Friday, May 15, 2015

What is this "over" sexed you're talking about?

My little half-baked dictionary on my computer defines oversexed as "having unusually strong sexual desires". That seems a beige and generalised definition to me. For it to have any relevance, then we'd need to establish a baseline as to what usually strong sexual desires might be.

(Side note: I'm aware all kinds of studies have been done. I'm also blissfully and wilfully unaware of statistics in these matters. Some things can be measured and quantified, and for me, some things shouldn't be. After all, it's not how big it is, it's what you do with it...right? Am I right? I'm right, right? When you're right, you're right...right? Right.)

One of the issues with that particular definition of oversexed is its apparent focus on quantity or frequency of feeling. What about quality? Or range of tastes? A person can feel a completely normal amount of lust, yet feel it for an enormous range of people (and/or objects). A bisexual person has twice the range of lust objects a heterosexual person has. Polyamory, just as a word, sounds oversexed. Yet none of those examples automatically fits the definition. A person can be bisexual but still have a low libido, for instance.

Personally, I gladly and wholeheartedly confess to being utterly oversexed. At least in a mental and emotional sense. Like most people, I don't act on it physically every time I feel the urge. Hell, I'd never get a scrap of work done.

And it's not the bikini-clad models on billboards or the ice-cream-licking strumpets in advertisements that work me over. Blatant overuse of sexuality to sell crap has been pounded so hard it's gone numb.

But it's partly being a writer which has honed my particular oversexedness. A need to try and understand more people, and understand people more. The need to make educated guesses about motivations. Essentially, to sound overtly and tritely male, to get inside them.

Every day, all around me, I see desirable women of all sizes, shapes, ages and colours. Those with a finely tuned fashion sense, and those who, like me, think Jimmy Choo is a character from Thomas the Tank Engine. It's clear, too, that as I've aged, so my tastes have expanded.

Nowadays it's the subtle and unsuspecting sexiness of people around me which gets me all worked up. People as average as myself. In comments with the previous round of posts here, I discovered I was not alone in finding small, rogue slivers of skin to be one of the sexiest visual treats ever (hi, Annabeth!) That moment when a woman takes off her sweater and her blouse rides up a little, revealing a gorgeous plump belly, maybe with a few little stretch marks she'd normally take great pains to conceal. The velvet skin of a throat either side of a black choker. Or the holy grail; the sweet skin of a curvaceous thigh between a skirt and a three-quarter-length stocking.

As a means of contrast...a drunk woman running up to me in the street, pulling out her breasts and shaking them at me would be a sensory assault. A businesswoman removing her glasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose is way sexy. It's those intimacies which really set my pot a-simmerin'. Little nothings that hit hard because that person has let you into them just a little, without even realising it in most cases.

Living in a subtropical city, with its barely-there winters and free-wheeling spirits, those moments arise so very often. On the bus, at the shops, in the park. Taking into account the vast array of feminine physicality which appeals to me, I simply cannot go anywhere without seeing a hundred different moments which hit me.

Moments which provoke in me an unusually strong sexual desire.


16 comments:

  1. I understand those little subtleties that shouldn't turn us on but do. I have an attraction to a chipped front tooth, or a cast to an eye. Of course short skirts, skimpy halters leave just enough covered to evoke mystery. Yum.

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    1. Yes, the cast to an eye is a biggie for me, too. Even more so should the eye in question be coquettishly obscured by funky spectacles.

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  2. I've always thought oversexed was a word men used to keep women in line. Unless its sexual addiction, which has nothing to do with pleasure.

    Actually I think you really hit on something here. It would be interesting to have a story about someone being aroused not by provacative clothing, but sutle glances and glimmers of of this and that. There's something there.

    Garce

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    1. I've always thought oversexed was a word men used to keep women in line.

      Good point, Garce!

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    2. Yes, I had similar intents in mind with the original blog but just didn't find a way to bring them in. It's definitely an apt point.
      And I always strive to keep the subtleties in mind for my more literary-aspiring erotic works. Not so much if I'm striving for smut!

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  3. In my head oversexed meant not only having strong and frequent desires but actually acting on them. This was eye-opening.
    Chandra

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    1. Hey, lovely! Certainly the acting on those desires would be an outward indicator of this strange elusive beast we call "oversexed". I guess what I'm considering in the blog is the weight of desire any or all of us feels, most of the time. And whether thinking about sex qualifies as being oversexed.

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  4. I definitely know exactly what you mean, Willsin. Check out my post from last year, before you joined us, on the topic of fascination:

    http://ohgetagrip.blogspot.com/2014/09/i-cant-take-my-eyes-off-her.html

    I find it interesting that although I'm bisexual, I'm far less fascinated watching guys. Every now and again I'll catch a glimpse of some guy that sparks a response, but it's fairly rare. I guess with men I'm more involved with being the object of desire.

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    1. Wow. Basically every pressure point of fascination you mentioned is one I share, Lisabet. A hot, semi-naked body has some kind of visceral appeal, certainly (unless it's being shoved in your face against your will), but I think most of those little elements you listed are matters of choice. To be born beautiful is a gift of sorts, but it doesn't make a person. To choose those cute glasses and the crop top, or to shave one side of her head, or whatever, become outward displays of inner workings. And a type of intimacy, too - even if it's the intimacy of saying "I don't give a fuck what YOU think, folks!"

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  5. Interesting and entertaining, Willsin, as always.

    My take on oversexed is that, generally speaking, it may be a loaded word rooted in a veiled (or not so veiled) puritanism. Perhaps I could see a "legitimate" use of such a term to describe someone whose life had been taken over by things sexual to an extent that he or she felt unhappy and out of balance; or to describe a marketplace that slathers insincere sex all over everything in an undiscriminating and manipulative way (as you allude to above with advertising). But what I usually hear in the term is a gratuitous, sex-negative judgment against people who feel free to sexually self-actualize, against people with a strong, healthy, self-aware focus on the sexual side of things, or against a culture that is relatively open and honest about the centrality of sexuality in the lives of most adults. (These are just my impressions.)

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    1. Absolutely agree. Oversexing is in the palm of the beholder. Wait...what I meant was...

      But seriously, as Garce said and as you've elaborated, the entire concept of being "oversexed" is probably, in most cases, an artificial construct to either keep others in line or to justify why someone's not gettin' any. "She has more sex than I do? Well, that's just WRONG!"

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  6. "In olden days, a glimpse of stocking..."

    Lust will find something to be sparked by, even if it has to imagine what's hidden. The more that parts of bodies are customarily revealed, the more alluring the customarily hidden parts become. The Ferengi in the Star Trek universe considered it obscene for women to wear any clothes at all, because clothing would stimulate the imagination to speculate on what lay beneath. Okay, this was all wildly satirical (and satyrical?) but still food for thought. (One wonders whether female Ferengi were stimulated by imagining what lay beneath the clothing of males. My theory is that they had better taste than to want to know.)

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  7. I have a vague memory of a comedian who had a routine along these lines. Heck, it might even have been Seinfeld. About how the hiding of certain parts of women's bodies made those parts so much more fascinating. That if women walked around wearing nothing but hats, then porn movies would be filled with lustrous hair.

    Well, probably scalps, really. No unsightly naturalness to interrupt MY jerking off, thank you VERY much!

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  8. "Nowadays it's the subtle and unsuspecting sexiness of people around me which gets me all worked up."

    Hi, Willsin! I love your descriptions in this post in general, but I especially love this description. I'm reading a wonderful novel (not generally erotic) whose narrator frequently comments about the sexiness of people who are concentrating on work. I love that idea and have been thinking about it. I think some of these super-hot glimmers are about unguardedness. That's so sexy.

    And you just about killed me with the idea of the black choker...

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    1. Hey, Annabeth! I totally agree. Intimacy is far sexier than nudity to me, and clearly to many others. And yes...choker...le sigh. I'm not sure of the origin of that particular desire in me. I just know it's there and it's strong!

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