, bicyclist, Millenial dad, patient as Job with highly escalated students, slightly spectrum-y, nothing-sticks-to-him kind of take-it-easy guy — and who I talk to regularly, usually during my lunch, was talking to me about his wife. And while I was smiling and nodding and making appropriate replies, I thought…
“I bet his favorite thing to do when he gets home is to get her naked and give her a massage.”
And…
WTF?!?
Seriously. What. The. FUCK.
These are not items in isolation. There are others.
- I looked at the long lean body of a slightly balding client about a month ago and said to myself, “He looks a bit frumpy in clothes but I bet he’s glorious naked.”
- The new gal who is my team two days a week is probably older than me and quite likely has been married just as long or much longer than I have, and I’m like… “I can’t make out whether she is getting laid all the time or if that’s just a natural glow.”
- A person I have worked with for many years off and on, and who is really good at What We Do For A Living caused me to think, “What gloriously long fingers she has… I bet she’s really good with them!” (And I meant ‘good with her fingers’ in a finger-ing kind of way.)
And…
I just don’t get it.
None of this is sexy to me. Nothing about any of it turns me on in any way.
These thoughts are, for lack of a better descriptor, clinical.
I have them fleetingly and in a coldly-examining kind of way.
But just the fact that I have them at all…
: bewildered shrug :
I do it, too. I’m sure it probably means something…
Freud would have a field day. 😉
I think you’ve described my routine workday. It isn’t about me being all horny or wanting to turn a conversation into sex but my random thoughts do drift toward sexual things. I’ve learned to move my thoughts quickly from, “I bet his wife appreciates that big penis” to “I bet he could solve a problem we are having” and “I wonder if that mark on her arm is from being tied up” to “I bet she could solve a problem we are having.”
I still have sexual thoughts all the time, but I just don’t act on them they way I may have a decade ago. The other thing I would have done is make comments about those thoughts. As the work environment has changed so significantly in the last several years, tamping it down has been aided by my loss of sex drive.
JFBreak recently posted…Catch Me If You Can…
It’s good to know others can relate.
For me, the fact that this is happening concurrently with my own loss of libido is one of the things that puzzles me. Because when my body was “on” my thoughts did not meander in these directions.
I think it’s part of a kind of comparative rationalization that probably has its roots in your own current state. That’s why I believe they are all so clinical, and some even unflattering. It’s like sex is on your mind by way of absence, so sex thoughts pop in, but the ones that do support or maybe even justify your disinterest. It’s like you’re subconsciously processing your situation in a way that feels safely disconnected. How different would it be to have some of those same thoughts and be even slightly titillated by them?
I’m no psychologist, but I have lived my life with my eyes and ears open, I mentioned the last time that I think what you have going on is more complicated than just premenopausal disinterest, and that the disinterest doesn’t seem to want to be disinteresting. And because I’ve come to see you as quite an intelligent, creative, and imaginative person, those creative attributes which would have once manifested sexually for you in terms of spontaneous games and adventures, are finding other ways out. (It’s like a sexual take on ‘Dr. Malcom’s’ “Life finds a way.”) Anything that is a big part of human nature that ends up repressed for whatever reason is like that proverbial ‘bubble’ that won’t stay down…… and sex, for all our insistence on its relative unimportance, is one of those forces. (You can take another movie reference and think of sex as Glenn Close’s character in ‘Fatal Attraction’…….”I will not be ignored, Jack!”) 😉
Of course, I could just be full of shit or projecting my own thoughts???? 😉
I think that makes a lot of sense. I appreciate your insight. Thank you.