Not quite ace, but sensory processing disorder makes sex unpleasant (tmi)

[Xrenity]

So I'm not as demisexual as I thought. Turns out I just have very high standards for trusting other people, and an unconventional expression/understanding of love and what it means, etc. Recently I started noticing that I do experience sexual arousal via the visual stimulus of female body parts, i.e, technically I'm heterosexual. I was deeply ashamed of getting aroused over bodies with breasts/vaginas because of some weird fear that it made me an objectifying oppressive patriarch, and the strange double standard about violent fetishes and gender.

(E.g, the thought process was this: "It's somehow less wrong to see bruises on males because bruises on females are a special kind of unforgivable evil. And that means it's more okay for men to get injured. If you are sexually aroused by women's bodies, you must justify your own body's reaction by making yourself emotionally attracted to them as people, or else you are a horrible person who only views women as sexual objects. You are not allowed to simply think someone is physically 'hot,' nor are you allowed to masturbate to the thought of their physical attributes without an emotional connection, because it is shallow, oppressive, puerile, sick and wrong. You may only feel lust for those to whom you are deeply emotionally attached. If those people are mainly men, you are only allowed to feel lust towards their bodies. If you don't get 'turned on' by their penises, that's too bad and there's something wrong with you.")

The self-evaluation initially sprang from confusion as to how I was happily in a relationship with a guy when I felt lust towards female bodily characteristics but not male ones. (This is how I can tell I'm not bi either, because that means lust for both, and homoromantic heterosexual isn't accurate either because I don't "seek out" "romantic relationships" with men as a demographic--not only does my experience of love have nothing to do with gender whatsoever, it is very much unlike what is usually described as "love" at all, I can't seek it out if it's not there already and "romantic gestures" cannot create it in me.) Then I hit another conundrum. I started digging through the shame about my heterosexuality and found there was another component to it.

Sex is physically uncomfortable. So is masturbation. So are orgasms. So are erections. This is because I have sensory processing disorder. If being touched, hugged and squeezed is an ordeal for me in non-sexual contexts, of course sex felt like a letdown, uncomfortable, painful, unpleasant, etc! Being both tactile defensive and proprioceptive defensive means that anything more than cautious minimal touch feels bad, and deep pressure is VERY painful. The deep pressure thing is the worst--it's relatively rare for people with SPD to be dysregulated by deep pressure instead of soothed, but I am. Think about it...this is someone who would go berserk from wearing weighted vests and tear the vest off screaming as soon as he got home, who is distressed by the compression and stretching if his muscles, who nearly pulled a friend's head off when they unwittingly talked him into getting a deep tissue massage, who cannot wear seatbelts or briefs because they feel too tight. And what is sex, or for that matter, what is masturbation, or orgasm, or an erection, but a whole bunch of squeezing and swelling and stretching and pulling?

I would place it in the same category of sensation as nausea and vomiting. Not pleasure, but not entirely painful, though uncomfortable and intense and kind of interesting in that it can create an altered state of consciousness through the ordeal of it all if pain management is used. Not a calming fun sensation or something sought out as such, but when you have to puke, you have to puke. Or stifle the nausea and stay awash in queasy woozy-headedness until it subsides.

It's been that way since I started getting erections--I had no idea what other people felt, only that it was a thing that happened and people masturbated when they were alone. It was unpleasant, but I still did it because 1) I felt like I needed to, and 2) pushing through pain made me feel alive and strong and gave a sense of self-ownership. Some ways I mitigated pain were thinking about blood and bruises, or biting something, or actual self-harm or imagining the person I was masturbating to self-harming...making the discomfort visible was the only way I could tolerate it. I really had no clue that other people didn't experience the same thing. I was taken aback by the alarm and disgust others exhibited when I talked about sex as though it was always painful and had to be rough to be tolerable. I was equally taken aback by the notion that people existed who were capable of smiling or giggling during sex, for whom it was playful and entertaining.

The SPD and the shame are two different things. I was never ashamed until it sunk in that I was different from others in this regard. Also, the sadomasochism stuff was grossly misinterpreted--it was seen as a pathological need for control, or an emotional disturbance that meant I wanted to abuse people. It wasn't. It was something I needed to cope with the inherent discomfort of sexual arousal, not something I necessarily enjoyed for its own sake. This is why I harbored a grudge toward the BDSM community for a long time, because they were voluntarily and recreationally seeking pleasure from pain, and I had no choice as long as I had a libido. Even vanilla sex was going to be painful for me, and they were judging me as doing it wrong or that I had something wrong with me?

I know the conventional wisdom: "if it hurts, you shouldn't do it." While well-meaning, in my case it's incredibly ableist, compassionless and short-sighted. I cannot will my libido away, and I don't like the implications or potential side effects of chemically or surgically suppressing it. It's not some tragedy that arousal is inherently painful due to SPD. I cope. The way I cope is the way I cope. But it does alienate me somewhat from the world of allosexuals, leaving me somewhere that both is and isn't gray-a, both is and isn't allosexual, both is and isn't sex-repulsed, something that can look like long stretches of chosen celibacy but for entirely different reasons--many definitions and parameters are centered around the idea that orgasms feel pleasurable and being touched feels nice, structurally excluding me.

I still worry about the possibility of me and the guy I'm with being pathologized and separated, or labeled abusive in some way--I've seen it happen before, where they tried to blame both his and my pre-existing depression and anger issues on the nature of our relationship and sex life, trying to have Him and me locked up because we were doing things in bed even though they hurt and not trying to "fix" ourselves or each other, dealing with friends or relatives breathing down our necks because we weren't allowed to be alone together, all the snap judgments and misunderstandings and attributions of motives that weren't there. And I still have some guilt about it, thinking "what is wrong with me for being the way I am," etc.

But yeah, this is where I'm at in figuring myself out, needed to make some noise, make up for the convoluted confusing posts I made previously. I underestimated the role of SPD in the difficulties defining and explaining myself.

[dakdoc]

Hey Xrenity! I appreciate when members take the time to really do some self exploration and are genuine in this journey so I enjoyed reading your post. I look forward to hearing more of your insights and comments. Thanks so much for sharing this part of your story! Have a great night!