What do you think made you not experience sexual attraction?
It was really a perfect storm of different things.
Part of it is the nature of my attraction from the get go. I just naturally have a lower sex drive than most men. And the way I experience attraction is more similar to how women typically seem to experience sexual attraction, which is that they need a context or a sense of personality before they start experiencing attraction. Even when I watch porn I can recognize and be turned on to an extent by hot people having sex but without some kind of explanation for the sex I have a difficult time getting off. And I don't need much. The title of the video or a little blurb in the description painting a picture of the scenario is enough. And frequently if I don't have a story to go off of I'll just invent one myself.
Another component was my parents, but not in the way you'd likely expect.
My parents were not sex negative. It'd be more accurate to describe them as sex 'neutral' or sex 'null'; moreso my dad than my mom. My mom had perfectly healthy sex talks with my sister and my understanding is that my mom thought that my dad was having them with me. My dad expected me to be the one to initiate those conversations and since I didn't 'Show any interest' we never talked about it.
Eventually I did have some sex talks with my mom, but they were mostly about women's sexuality; stuff like what a period is and various mechanisms relating to reproduction.
But in the absence of sex positivity from the home, the void was filled by the sex negativity of American culture. All this talk about virginity, abstinence, and doing everything to avoid stuff that was 'too sexual' sent the clear message that sex was a largely shameful and taboo thing. And when people can't talk about a thing, people can't learn about the thing. I fostered an incredibly effective avoidant behavior of anything relating to sex.
Tying in to the previous two points was--well it'd probably be best to just explain it.
When I was younger, like five, when I got stressed I would fondle my penis. That's not terribly unusual. But it's not exactly socially acceptable and apparently I did it in the middle of kindergarten one time.
I think my mom handled it about the best that anyone could expect but because of the insipid nature of my culture I put negativity into it. All my mom would do is ask why I was touching my penis. And I didn't really know why I was doing it, but I could tell I wasn't suppose to do it.
But it lead to me going off the deep end. I basically tried to forget I even had a sex. I never looked at my dick. I just pretended it wasn't even there. I sit when I pee so I didn't even interact with it for that.
So a lot of boys discover masturbation because their dick ends up rubbing against something for one reason or another and it feels good so they keep going. But I'd basically removed that method of discovering some of my sexual side from the equation.
Trying to forget I had a sex really was a powerful tool for locking down sexuality. When I started getting random erections during puberty I thought there was something wrong with me but I was too afraid to talk about it so I just hid it. And I believe I was very good at hiding it too, otherwise I probably
would have had a sex talk.
It wasn't until years later when I saw a symbolic representation of the Egyptian god 'Min', who has a constant erection, in a mythology/symbology book that I realized other men had erections too. Which is sad. It took stumbling on a piece of
mythology for me to realize something so basic about
reality.
I was also homeschooled so my contact with other people my age was extremely limited. In addition... The homeschool market and organizations were largely fundamental-christian based. So whether my mom actively sought out christian influence, I suspect mom didn't, that is what I got. And so of course talks about sex would be incredibly unlikely or slanted in a negative direction; from non-parental entities.
I think that covers most of the bases. There're a few minor details here or there but I think this shows my core reasons for not experiencing sexual attraction. My low/particular sex drive, paired with avoiding sexual content, and avoiding exploring my body, created an environment where there was nothing sexual
to elicit arousal or attraction.
Think of it like feeling grief. If you never put yourself in a place where you can experience loss you never have to deal with the feelings so you never become aware of them.
It wasn't until you prompted me to formalize my thoughts, but I don't think I'd ever seen a remotely realistic representation of an erect penis, other than my own, prior to that day I went to Rule 34. I'd been so good at avoiding the subject of sex that I went
20 years without seeing that.
