How to Stop Thinking About Sex All the Time

on processing my relationship with sex, violence, and desire

This morning, I woke up thinking about sex. Not beautiful sex. I had a horrible dream about being raped by a family member. And I can’t get it out of my head.

I was diagnosed with anxiety when I was very young and have, as I have gotten older, developed a tendency towards obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors. Most of my obsessive thoughts are about acting out extreme violence; as a child I had reoccurring anxiety attacks over the thought that I might stab my dog with a bread knife. I would stand there shaking and crying in the kitchen while my dog stared up at me and the thought of the knife in my hand plunging into his chest loomed above me. Other than extreme intrusive thoughts of violence, such as killing my dog or murdering my loved ones, I also have, as my therapist puts it, “obsessive sexual thoughts and hypersexual thrill-seeking behaviors”.

I do have obsessive sexual thoughts and hypersexual thrill-seeking behaviors. I would say that is a fairly astute observation about me. I have always felt that my sexual curiosity came on at a uniquely young age, perhaps I was five or six the first time I imagined myself having sex with someone. That feels humiliating to me to admit. I masturbated for the first time when I was maybe ten or eleven and it was around this age that I was experiencing sexual violence for the first time. It became a complete addiction from that point on. I was obsessed with understanding how to make my body feel good and attempting to separate and understand sexual pleasure from violation. I dove deeply into the world of internet porn, laying on my purple and pink bed spread with my iPad open to women getting tied up and fucked violently, women fucking each other, men fucking each other, men fucking women like they owned them. My sexuality developed at a time in my life where I was vulnerable and being harmed. I guess that is why it became such an obsessive thing for me.

I love having sex, don’t get me wrong. I talk about sex constantly; I have no shame in sharing what I like and what I don’t like (which isn’t much). I lack an understanding of sexual privacy and what is and isn’t appropriate to share with other people. I struggle to relate to my body as an individual, autonomous, sexual being rather than an object that I have little connection to. I feel pleasure when I have sex, I feel pleasure in my body and in my brain, but a lot of the pleasure I feel is perhaps derived from being used by my sexual partner for their own gratification. Whether I’m being fucked or the one doing the fucking, I am a vessel for pleasure for my partner. When I was having lesbian sex, I think that is why I was often drawn towards topping. It was an easy way for me to focus on the other person, dial in solely on making them feel pleasure. Even when I was getting fucked by lesbian partners, it was because they enjoyed the feeling of wearing a strap and doing the fucking. It was rarely ever because I wanted explicitly to be fucked. Even when the words “please fuck me” would fall out of my mouth, I did it because I knew it was something they wanted to hear. Who doesn’t want to hear that? I liked hearing it because I knew that I was going to be used for my sexual purpose, to get the other person off.

My boyfriend recently said, sort of offhandedly, that it seems like everything I’m into, sexually, is about “being taken advantage of”. I laughed and brushed this comment off, saying that we didn’t need to dig that deep into it. But fuck. It was like someone just slammed the door open to my insides and pointed all the rotten parts out. I know I like the feeling of being taken advantage of, but I like it when I’m telling my partner to do it. It is a complex reclamation of the complex violations I’ve experienced and my complex emotions towards sex itself. I want to be held down, tied up, thrown around, spit on, slapped, choked, because it makes me feel safe in a weird disgusting fucked up sort of way. I would let someone I loved do or try anything on me if it made them happy, because satisfying someone else is the driving desire of all sexual acts I participate in. In satiating my partners appetite, I am satiating my own. My appetite is that of being used.

It doesn’t have to be a bad thing to desire being used, at least I don’t interpret it as such for myself. It hasn’t changed the fact that I deeply enjoy having sex. I have a ridiculously high, often inconvenient, libido. The testosterone has only made it worse. I think about sex all the time, and I wonder how healthy that is sometimes. Sex is such an important part of how I feel connected to romantic partners, what I enjoy talking about, what I find myself daydreaming about.

But sometimes these connections, these talks, these daydreams, turn sour. I have many times been filled with a complete sense of dread and disgust towards myself after sex. Laying there, staring at the ceiling, the bed covered in bodies, the room filled with the smell of sex, thinking about how utterly worthless and disgusting I am. I know that this is an easily explained reaction to the steep come down of hormones post-coital. Logically I know that. Emotionally, I don’t know anything. Emotionally I find myself recoiling in the presence of my own pleasure, praying that my lover will just leave me alone or tell me they love me, and that I am everything they could ever want. I can’t decide whether I want the things I think about myself to be articulated back to me or decimated with reassurance. No one wants to be the needy freak who is asking to be told how much they are loved directly after asking to have their hair pulled and be called a disgusting slut.

These dynamics that exist inside of me are in constant battle with one another. Can I will myself to be vulnerable enough to let sex be about me? Is it possible that I could focus on what pleasure actually feels like for me, in my body, separate from it pleasing someone else? Or is there simply nothing wrong with the way I think about sex? I mean, does it have to mean something bad for me to want to be used? I like being used. I like feeling like I am making someone else happy by being a body for them to fuck and suck, a voice to moan their name, a person to feel desire towards. That makes me happy. I don’t feel like I am missing out on anything because I am not drawn to passionate vulnerable sex.

When I have soft, slow, loving sex, I feel overwhelmed with incongruent emotions of embarrassment afterwards. And often before too. I am terrified of feeling rejected or unwanted, so I simply can’t get the words out to express what I want. I want to be loved, but I struggle to enjoy being shown that love when I’m having sex. I feel uncomfortable knowing that desire could be a gentle wanting, a kind wanting. In the earliest periods of desire developing in my brain, I was only shown that someone's desire for me would be violent, a violation of my personhood; desiring me was desiring something to be used for personal pleasure. I have definitely internalized that in a pretty fucked up way.

I don’t know how to stop thinking about sex all the time. I fantasize about the next time I will be fucked constantly. And I fantasize about degradation and desperation. Degradation of my body, desperation to be told that I am good while it’s happening. When I’m confronted with that, I don’t know how to address it. I know that I think about sex in the wrong way, that it is a-typical of most people’s experiences. I feel like I’ll never want to have normal sex, whatever normal sex is. Perhaps that’s okay. It’s my own way of dealing with the sexually obsessive intrusive thoughts, coping with the sexual violence I experienced as a child, sifting through my understanding of want. But part of me always wonders if I could teach myself, train myself, unlearn that trauma, and figure out how to let myself be vulnerable. Can I be more than hands, a mouth, and a pussy? Am I capable of bringing my whole self to the bedroom, letting go of what holds me back, leaning into complete and total openness, prioritizing what feels good for me?

I should try. Maybe it’ll be the best sex of my life. Then I’ll turn into some vanilla normie and never think about getting hog tied and bitch slapped again. Probably not, that’s far too much fun to give up.

This is a vulnerable one. Thank you for reading <3