the perfect libido
I snuggle under the duvet in my sister and her husband’s spare room, pretty sure it’s late enough to doze off into sleep. they live in a remote Druze village in the north of the country. I can’t seem to get warm enough. it’s very quiet. my mind starts talking. it’s on the How Can We Fix It mode.
“maybe I should jerk off. sexual release would send me to sleep. it’s like the body gets in this kind of balance, and then it’s like I don’t notice that it’s cold anymore, and then it isn’t. like it preserves its heat better or something. I could do that. and I don’t even have to corrupt my sexuality with porn, I’ll just concentrate on the sensation. having sex with myself. it would be a feeding experience, not a draining one. sensual. if I need to I can conjure up the lovely people I’d had sex with. imagine one of them visiting me again. maybe a few.”
and so far, I like the story my mind is telling me. then it takes an interesting turn.
“I’ve always had such a weak libido. that’s always been what really held me back from exploring my sexuality. I just don’t seem as interested as other people are, as passionate. sometimes I even find the idea of having sex exhausting. it’s one of my unfortunate shortcomings, my lack of sexual appetite.”
a few seconds pass, and my mind silently asks itself, is that true? is it true that I have a weak libido? is my premise for all these evaluations even correct?
in response, I get images from high school, from university - years where I would masturbate almost every day, often via stimulation from pornography on the internet. “have I always had a weak libido? well, that doesn’t seem to be very true. it seems to be truer that I have channelled my sexuality in the ways that I found most comfortable, then. for all I know it was a very strong libido. but I’ve always had such strong fears of approaching men, of exposing myself physically, of hurting someone’s feelings or being hurt myself. that is what holds me back, not my libido.”
as I’m having these thoughts, a few hidden muscles in my body relax, and I feel myself open. actually, I’m amazed. this never occurred to me. my history is not what I thought it was. I suddenly feel like I just got to know me a bit better. but then it turns on me again.
“I wasted it. all those years, wanking in the toilets. my formative years. student years. by now, I could have explored every fetish imaginable. I could have stepped into many more relationships, and could have learnt so much more. I had a perfectly healthy libido, and I wasted it.”
my muscles contract again. I feel the sadness of mourning, and my face wears a strange grimace. and I don’t know where this is going, but I seem to be asking myself again - is it true? is it true that I wasted my libido, all those years? is it even true that I would have learnt and developed to a greater extent had I done differently?
“well, looking at what I believed about sex and about my body back then, it’s hardly surprising that I did what I did. and who knows, maybe if I’d had no sexual inhibitions whatsoever when I was still living in London I would have been seduced into some very tricky situations. I might have contracted disease, or developed serious addictions that would have burnt up months and years of sobriety. I might have been so sexually active that sex itself would have become an addiction, instead of porn, and I would have still come to the same point that I’m at - trying to find liberation. perhaps porn protected me from a worse fate, or from things I just couldn’t have handled. I sure learnt a thing or two from it. not least what addiction feels like. what I certainly know is that the frustration of masturbation coupled with the belief that I should be more sexually active is what led me to confront my ideas and beliefs about sex and about people, my fears. that was my path. nothing here was wasted.”
and then my awareness comes full circle and descends back into the throne of the moment. there is silence. comfortable. another page is turned, and the canvas is freshly blank, with not even a trace of denial of what came before. whether I have sex or I don’t, I know that my libido is perfect the way it is. increasing it, supressing it, channeling it or ignoring it has never been my job. I just thought it was.
