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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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It's as good a place to start as any. I was born small and helpless, able to cry, able to smile, able to giggle. I could sleep, wake, poop, pee and eat. I'm told my eyes focussed on things and I paid attention. In other words I was a normal baby.
What I was not was heterosexual, nor was I "anysexual". I was simply a little growing and learning machine. I did the usual maternal imprinting thing and was able to recognise my mother and presumably my father.
I became body aware at around four years old as far as my memory says, and that was because I was alwasy being told, like all little boys, "Don't play with yourself". I continued to play with myself.
I wasn't particularly aware of other people and their bodies until I was seven and we had to change for games at school. I was not homosexual nor heterosexual at this point. I was a curious kid who just wanted to see.
As we all developed I learnt about sex. It was interesting, the more so because it was taboo. I was very interested in girls and had immature fantasies about them based on a total lack of knowledge. Was I heterosexual at this point? I knew very few girls and had played doctors and nurses with none of them.
From about the age of ten onwards we all talked about sex and willies and how to masturbate, and whether it was right that a stiff willy pointed upwards or straight out or wherever. And we talked about girls and what we would do to them. Not with. To. But was this heterosexuality? If so, what made me heterosexual?
The point to this? I think simply that, until puberty, any sexuality is probably a learned response, potentially to peer group kids also learningthe response. I suspect that puberty switches on the things we were born with, but not "born as".
We are all born with latent sexuality, but we are not born as sexual beings. We grow, test, explore, even practice. But at puberty the whole thing switches on and we get what we were given in the first place.
Some will say "I knew I was gay at the age of 6", and they probably are right. I can rationalise my homosexuality back to an early age, but I was not concious of it. They may be 100% correct or they may be rationalising, too. Or a bit of puberty chemicals, just enough, may have leaked out early and they got to open the puberty present early.
I do know this, though
I learnt to be heterosexual. It was a received behaviour. I never learnt to be homosexual. That was a behaviour I did not want.
[Updated on: Thu, 11 January 2007 23:52]
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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I was never taught to be homosexual. I was never taught to be straight, either. I was completely asexual until I was 11 or 12. I never talked about sex to my peers. I never played 'doctors and nurses'. I learnt about sex in biology lessons, but that was pretty boring and clinical. I had no conception of sex because I had never masturbated and never did until I was 22.
However, at the age of 11 or 12, I remember looking at other boys and finding their bodies interesting. I suppose the earliest memory of this was in the shower, but it happened outside as well. It never happened with girls, even though there were girls at my school. (I never saw into the girls' showers, either.) I objected to it. I remember trying to rationalise myself straight. (While watching a movie, my internal monologue: "This girl's quite good-looking, isn't she?" Then a boy would walk in and the girl would get the boy, and I would suddenly find myself feeling jealous of her.) I did that quite a lot. I knew it was wrong to be gay, but I also found that it was quite exciting thinking thoughts that were 'wrong'.
Something I'm very aware of is my tendency towards obsessiveness. I've mentioned before that I had OCD. The way OCD works is that you think a thought, and it's not a useful thought -- sometimes it's a downright horrible thought -- so you try and forget that thought; but by trying to forget it you remember it, and the harder you try to forget it the more you find yourself thinking it, or, even worse, thinking about what else could be affected by it, and before long (if you don't find a strategy for dealing with it) you can't think of anything else and you've dissolved into a gibbering wreck. That's an obsession. The compulsions are the strategies you use to try and get rid of it, which in my case usually centred around washing. If you're worried that your hand is dirty, and you wash it, then the feeling of panic goes away because you can successfully rationalise that the dirt is not there any more.
Anyway, the reason I mention that is that I'm not altogether convinced that a similar process did not take place with my sexuality. I am not a psychologist, and I have no idea whether this happened for anyone else, but I *do* remember thinking, when, for example, watching other people in the showers out of -- at the time -- mere curiosity, "I shouldn't be thinking this. I shouldn't be thinking this." The same occurred slightly later, when I found myself finding other people attractive. (It still happens today.) I would think, "It's not appropriate for me to feel this way." And I would remember how I felt afterwards. I never tried to beat it out of myself, but I've never felt absolutely happy about it.
I'm afraid to say that, though the OCD bothers me much less than it did when I was 16, I am still somewhat funny about hygiene. In other words, it's left a permanent mark on the way I behave. My 'gay thoughts' never turned into a full-blown obsession (thank God!) and certainly not into compulsions (a compulsion in other people might have been to masturbate, but that practice was not open to me, nor did I need it) but it seems reasonable to assume that, since I've been thinking of the subject from time to time for ten or eleven years now, and especially during the crucial time of puberty, some of it has 'rubbed off' and imprinted itself upon me -- something that would never had happened had I not found myself thinking those thoughts then.
Is that what sexuality is? If I weren't obsessional would I still have become gay, or is the link a spurious one? Could I have obsessed about girls' bodies instead? In that case, would it have made me straight? Did anyone else have a similar thought process at the point they became aware of their sexuality, or am I exceptional?
I don't know the answers to any of these questions, but I do wonder about them sometimes.
Another rather personal but slightly off-topic question is, "Did my OCD come about out of sexual frustration as well as or instead of the most obvious reason (extreme work-related stress)?" (I had no boyfriend, girlfriend or person to talk to about my sexuality, and I couldn't masturbate either.) Because it's such a personal one, and my own brain so mystifying to me, I doubt it will ever be answered.
David
[Updated on: Fri, 12 January 2007 00:57] |
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That's an interesting way of putting it.
Personally, and given the choice, I'd rather have remained asexual. Then I wouldn't have any idea what I was losing out on.
This "sexual pleasure" thing is all well and good, but I've done without it so long I know I don't really need it.
David
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Deeej wrote:
> That's an interesting way of putting it.
>
> Personally, and given the choice, I'd rather have remained asexual. Then I wouldn't have any idea what I was losing out on.
>
It's funny how we long for the things that we never had a chance to have! Personally, I think I'd've benefited from a chance to learn about my own body and my own sexual reactions by myself, rather than discovering orgasms in the middle of a rather intense (on my side, anyway) love affair.
> This "sexual pleasure" thing is all well and good, but I've done without it so long I know I don't really need it.
Of course no-one needs it, but it can be life-enhancing ... and when you meet the right person your experience in generating your own sexual pleasure will be invaluable in helping you feel confident in understanding how to do a great job of giving him sexual pleasure. And, if he's truly the right person, that will be important to you.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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Each of us can partake of "sexual pleasure" to what ever extent we desire. We do not have to pursue it.
Sometimes it pops up and pursues us.
Gary
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Yeah Timmy I can agree with you. I can't remember a time when I was suddenly aware that I was gay.
I remember though that I did find myself looking at a boy's crotch a lot to try to guess what his looked like. I remember getting jeans like the boy I liked and that I wanted ones that would tend to show something in the crotch. It was a time (unfortunately) when boys didnt wear shorts hardly at all with the exception of gym class. I would take that opportunity to try to look up the legs of some of my classmates; sometimes with a degree of success. I was never called on this by my classmates that I can remember, so I guess I must have been pretty good at it.
I remember that my sexual interests were towards guys and not girls and mostly because there was less anxiety for me to deal with guys than there was with dealing with girls. For one thing, I would seem to be teased about being around a girl or having a girl friend. To this day, when I see some younger boy get teased about getting a girl friend, I get angry about it and say something.
Although I dont know exactly what thing made me lean towards liking boys, I just dont think it was something I was born with, but that is only me. Others are convinced somehow that they were and I guess there is just not any point to argue it. No matter how, here we are.
Ken
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I learnt to be heterosexual. It was a received behaviour. I never learnt to be homosexual. That was a behaviour I did not want.
Thanks, Timmy, for your simple and straightforward way of saying it.
Some of us learnt to be heterosexual, because it was what we had to do. It was not a matter of discussion, and there was no one to discuss it with.
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Hi NW,
I said,
>Personally, and given the choice, I'd rather have remained asexual. Then I wouldn't have any idea what I was losing out on.
You said,
>It's funny how we long for the things that we never had a chance to have! Personally, I think I'd've benefited from a chance to learn about my own body and my own sexual reactions by myself, rather than discovering orgasms in the middle of a rather intense (on my side, anyway) love affair.
In my case, I suppose that I've convinced myself that neither option -- being entirely sexually naive, or learning about sex by indulging in masturbation -- is a 'good' one. (The only 'good' option, to my mind, being actual sex with someone I love -- I find it very interesting that you, having been in that position, aren't all that happy about it!) I've spent a lot of time in recent months 'learning about my body', and it's taken up a lot of time and only occasionally taught me anything new. But then, beforehand I spent a lot of time worrying about my apparent incapability.
I would guess I'm more aware of the radical change in perceptions that comes with personal sexual awakening than most. Usually it happens around puberty as a 'matter of course', and most people haven't considered for a moment what it might have been like to get to 22 without any sort of sex (not as anything more than a trivial thought experiment, anyway).
I said,
>This "sexual pleasure" thing is all well and good, but I've done without it so long I know I don't really need it.
You said,
>Of course no-one needs it, but it can be life-enhancing ... and when you meet the right person your experience in generating your own sexual pleasure will be invaluable in helping you feel confident in understanding how to do a great job of giving him sexual pleasure. And, if he's truly the right person, that will be important to you.
I think 'meeting the right person' is the problem -- I meant that by having a concept of what sexual pleasure is, I will forever be in pursuit of something that, whether out of bad luck or because I'm looking in the wrong place, I may never be able to find with someone else I find physically attractive (I will emphasise again that I am very picky). I can successfully gain it with fantasies and photographs, but as I understand it these are a poor substitute for the real thing. I know I grumble a lot about this, so please feel free to ignore this paragraph!
David
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