Sex and Rage

Sometimes when I get angry all I can seem to think about is how I hate sex, which isn’t necessarily true. I’ve heard my mother say more than once that she thinks sex is incredibly overrated, and I let this voice echo inside of my own. I don’t want to think this way, it doesn’t seem healthy to me.

In the second season of the Netflix show Sex Education a high school student comes to see Gillian Anderson’s character for sex advice. The student says she isn’t interested in having sex, doesn’t really want to have it or think about it. Does this mean she’s broken? Is something wrong with me, she asks. Anderson asks if she has heard of the term ‘asexual,’ and explains that it means to be free of sexual desires or sexuality.

“Sex doesn’t make us whole,” Anderson says. So how can something that doesn’t complete us make us feel broken?

I have no interest in calling myself asexual because why the fuck should I? I have sexual desire but don’t go out of my way to do anything about it unless I feel like masturbating. At this point, I haven’t been sexually active in over five years and I’ve made peace with it.

I’ve made peace with this because the emotional work I’ve done for myself has given me the confidence to be able to write about the complexities of sexual desire or lack thereof. I started going to therapy as an adult about a year and a half ago, and during this time I realized I had a lot of negative memories associated with my sexual history that perhaps I hadn’t worked through properly. 

The day I got the call from my gynecologist that I had herpes. Unrequited love. A man telling me he loved me and then taking it back three days later. Cold hearted men who couldn’t look me in the eye or in the case of the boy who took my virginity, didn’t give a shit about how my day was. The man who lived in a completely different state who had an emotional hold on me for nearly ten years. You were pretty out of it, he said once when I had asked if we had sex the night before.

Sex is never easy, except when we watch it on television or in the movies. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing right? I say this to myself sometimes when I’m sitting on my couch on a Saturday night realizing I’m the same age as Carrie Bradshaw. 

I don’t even believe myself in my own head when I say sex is stupid. Here’s what I think is stupid: ignoring my own feelings to please someone else. Telling myself if he wants to sleep with me that must mean he will eventually want to get back together. Girl, no. I remember sex being fun, but loving who I am is better.