Erotic Phobias

Sex, as we all know, tends to promote obsession, and this is particularly true of those who fear and hate it. 

No one is more obsessed with pornography, for example, than its opponents, many of whom spend countless hours pouring over all kinds of porn in paroxysms of disgust.  To someone who doesn't share that kind of obsession, it's easy to interpret their behavior as merely hypocritical — as if they're merely pretending to be disgusted so as to have an excuse to enjoy the porn.  This is seldom the case, however — such people often seem genuinely cut off from their own sexual enjoyment, and like other obsessive consumers of porn, tend to find real-life sexual interactions difficult.  In a more complex way, their disgust itself becomes eroticized, and provides a safe way for them to protect themselves against this side of life. 

Most sexual phobias are different from other phobias because fear itself can be such a powerful aphrodisiac.  Sexual phobias tend to turn in on themselves — the fear produces arousal, and arousal reinforces the fear by making it feel pleasurable and exciting as well as terrible. 

Sexual phobias should not be taken lightly.  Throughout history, they've caused a vast amount of suffering to the people who have them as well as to innocent bystanders.  In extreme form, such phobias have repeatedly expressed themselves in anti-sexual hysteria involving self-castration and suicide. 

Extreme measures

From Origen, an early Christian Church Father who castrated himself and persuaded hundreds of early Christians to give themselves up to the Romans for martyrdom, to Marshall Applegate, the equally charismatic leader of the Heaven's Gate cult who castrated himself and in 1997 persuaded his followers to join him in suicide in California, there's a consistent pattern of self-loathing and self-destruction.

Extremists among the Bogumils in Bulgaria, the Cathars in France, the Skoptsyi in Russia were reputed to have practiced self-castration in significant numbers as a means of freeing themselves from sexual desire.  Very often, this dramatic renunciation of the world was followed by a longing for death. 

Far more common than organized groups of self-castrators are the countless individuals who have chosen this path throughout history, and who continue to do so today, as a way of freeing themselves from feelings they don't know how to cope with (I'm not speaking here of people who wish to change their gender — this is a different phenomenon, with its own rich history as well). 

There's a peculiar emotional illogic to self-castration as a means of escape.  A man who fears and hates his own sexuality often finds his fear eroticized by the very libido it's directed against.  The desire to escape his sexuality leads him to think about castrating himself, cutting off what he perceives as the source of his problems, and the thought of castration in turn evokes a more visceral form of fear that can easily be eroticized.  Surprising numbers of men find castration fantasies arousing just because the fear they evoke is so exciting. 

Perversely, the very sexual excitement that can supply a man with the obsessive dedication and enthusiasm he needs to cut his own balls off is also something he loses through the act.  The balls go but fear remains, along with sufficient testosterone produced by the adrenal glands that sexual interests still remain, though with diminished force.  Nothing is really gained and much is lost.  It's hardly surprising that men who castrate themselves as an escape often become obsessed with suicide thereafter. 

One of the aims of this site is to affirm that there are far better ways of coping with sexuality — that it's not impossible to integrate it into your life so that it gives you joy in ways you can be proud of.

Vegetarian Abstinence Movements of the 19th Century

The 18th and 19th centuries saw a significant rise in prudishness all across Europe, culminating in the strange extremes of Victorian era, where a glimpse of a woman's naked arm or ankle could keep a man up most of the night trying not to masturbate and then trying not to masturbate again...  This prudery became especially popular in 19th-century America, where remarkably wide-spread anti-sex movements flourished.  Following a trend that had started in the early 18th century, these were at least as closely associated with health concerns as with dualistic religious fervor. 

Sylvester Graham, for example, founded an extraordinarily successful vegetarian, natural foods and anti-sex movement in the United States in the middle of the 19th century.  His early life was difficult — he was expelled from Amherst College in 1823 for assaulting a young woman, went on to suffer a nervous breakdown and then failed in his attempt to become a minister.  He believed that sex of any sort caused a wide variety of diseases, and that the best cure for sexual desire was to marry, which would cause the urge to die quickly.  He invented graham crackers as an aid to abstinence, because he believed that eating a whole-grain diet could prevent masturbation. 

Later in the 19th century, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg took up where Graham had left off, inventing corn flakes to reinforce the influence of graham crackers.  Kellogg believed that good health required total celibacy, and claimed never to have had sex with his wife at all.  Although he inveighed tirelessly against masturbation, it's hard to tell how often he did it himself.  We do know he took an enormous delight in enemas — his clinic was famous for the thorough and vigorous bowel cleansing that its patients regularly underwent.  Sufficient anal stimulation, of course, does stimulate the prostate quite pleasurably, and doesn't require touching one's dreadful genitalia...

What's amazing and sad is how many people responded positively to the anti-sex messages of crusaders like Graham and Kellogg.  Huge numbers of their adherents seemed quite willing to accept that sex of any sort was terribly unhealthy and should be completely avoided.  With the rise of middle-class prudery, the only safe (fashionable, acceptable) way to talk about sex was in terms of rejecting it, and the only safe way to think about it all the time was to think (almost always unsuccessfully) about how to hold back from it. 

Then as now, there's no evidence that people actually succeeded in avoiding their sex lives through such cults — all the abstinence programs did was make people feel guiltier about the desires they couldn't suppress, and feel obscurely bitter about not having things they believed they should reject.  The fear of sex that each one of us has seems all too easy to inflame into fanaticism if we aren't encouraged to enjoy our sexuality in a safe and positive way. 

Feminist critiques of sex

Moralistic phobias are by no means restricted to dualists or to people striving to be socially correct.  There is a vocal wing of the feminist movement which regards sex, and particularly sex between women and men, as a form of subjugation of women.  Two of the best-known voices in this camp are those of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon.  For these women, any form of penetration by a penis constitutes the moral equivalent of rape, and any form of pornography is an invitation for men to despise, degrade and dominate women.  Everywhere they look, males are threatening dominance and sex is degrading female purity.

Reading what people like this write, it's clear that they speak from the heart, that they feel a genuine visceral disgust and rage at contemplating sexual interactions, and in particular almost all forms of male desire.  While I don't know anything about Dworkin's or McKinnon's background, I have met people who have similar feelings that are entirely understandable in light of their childhood experiences of heartbreaking abuse. 

Dworkin and McKinnon appear to have phobias around sex that are at least as strong as those of Graham and Kellog.  While their own experiences may make these phobias more understandable, their intellectual posture of speaking for the experience of all women is wildly arrogant and certainly not characteristic of mainstream feminism. 

What's ironic is that the anti-sex feminists often seem happy to ally themselves politically with male counterparts who have as degrading a view of women as they would expect, and to fight against other feminists who are actually struggling in a real way to recover women's sexual power. 

In fact many of the most courageous and intelligent sex-positive pioneers have been feminist women — people like Carol Queen, Annie Sprinkle, Susie Bright, Pat Califia (now a man), and countless others.  All of the women I know personally who have been sex activists for years are extremely strong, self-respecting, intelligent feminists who are as much in control of their own lives as any man I know.  To dismiss the views and experience of such women out of hand as "male-identified" seems not only presumptuous but also, on an emotional level, desperately childish. 

In the end, sex phobia is more about fear than sex

Although the eroticizing of disgust gives many sex phobias an overtly sexual overtone for the men and women who suffer from them, and although the subject matter of their resulting obsessions is relentlessly sexual, in the end the emotional cycle is dominated by the fear, and no good sex results. 

At the same time, dissipating that fear and re-directing the trapped sexual energy tied up in it seems no easier a task than is the case with any other sexual obsession, because the only sexual satisfaction the sufferers know or can imagine to be possible for them derives from the obsession.

Yet if you want to (a big if, sometimes!),  you can walk back through amazingly frightening and painful passageways to reclaim yourself.  Jane Juska wrote this about her own self-discovery at the age of 60, in her inspiring book, A Round-Heeled Woman:

Psychoanalysis has lately gotten a lot of criticism, often by people who would benefit from it.  Talk therapy, under the guidance of a good analyst — and there are lots of them — is invaluable.  It costs money, but so does lying flattened on your bed, able to live a life only dimly lit.  Analysis saved my life and made me rich.  I had to learn to read the sober and complex book that was me.  With the help of the best teacher I will ever know, I learned to appreciate me, to be analytical and sometimes critical of me, not to be scared of me.  Learning all that made the world a different place, a place with plenty of room for me to live a full life. 

It is never easy, never for anyone and it certainly wasn't for Juska.  But what's amazing is that it's possible, if you're willing, stubborn and brave, and that a surprising number of people do turn out to be so much more willing, stubborn and brave than they first imagine.