Last month, me and my brother David drove down to Venice Beach to hang out for a few hours before I dropped him at the airport for his red-eye flight to Texas. It was a Friday after working hours and people were out. I mean, out out. I describe it this way because we were shopping for sweatshirts and everyone else had on shorts and tank tops.
Walking along Abbot Kinney, the mile-long stretch containing shops, restaurants, and the occasional, feathered-hat store leading to the boardwalk, I noticed how attractive everyone was. And toned and golden tanned. As he walked into a small retailer, my eyes did a slow panorama and landed on two women walking behind us. They had stopped just as we had. They turned away and walked into a coffee shop a few doors down.
One of these women was walking a small dog. The other, and this is where alternate phrasing fails me, had a behind with her. I stared at it for a few seconds, the way primates do. I turned into Nicholas Cage in The Weatherman; I wanted to place myself against it. I felt silly, and by the time I had returned to myself, both the woman and her backside had disappeared.
These days, despite being the 42-year-old virgin that I am, I sometimes forget that I haven’t had penetrative sex yet. Yes, that’s correct, my friends. Blame it on global warming, an exhaustive job search or the fact that I’m working my way through a chronic, nerve injury (see below), but it doesn’t cross my mind as much as you might expect.
Until suddenly, it does. Then, the obsession starts. I enjoyed my evening with my brother, but kept thinking of the woman and the fact that I haven’t been with one in that way quite yet.
I drove home that night while mulling over my situation for the thousandth time. When I arrived, I poured a beer and pulled my journal from my desk.
Why am I still a virgin? I wondered. What’s stopping me? Why haven’t I crossed over yet?
As it turns out, like most of life, it just boils down to a few things. Three things, by what I gathered. Each of them related and like dominoes, as one goes, so go the others.
Here are the reasons why I believe I’m still a virgin after twenty years of trying.
1. Physical Pain Due to Chronic Injury
The last time I attempted penetrative sex was in the midst of the pandemic. It was early 2022, only a few days removed from New Year’s, and I had met someone on Feeld. The woman was attractive, funny, and was “open” to casual, sexual experiences. She also happened to live nearby. We had drinks and eventually made it back to her apartment.
After making out on her couch and following her into her bedroom, my back began to stiffen. That’s the wrong body part, I thought to myself. She proceeded to help me undress.
A few moments later, I was laying in front of her, attempting to go down on her while experiencing mid-level back spasms (I’d rate them at 5/10) as my half erection withered and my face winced with pain.
“Are you okay?” she asked. My body or my best laid plans. Then, “Yeah, but there’s something I should tell you.” I pulled myself forward and decided to level with her.
Lying next to her, each of us naked, but feeling as comfortable as you can with a stranger you met hours earlier, I began telling her about my condition, Myofascial Pain Syndrome (MPS). How it came on slowly in the course of my thirties. How it’s likely related to my spine curvature, scoliosis, but seems to be exacerbated by a dysregulated nervous system as well. I told her how, at 40, it’s the worst it’s ever been. Not disabling, just increasingly limiting. She invited me to share more.
MPS is essentially ongoing — aka. chronic — pain in your fascia in the form of trigger points. In my case, growing up with scoliosis, it began in my lower back, but has since spread to my neck as those muscles have grown more contracted and begun pinching my cervical nerve roots. The neck compression then causes burning, nerve pain into the arms, hands, and fingers. Adding it up gives you a real, full body recipe: pain in one direction with your back and sciatica, and then at the opposite end involving your neck and extremities.
It is near impossible to attempt sex in my condition. Not only painful, but scary and distracting as all hell. To put it differently, being in pain while resting is one thing, but experiencing it while in motion is much more intense. Even typing this story is difficult. With good posture and frequent breaks, I find ways to function day-to-day.
I don’t know if the physical aspect of being unable to have sex will change, but I do know this: being in constant nerve pain during waking hours is difficult enough.
I try my best to stay positive, educate myself, and work with the group of somatic professionals who are committed to helping me overcome my condition. And emerge stronger on the other side. I’m hopeful that my body will one day heal itself from MPS.
The sex I dream about is painless, not excruciating. I remind myself I only have one body to experience it with.
2. Porn-induced Erectile Dysfunction (P.I.E.D.)
This one stings because unlike my chronic pain condition, I could have avoided it had I been willing to make some better choices. If I’d paid closer attention to what I let myself consume. Somehow, I just don’t think I’d be a virgin today if I was not a pornography addict, also.
P.I.E.D. occurs in men when the brain is desensitized due to consistent porn use flooding their neural pathways with dopamine, the end result being that real-life sexual experiences are not stimulating enough for them to sustain arousal. I’ve written firsthand accounts of this, and it’s not pretty. It’s confusing and painfully real for both parties. More than that, it’s avoidable, and as porn use in young men keeps increasing, it’s something both parents and teenagers should make themselves aware of.
I began experiencing P.I.E.D. almost eight years ago, in my early thirties, and even though I was aware of what was happening, didn’t change my habits for another few years and continued masturbating to porn with regularity until I entered a recovery program in 2019. This timeframe — one of confusion, frustration, and mounting depression — contained consistent episodes of P.I.E.D., so much so that I eventually had to stop attempting to have penetrative sex all together.
There was the woman I met in my neighborhood, developed feelings for and tried to sleep with. There was another woman — a single mom with a young daughter — who I met six months later, but again could not engage in intercourse with. The length of time between partners, between even trying to meet someone, increased, and it was full year later before I met someone who, despite having incredible mental and emotional chemistry with, despite having a set of shared values I’d dreamed about, I still could not get an erection around. It’s shocking, even today. Everything seemed to work except my private parts when called upon.
When I wrote Looking At Naked Women in Real Life, I was dating someone who almost become my girlfriend after meeting at a bar and slowly getting to know each other over the course of six months. I took a leap and told her about my addiction. She even read my article and liked it. She appreciated how vulnerable I was and how different I was from other men.
Still, when it came time for sex, I couldn’t be with her that way and the relationship suffered, then failed. It pained me to see how it affected someone else up close. Women need sex despite the sheltered environment I was raised in saying otherwise. We wished each other well and parted ways before the pandemic. I haven’t mustered the capacity to date anyone or pursue a woman since.
P.I.E.D. begins as a seemingly strange phenomenon that, in my case, virgin or not, caused me to retire from sexual encounters altogether. I’ll return at some point, but not until I’m confident I’ve rewired my brain long enough to become stimulated naturally again.
I want to experience penetration, but I also want to stop watching pornography. One requires that other. The first one will happen when my body becomes aroused in the way it was designed to.
3. The Long-Lasting Effects of Sexual Shame
Lately, I’ve had the sneaky suspicion that I’m about to really learn some things about myself. I supposed you could say I’m already learning them. I feel like I’ve been contracted for so long, I can’t help but start expanding.
When it comes to my virginity, I feel most strongly about this third reason because I’ve carried it the longest. It’s not immediately noticable like a back injury or E.D. Sifting through it instead of running from it is might just be where this self-discovery journey begins.
Picking up where E.D. leaves off, I believe the reason I watch porn is because of the underlying safety it provides. It’s voyerism at its most delectable. I’m watching from a distance and I don’t have to participate.
Let’s rewind that back: I don’t have do anything. No kissing or foreplay. No intimacy or immediacy. I certainly don’t have to experience any depth of feeling and act on it. No penetration between humans as we’ve comitted to for thousands of years.
But why, if I might ask a follow-up, do I feel so comfortable with not participating? With being a happy voyer? Someone who is deeply curious, romantic, relational, and yet, is still waiting on the sidelines as others experience sex. That’s the real learning curve, once I get real with myself. I took it to my therapist last year to see if she might back me up.
“Sawyer, you didn’t exactly have a dialogue around sex,” she said, lovingly. “You had no discussion, no teaching. You were told not to do it because of the Purity Culture movement, but that’s it. Of course, you’re going to have moments where you feel like this is wrong.”
It is wrong, I thought to myself as I sat across from her in her office during the course of the pandemic. It’s always been wrong. From making out with Jamie Hardy in high school and getting scolded by her parents. To sneaking around with Shonali, my first love, because her mother suspected we were sleeping together and forbid me from spending the night. Even in my late twenties, travelling halfway across the world to visit my girlfriend, but realizing, to my dismay, that sex was impossible because she was guilt-ridden as well. Our parents were old friends; the circle was complete. I never realized just how much I was afraid of sex until I started trying to have it with someone else.
I never realized how much it scares me. Still. I feel like it’s wrong and that I’ll get in trouble, so I stay away.
Sexual shame is the link that, although I still may not understand it, trumps any sort of physical dysfunction I may be going through at any moment. It’s the tipping point, a mountain I’m still climbing and navigating well into adulthood.
When I do lose my virginity, I will know that I’ve shed the weight of it. Something that I never asked for, but was forced to carry until I was strong enough to let it go.
…
I believe, if I’m being honest, that I do think about my virginity these days. It’s important to me, just as it was to you. It’s just that these roadblocks that have been with for me so long make me believe I should forget about it.
I haven’t forgotten — how could I? How could I forget about what I once described to my former therapist as liking someone all the way?
The pleasure of being with someone. The euphoria of experiencing another human in the way that birthed us all. The profoundness isn’t lost on me, just the joy. I do believe I’ve shown maturity. What I’d like to do is embody the courage it takes to find fulfillment in what so many my age already have.
Back to the woman in Venice, when I searched my journal that evening I found some notes I had written surrounding the second most recent time I had almost experienced penetration. It was halfway through 2020 and lockdown had lifted. I enjoyed a romantic evening that turned passionate; she was a friend of mine, a former co-worker, and we had not seen each other since we had lost our jobs together.
Returning to my apartment, we undressed, made out, and took turns going down on each other. At some point, my back pain started, and I lost my erection. I took the opportunity to put my focus on her. I remember enjoying her and finding meaning in her enjoyment.
What surprised me was feeling her wake me up in the early morning by covering me with kisses. Softly, making her way down. She stayed with me, unhurried and when nothing happened, I told her I was still a virgin.
We didn’t force things afterward and I was okay with it. She listened to me and that meant something. Something was created out of nothing. She was the third woman I’ve ever had the conversation with.
The moment passed and the day ended. I had tried.
Now I am getting ready to try again.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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