She could look like this and be standing naked in front of me and I still would head for the hills!
Posted on 12/09/2016 3:19:30 PM PST by nickcarraway
I’ve never been less horny in my post-puberty life than I was the week after Donald Trump won the presidency. Like most progressive people, I felt a lot of things that week: sorrow, terror, rage, disbelief, hopelessness. I had so many feelings that it was like I was playing an unwinnable game of Frogger against all the many and varied ways in which a person can feel like total garbage. Amid all those emotions, though, one that’s almost always with me was conspicuously absent: the desire to be in some sort of sexual contact with a human man, or even with myself.
My sudden will toward abstinence was not out of a Lysistrata-style crusade to bend men to my will for the horrors visited on us and those yet to come. It also wasn’t out of principle, or out of some misplaced sense of self-righteous solidarity. (I will not X unless and until everyone can X safely!) Instead, the very concept of horniness seemed alien and impossible to me, as if creeping fascism had zapped the part of my brain that sometimes thinks sweaty men on the subway smell fantastic. Frankly, I had thought the end of the world would be sexier.
The change was immediate. I called out of work the day after the election, and, while racking my brain for ways I might improve my mood without leaving my apartment, masturbation occurred to me. It’s been my preferred source of quick-fix brain chemicals since the age of 12 because, at the very least, it forces you to think about something you enjoy for a solid five minutes — even if that thing is just, like, getting railed by Joe Manganiello inside your own mind. I peered down at the $200 impulse-purchase vibrator in the top drawer of my bedside table and felt nothing.
Voting rights, reproductive rights, and the various other rights the Trump administration plans to burn to the ground are obviously graver concerns than whether one is more or less horned up than normal. That’s probably why it took a few days for any of my friends to mention their own newly nonexistent sex drives to me. Until then, I gave little thought to whether or not my body’s post-Trump numbness might be a shared reaction. Eventually, though, people started to move from abject horror to abject horror mixed with the occasional dry, grim joke, and that’s when people started admitting (both privately and in the semi-public space of social media) how intimately the election had affected them.
“What are the odds, do you think, that I’ll ever have sex again?” one friend wondered aloud on Twitter. Later, I caught a friend cracking a joke to another about how she and her boyfriend hadn’t both stopped crying and panicking long enough to have sex since the election. So I began asking around, starting with my most libidinous circle of friends — the kinds of people with sex drives I’d expect to survive a nuclear holocaust, along with cockroaches and Keith Richards.
“I’ve had sex once since the election,” said Lauren, 33. “But I kicked the guy out immediately. I just … can’t right now. The election soured men for me more than they already were.” When I asked Jacques, 25 — a gay man and the only person I’ve ever met who seems to genuinely enjoy dating apps — I couldn’t even get the question out before he said, “I don’t want anyone to touch me right now.” His uncharacteristic apprehension was a result of how vulnerable the election results made him feel, he explained: “I think it’s because I tend to be more submissive in bed, and I didn’t want to put myself in a position to be even more defeated, so to speak.”
The post-election cratering didn’t just strike sexually precarious single people, either. Lena, 31, has lived with her long-term boyfriend for almost two years; she describes the frequency of their pre-election sex as “a lot,” but reported that Trump’s win had brought it to an abrupt halt that lasted weeks. “After the election, we went almost a month not just without X, but, like, barely touching. Trump and sex (and assault) were so loudly and constantly associated during the election that I couldn’t get the horrible image of him out of my mind and it 100 percent killed my sex drive.” Trump’s relentless denigration of women may not have cost him the presidency, but it was certainly enough to X up plenty of women’s relationship to their own sexuality (even if only temporarily). “It felt like the dudes who think the existence of women to whom they’re not attracted should be, like, made illegal had won,” Lena went on. “I barely took off my clothes except to shower for a couple weeks. Just thinking about sex made me really, really angry.”
And then there were the practical concerns involved in sex-having. A few friends reached out to inquire about my experience with my IUD (it’s great) and how much it hurt to get it inserted (a lot). When I asked Nina, 27, if the election had affected her sex life, she said, “It doesn’t help having to reexamine pregnancy. Nothing makes me less horny than abortion access being further restricted.” For Amber, 35, “There was this sense that I had, up until that moment, been living a somewhat frivolous life and that frivolity and its attendant pleasures were almost offensive. I got weirdly puritanical, I suppose.” The election’s grand-scale emotional impact and the awareness of its real-life, everyday consequences were a combination that produced extremely bad circumstances for X.
They might be good circumstances, though, for something a bit more tender. Anna, 24, was the only person I spoke with who had had a lot of sex in the election’s immediate aftermath, and she attributed that to the election’s final days coinciding with her falling in love. “We’re long distance, but on Election Night, we were both flipping out and having Skype sex made me feel a lot better. Now he’s visiting me and we’re having tons of sex. It’s a weird juxtaposition — we’re afraid that the world as we know is going to fall apart. But we’re also really into each other, and it’s one of the few things that’s making me feel okay.”
When I set the question to friends at a party last week (I’m great at parties), Nisha, 30, said that the aftermath of the election had helped her see the man she’d been dating for a few weeks as someone she could get serious with. “He knew I was upset and left his office to bring me tea at work and see how I was,” she said. “I’m a woman of color dating a white guy, and him understanding I’d need some support without me having to ask or explain felt big.”
In the weeks since the election, my own revulsion at the idea of sex has also turned into something softer. At first, it felt as if my sex drive was replaced with a deep well of anxiety and dread; like any possibility of goodness or pleasure had been sucked into a vortex of vague, endless peril; like I was suddenly, hopelessly alone. Eventually, the sharpness of those emotions dulled, as though my body was diverting energy away from feeling bad and toward the biological processes required to sustain life. In that space, a desire for personal intimacy crept in — like I could prove the persistence of goodness in the world by identifying it between me and another person.
A disaster of any proportion always helps clarify things in one way or another. If nothing else, one this size gives everyone an opportunity to step up for the people they care about and to be heartened by those who show up for them. My sex drive has returned, but with it has come a specific desire for intimacy with a man who made himself known as a shelter in the storm when I needed one. I’ve never been a person for whom sex and love share an inextricable emotional link, but since my interest in having sex has resurfaced in the past two weeks, even something as simple and fun as sexting feels different — warmer, closer, more valuable. Sex is starting to feel like the antidote to politics, at least in personal spaces, because it’s everything the outside world isn’t right now. Sex is also, thank god, something I can make personally and totally sure a Trump presidency doesn’t take away from me. He already tried his best and failed.
Oh, please, liberal chicks are easy. Always have been, always will be.
But pics would probably help. ;)
She is so far out on the Crazy axis of the Hot Crazy Matrix, that it doesn't matter what she looks like.
No, Priscilla. Trump can never stop you from being a total slut.
Just imagine if Hillary had won and Trump supporters posted articles stating that their plumbing doesn’t work even with a handful of Viagra because the thought of Hillary as president acted like a cold shower of liquid nitrogen and made them shrink like a scared turtle.
Any male who cries and panics about election results should be exterminated from the gene pool.
She could look like this and be standing naked in front of me and I still would head for the hills!
this is so funny!
masturbation occurred to me. It’s been my preferred source of quick-fix brain chemicals since the age of 12 because, at the very least, it forces you to think about something you enjoy for a solid five minutes — even if that thing is just, like, getting railed by Joe Manganiello inside your own mind. I peered down at the $200 impulse-purchase vibrator in the top drawer of my bedside table and felt nothing.
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She wasn’t attracted by her vibrator? I cannot begin to address this woman’s combination of TMI and sheer drama.
My dad once told me a story about my mom, early in their marriage whe they were both under 23 y.o.....how she was mad at him and said he wasn’t going to have sex of he didn’t do “xyz.”
He told me his response was “I am going to be having sex....its just whether it will be with you or someome else.”
The disagreement ended rapido apparently.
That’s weird, because every time I saw Obama give a speech, I had the urge to go take a dump. Not sure why that was. Maybe I should go write a story about it.
I agree....its because they have such low self esteem....woud be my target audience if I were single and out to mingle.....it makes for a lousy long term relationship however.
Watching these snowflakes freak out is getting to be one of my funniest pastimes.
But if her libido were kicking a fetus would have been a casualty.. Over and over, I’m sure.
That line blows up my tablet. Odd.
Gotta think, “My libido, a mosquito ...”
That didn’t work out too well, either.
What level of delusion does it require to believe that Trump has tried and failed to prevent her from having sex? This reminds me about shows I've seen describing obsessive stalkers that are like that. They become obsessed with a famous woman--for example, a TV journalist--and imagine the object of their obsession is sending them messages, talking to them, etc. The reality is that the victim of the stalker has no idea the stalker even exists. Just like this woman--Trump doesn't know she exists, and certainly is not trying to control her sex life.
It has been. Why do you think the left is so adamant about importing voters from the third world?
Ever wonder why there are not large numbers of blacks in Arabia? The Arabians had the sense to cut some very important parts off their male black slaves.
I wonder if Obama’s mother were alive if she would have lost your libido and stopped banging every man in sight who was a Marxist
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