Sex and OPAR

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I don't mind lewd as a sporadic playful game with the person I love. I don't like the idea of being approached with smutty lewdness by a strange woman as her version of flirting. This has happened to me in the past and it is an enormous turn-off. I have also experienced open admiration, which was an enormous turn-on.

If I don't like the down-and-dirty from strange women (and I am very open-minded), I can only imagine how women feel.

Michael

[John Dailey]

~ Can one say that 'lewd' and 'dirty' are...how does that saying go (?) "...in the mind [!] of the beholder" ?

LLAP

J:D

P.S: I'm all for casual sex...as long as it's not 'deceptive' to a supposedly significant/committed-to 'other.' But, even excepting the latter's existence, regardless, 'blow-up' dolls (plastic or credit-card-taking)? Eh-h-h-h....

P.P.S: This is supposed to be The Romance Room! How'd THIS subject get going here?

Edited January 9, 2007 by John Dailey

[Kat]

P.P.S: This is supposed to be The Romance Room! How'd THIS subject get going here?

hmmm...that reminds me I think the zen master is MIA.

Kat

[John Dailey]

~ 'MIA'? LOL!!

~ As long as he's not a captured-by-'blow-up'-doll POW, not to worry.

~ Still, this 'grasshopper' awaits a Master's elucidations...be they 'Zen'-ish or not.

LLAP

J:D

Edited January 15, 2007 by John Dailey

[Charles R. Anderson]

Wow .... It took me two nights to read the 204 posts in this thread. It has been an interesting read. I especially found Ellen's college adventures interesting. There were dozens of ideas I would have liked to have commented on, but so much water has flowed past the bridge ....

So, for now I just want to toss in something of my own perspective on sex and the desire to have it with someone.

When I was a teenager I did not experience thinking about sex once every five seconds, which I have frequently read is the case for the average man, let alone the teenager. I had too many other things on my mind. Besides, somehow I was unable to think about sex without thinking about who I wanted to be very intimate with. It seemed that my desire to be intimate with anyone only followed finding them to have a very interesting mind and the knowledge that I judged them to be a good person. So, while I rather liked a lot of people, it was almost never the case that I encountered a young lady to whom I felt any strong attraction. Boredom was much more common. Usually, I discovered in time that the young lady's virtues were substantially a product of my desire to find someone to really admire. Well, my standards were pretty high, even before I read Rand and decided I was an Objectivist. I recall very little interest in having sex with any girl through my teenage years, though there were a few who were friends. So, we are all very different and we have a wide variety of sex drives.

The week before I had to report for induction and was subsequently sent to Vietnam, I met an undergraduate in her Junior year. We were having a disagreement about the nature of the Vietnam War, but for the first time I felt an immediate and strong desire to be intimate with a woman. We had one fine date and I was gone. When I returned to grad school, I looked her up and we dated for a few months. She was exceedingly intelligent, highly spirited, beautiful, but insistently religious and prone to huge emotional swings. I came to love her, but we both knew that we were not right for each other in time. We never made love, but for the first time, I wanted to make love to a woman.

A few months later I met Anna and it was not long before we were lovers. I discovered how heavenly sex could be and was immediately insatiable according to my Anna. I had had no idea what I had missed until I experienced it. But I had not experienced sex with someone I did not love. No, I was very deeply in love with Anna. There were times when simply looking at her was very nearly too much to avoid cuming. So, I became a sex addict! If I go a day without working, I get grouchy and I get a headache. If I have to go a week without sex, I get grouchy and I get a headache. Yep, pure and simple addicted. So, in my life sex is good. It keeps me happy and functional. How odd that I managed so well and easily before Anna without it and now I cannot live without it. I find it a marvelously complex and fascinating part of life. It is one of life's central pleasures.

Now, clearly, almost no one else has a sexual history like mine. So, you are all immoral, unnatural, base animals! No, I am only kidding. I expect you simply had a different biochemistry than I did. The more I have learned about people and the more I have learned about one of the things that most differentiates them from one another, namely how they love and what they think about sex, the more I appreciate how individual we are. We are also immensely complex, with little about us being more complex than our sexuality. This is one of the things that makes sexuality such a fascinating topic.

Sex and sexuality being a fascinating subject, it seems right to me that one should study it. One good way to study it is to find out something about other people's experience with sex and what turns them on. Many Americans, and I dare say others in this world world, would learn a few things by reading erotic stories. It really disgusts me when people classify all erotic stories as pornography, with all of its negative moral connotations. Sure, there are disgusting acts that some people do in the name of sex, but there are many sexual acts that are far more loving and pleasurable than the ignorant believe them to be. As with most very complex areas of knowledge, theory alone can lead you astray. Experiment tests your theory and forces you to make it consistent with reality. As with most areas of knowledge, it is worth finding out something about what other people know and doing some experiencing and experimenting yourself. Sometimes you will learn that there are more natural acts than you believed beforehand. Ignorance being the handmaiden of prejudice .....

I sympathize with those who really, really think sex with someone you do not love would be disgusting, since this is the way I felt and thought for a long time. I still have no desire to have sex with someone I do not love, but I can understand that if I had had the desire when I was young to at least have sex with a woman I liked, perhaps I would have learned more about women and about sex than I had. I am not sure that would have been a bad thing. On the other hand, what if I had become addicted to sex before I had Anna? Horrors. Well, who knows? This is too complicated for me to make predictions about. What I do know is that making love to someone you love is to bring heaven to earth. Or is it to bring earth to heaven?

But not everyone is me. Some people were addicted to sex perhaps as teenagers and if they could not function without it, maybe they had to have sex with little emotional commitment. It gave them the relief they needed to study and then go to college and take up a career. Perhaps without it they could not have achieved these things. We come in many varieties. Those of a different variety are not at all necessarily bad and immoral.

Of course, I am bad. I think sex is largely good and often heavenly, there are at least a few women worth loving and many of them are quite experienced sexually, and not all erotic literature is pornography. Disgusting me!

[Charles R. Anderson]

I do not really think that the word addiction is quite right with respect to my need to think and my need for sex, due to its negative connotations. Frankly, I think I am at my healthiest and happiest when I have enough to think about and when I have enough sex.

The mind's chemistry changes when it is almost constantly engaged. At least mine does. When I shift down from having it engaged to a much less engaged state, the mind's chemistry changes. Now, I am sure there is a low-engagement chemistry that my mind would come into equilibrium with in time if it were long disengaged from heavy thinking. However, it clearly takes at least weeks for my mind to make a transition from the good-feeling chemistry of hard thinking to one of little thinking which is not accompanied by headaches. The dynamics of that chemistry changing process is complex and various changes happen at different rates. While these chemical changes are occurring my mind is a mess. This phenomena seems to apply to some other people, but apparently not to everyone.

While work is the primary means of keeping my mind engaged at the desired level of concentration and focus, there are some other means. For instance, having interesting conversations with someone who is intelligent or visiting OL both work fairly well.

We know that sex also changes one's brain chemistry. Some of these changes are thought to be very healthy for an individual. But again, when I do not get enough sex, my brain chemistry gets out of whack for a while. I do not know that everyone's chemistry gets as messed up as mine does, but I do know that of some others apparently does also.

Those of us who have such let downs when we stop feeding our mind's enough to chew on and when we are not enjoying enough sex, have to take these biological needs into account. Fortunately, my lab, reading books, and OL provide me with pretty much enough intellectual stimulation and Anna provides me almost enough loving and sex to get by. But, what would someone do who did not have an Anna? Well, they may not be able to always hold out for the best and the highest, though that may be where they would find the best sex and love, if they could find it.

Really good women are quite rare and even now with much improved communications and many more ways for compatible people to try to find one another, it is still very hard to find the best and the highest.

In fact, now that Dagny has decided that John is her best and her highest, whatever is going to happen to Francisco and Hank? I really feel very sad that two such fine men are without the love and sex they deserve. The world needs more good women!