Does our past, our pain, our love, and our hate influence our sexuality?

[galaxus]

Sexuality is mysterious thing. Even more mysterious than the ecology deep in the oceans. People intertwine their faith, their pain, their racism, their homophobia, and more into their sexuality. And this creates both a disturbing and wonderful spectrum of beauty and desires.

I can give a couple of examples (some are rather controversial, I'll save those opinions for later)

While I was working at another job, I was training my co-worker for a few days. She was an older single mother and quite pleasant. during our down time we shared personal stories. We began to talk about her family and her daughter's dysfunctional relationships. We were talking about the issue of rape and she shared that her daughter had been raped at 15 years old. And the rape produced a child. Ever since that incident, she told me that her relationships and her sex life has been unstable. She would dump and reconcile with her boyfriends frequently. When mother and daughter had those personal talks, the daughter told her how she liked really rough sex.

Now did the abuse affect her sexuality? I don't know, I can't accurately say. I do know that it would be wrong to say that all rape victims act like this.

How has your past, your activities, your faith, your morals, your shame, and your fears shaped your sexuality?

 

[D_Pat Trick Henry]

I've grown up fully closeted in a small farm town.. have fallen in love with a couple of my straight male friends that i've had to just ignore.. hasn't really effected my sexuality. Still the same.

 

[Charles Finn]

short answer yes
when we find true love and lose it we always want to replace it when love goes wrong we want to avoid that unless we feel we are not worthy of that kind of love
you must love yourself above all else then find a partner that shares your love and values.

 

[D_Fizzy Cola Bottles]

I think there is some truth to your speculations. It is often revealed that frequently sexual molesters were victims of sexual abuse themselves as a child. And men who rape sometimes were raped themselves at some point. So yes, sexuality can be influenced by past events, people and encounters. There is also that rumor that a lot of porn starlets were victims of sex abuse.

I remember a long time ago in the news, there was a young girl, I don't know if anyone remembers. Her name was Amy Fisher. A teenager from Long Island who fell in love with a married man much older than she was. She ended up shooting her lover's wife out of jealousy. Anyway, I remember reading that after she served time for her crime and got out of jail, she ended up getting seriously attached to a man who looked VERY similar to her lover, Joey Buttafuoco, the one for whom she went to jail in the first place...

So sometimes you try to replace lovers from the past even if they were abusive or if the whole thing was a raw deal in some other way. That's a danger in sex, I think, when you keep replicating negative experiences. When you can't help yourself because you've been "broken in" in a certain way.

 

[Charles Finn]

yes that is very true

 

[B_thickjohnny]

I was molested as a youngster and I'm sure it's affected me. I have not been able to stay in a long term relationship for some reason. When I am in a relationship I find myself sneaking off for random sex and then we were finally break up it gets worse. "Break up sex" for me means going out to the saunas, parks and alley ways. I'm not proud of that in any way shape or form. Actually, this is the first time I've openly admitted that.

 

[galaxus]

Here is another example.

Some (a small percentage) of black men just have sex with white women just to look at themselves as powerful and successful. They have sex with white women so they can flaunt it around and to achieve validation in their minds and not because the white women are particularly beautiful.

This comes from years of institionalized racism. White women were viewed as valued objects while black women were view as unstable and menaces. I just think that's so sad. But I can't tell them what to do

Some (another small percentage) white women have sex with a black man just because he is perceived as a bad boy/gangsta/thug they want to do something naughty (when in reality it isn't). They do it to be rebels.

Their racism, in both of these situations, is intertwined in their sexuality.

 

[thadjock]

I've grown up fully closeted in a small farm town.. .

i have hot porn fantasies about farmboys

 

[Phil Ayesho]

Everything gets intertwined in sexuality, I agree.

I think its part of human beings capability to adapt to ever changing environments... that our sexuality is not set entirely in our genes, but is subject to modification thru early experiences.


I Had a wife whose own guilt over sex meant she preferred to feel 'forced'... she would purposely pick fights with me to get me to the point of frustrated anger, and then want angry sex...
It took me years to convince her that I could 'play' rough, without necessarily being enraged first... i.e. that we could simply treat it as a game.

For myself, My early experience with older boys certainly factored into my sexuality as an adult... It doesn't mess me up simply because I see it as nothing more than conditioning I can do nothing about... its not really about 'me'.

Folks into rubber, bondage, exhibitionism, et al, can usually trace their kink back to some early experience that became conflated with arousal or desire.

Folks who were molested as children are the most likely to molest other children when adults.

The problems arise when any of us takes any of that too seriously.

The way our brains get sexually wired by experience says very little about our real selves.
It can be easier to let go a fixation, if it is problematic, if we can understand it as simply programming... and not a reflection of our souls.

and it can be easier to simply enjoy a sexual predilection when we can divorce ourselves from a sense of it being anything manifest about our personalities... and realize that it can be just playing with the fact that, like it or not... this odd thing just happens to get us going, because something like it just happened to happen to us.

 

[galaxus]

Nice Post Phil! Thanks for the info.

OK. Now I'm done. I just had to thank Phil for his contribution. Peace