Head, Heart and Balls

Late loss of virginity in men

As I mentioned on the other page on this subject, there's a group of older male virgins who are basically heterosexual with some homosexual imprinting or inclinations. These men sometimes have a slightly effeminate presentation. Some of them are convinced they are gay; others are convinced they are not, while still appearing effeminate or even asexual. There may be a complete lack of sexual feeling around them, especially around women, which may mean they have lots of female friends who, perhaps to their puzzlement, just don't want to get sexual with them.

The one consistent factor in this group of men is that they have recurrent homosexual fantasies, fantasies which have convinced them they are gay. Yet they are almost never gay. How does this kind of emotional confusion develop?

If you're a man in this situation, see how many of these things ring true for you:

You had an emotionally close, perhaps almost incestuous, relationship with your mother. This relationship may have involved sexually inappropriate boundaries and behavior - for example, the sense that somehow your body, or your penis, was not your own property. Your mother was overly reliant on you for her emotional well-being, and your relationship with her had a sexual flavor about it. As a result of your resentment or anger, fear or sadness, about this relationship you turned off your heterosexual impulses towards women to avoid repeating the hurt of this primary relationship.

Your father was physically or emotionally absent. And passive or rejecting. This can lead to the very natural desire of a young man for approval from an older male becoming tinged with eroticism and sexualized.

You had a shy, awkward, shaming, or sexually inhibited adolescence. In the absence of an acceptable way of expressing those feelings towards girls, the power of your adolescent sexuality may have been redirected towards boys and men.

All of these things are powerful forces for the development of a sense of homoerotic attraction. And I also work with men whose penis was abnormal at birth, and who, as a result, have developed an intense in penises. For these men, what is in fact a perfectly natural desire to compare themselves with what they see as "normal" becomes a fear that they are gay, because otherwise, as they reason, why would they be so obsessed with penises?

Another potent factor here is the sense of wishing to absorb masculinity from outside themselves, since they have never developed a strong sense of their own masculinity. What could be more natural than to turn to other men, more masculine men, and have sex with them, since sex is a potent expression of masculinity?

Many of the characteristics of vaginal aversion and sexual inhibition that I mentioned before apply to men in this group as well. As you may know, if you are a man in this group or a partner of a man in this group, these men are also likely not to find a woman's body arousing and to avoid feeling sexual during intercourse.

The first step in dealing with all this is to accept your homosexual feelings and fantasies. Having such fantasies does not make you gay, and they can in fact be quite enjoyable if you can learn to relax into them and accept them! And even if you're with a woman when you start to fantasize about sex with men, if you go with the fantasy, you'll gradually begin to find that you start getting more sexual pleasure from being with a woman. And, as you start getting more aroused by women, your homosexual fantasies will begin to disappear.

Links:

A sexual surrogate may be helpful here. They are women who have the skills and motivation to help men overcome their sexual inhibitions through physical intimacy. This requires special skills - or at the least a very special disposition - and if you go down this road you need to be sure you're protecting yourself from any mishaps. But here's some more information on how to find one. And here's one guy's own account of what happened when he went to see one.

More on late loss of virginity.

Dealing with vaginal aversion.