Free to good home: 1 sex drive, hardly used.

[shiva_dan]

I've written and then scrapped several kiloword+ rants about this topic, and got more frustrated with my inability to write coherently and accurately-representatively-of-my-thoughts each time*, so i'm just going to say:

This is me.

This is one thing i am considering possibly doing about it

Comments

[shiva_dan]

Appropriate icon is oh so appropriate ;)

Ah, the scrapped rants addressed all this. I believe that the strength and frustratedness of my sex drive actually hinders my quest for wider physical intimacy, and that i would be much, much closer to achieving the latter if i could, if not necessarily remove *entirely*, then significantly reduce the former.

I had been looking into SSRIs, but Phoebe's post mentioning cyproterone acetate made me look it up, and it looked like it might have a lot less negative-for-me effects; however, what you describe sounds a lot like the reasons i rejected SSRIs. (I'd quite like to talk to someone who's used both, but the only person i know who i know has used both is the partner of a former very close friend who i've just come to terms with the fact that i'm probably never going to get back in touch with, which is another reason for feeling a bit crappy and lonely at the mo.)

Casual sex is right out because i have the triple whammy of cis-het-male (at least from a potential partner's perspective) privilege, strongly internalised radical feminism and total inability to understand nonverbal communication, which, put together, ensure that i'm incapable of making any kind of sexual proposition to anyone i'm likely to be attracted to that wouldn't feel like sexual harassment, or at least monstrously entitled creepiness (and i really can't imagine myself *getting* propositioned).

Paid sex would probably be worse than no sex, given how strongly my desire is oriented towards *giving* pleasure to someone else, rather than recieving it in exchange for something else.

[lisy_babe]

Cyproterone only reduces your sex drive, it doesn't reduce your romance drive. At all. And I find that is the drive more responsible for a desire to please others.

(I was on Dianette for about six months, then Dianette + SSRIs for about 4.5 years, then just SSRIs for the last couple of months.)

[shiva_dan]

I find it practically impossible to disentangle my sex drive from my romance drive - in fact, one of the biggest and most upsetting thigs for me about my frustrated sex drive is how it "taints" everything (or perhaps to use a more neutral phrase, "overflows into" everything) - it gets all mixed up with my feelings of love for my friends, my more general desire for non-sexual intimacy, my desires to comfort my friends when they are upset, etc, etc.

Separating my sex drive from my romance drive by taking something that removes one and not the other may actually be beneficial to me in that it might help me to understand the difference and get a clearer idea of what feelings are the product of which one...

On the other hand, if what foibey says is true about cyproterone drastically reducing energy levels, then it probably isn't right for me because my energy levels are chronically low anyway (well, that might actually be more a matter of executive function than *physical* energy levels, but in that case it's my ability to cope with low physical energy level's that's significantly impaired).

I would be very interested in what both your and foibey's comparative analysis of cyproterone and SSRIs and what they do/did to you in terms of sex/romance drives, physical energy and emotional effects...

(Also to both you and foibey, totally unrelatedly, - i'm aware that it's about 99.99999% likely that both of you have already seen it, but if you haven't, GO WATCH PLANET TERROR. NOW. It's fucking awesome. Disabled sex worker protagonist kicking zombie ass FTW...)