Loyal readers. You’ve been with me since January, less than a month after my fall. I had no idea then that people would be at all interested in my continuing degradation, but we have grown to sixteen-thousand subscribers, which is phenomenal and very moving.
Your raw candid writing, without intervening editors to fuss over it, is the most powerful stuff. This installment on the loss of sexuality expresses a reality I’ve often felt even as I was a sexual creature. I kept to myself my feeling that it was this mad governing force yet it was, as you say, something we spend a disproportionate amount of time on in our lives. How curious, I thought. And now, finally, you’ve written something I know to be true but couldn’t express. That is my definition of genius.
My first spouse and I went off for a weekend together in a vain attempt to save our marriage. In the hotel lobby we had a “chance” encounter with a very wise traveling salesman named Lieberman (“Love Man”). He said something in our very brief conversation I have remembered for half a century:
“Sex is an important part of self expression, but an infinitesimal part of love.”
Love those traveling-salesman-in-the-lobby stories! Wise and witty and on point!
Dr. Sweet, for instance, tells one about a doctor she met once in an elevator - and never bumped into again after the doors opened and closed - who gave her the medical equation that she would carry for the entirety of her career.
<< … Did he have any words of wisdom for me, a medical student?
<< The door of the elevator opened and he stepped in. But he held it open for a moment.
<< We doctors think we’re so important,” he told me, “but the way it works is that in any disease about a third of patients get better, a third get worse, and a third stay the same - and all we do is change who does what.”
<< Then he let go of the elevator door and it closed and I never saw him again … >>
Another fascinating insight into your world, Hanif. I wonder how many other people who are suddenly paralysed feel the same? Can they discuss their feelings? Are there online support groups? And how strange that I can address you as Hanif when you don't know me! We, your readers are all getting to know you very well. I hope it helps you to share
Bafflement, exactly. Turns out what we have believed all our lives to be the essence of who we are, just isn't. What gave us meaning, purpose, direction, vitality, just doesn't. I look back at myself and feel such affection and tenderness, and estrangement. The 'empty core' of Buddhism has always been horrific to me, but the older I get, the more I get it. Ugh, and the more I don't want to get it! For me, the bafflement about who I was is also a bafflement about who I am and what 'essence' I'll shed next. xx
I made some extreme choices on the back of sexual desire. It has mostly eased now and I can see it for the madness it was and the chaos it caused. I don’t miss it. Reading your essay has made me realise that. Sex had a power over me that I feel a bit awed by. Did it make me behave out of character? No - it was my own all consuming flaw! I’m glad I’m no longer at its mercy. I do love that I had it though. It might come back - if it does I’ll know it better this time round which will be interesting. Haven’t thought about it like that until now. Thanks X
'Losing one’s sexuality overnight, in a sudden blow, is like losing a sense' Absolutely! Just thought of that terrifies me... But on the other hand, I know people who've lost sight, hearing, and they can enjoy life too. (Am I just comforting myself with this thought?) Thank you for your writing, Hanif. Sending warm thoughts.
Back in the early 80s, I was 'released' from a spinal unit, aged twenty, into a 'Young Disabled Unit' (average age fifty). After about two months a delegation from Denmark visited to see how things were done over here.
One of the first questions they asked was: 'What happens about sex?'. You could hear a pin drop (aside from the sharp intake of breath). An embarrassed silence ensued. I looked at my nurse and she looked at me as if some sacred taboo had been breached. A word that couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't be mentioned. It was a subject that was obviously considered of prime importance in Denmark, but here in the UK, despite the 'swinging sixties', the experimental seventies, the tabloid obsession, in a care setting, the official line was still: 'No sex please, we're British'!
I am thinking of a characteristically eloquent line, penned by Mark Eitzel in the song 'Love Doesn't Belong To Anyone': “A key that turns you your whole life long...”
It does feel as though the sex drive is a tightly-wound mechanism; a force of nature that exerts itself with great vigour in our early youth and then slowly tapers off through the decades, though some of my friends seem to be in the midst of an Indian Summer; a resurgence. I once spoke to a woman who does outreach to communities that are regarded as vulnerable to HIV (she herself had the disease and had been disowned by her church as a result). She told me that one of the unlikely demographics were people over the age of 50, many fresh out of divorces and, obviously unburdened by the potential for accidental pregnancy, gleefully scattering years of pent-up wild oats.
Eitzel lost a number of friends to AIDS and wrote several songs around his experiences. The most poignant and ridiculous of these (the two states often appear to go hand in hand) is 'All Your Jeans Were Too Tight' which captures him in the act of clearing out the possessions of a dead friend.
“I put my flowers in your window, to hide a world nobody would ever prize,” he reflects, before questioning whether the Soundtrack from Diva is a good album, and expressing his belated sorrow for ever saying “anything about the tattoo.”
'Sick of Sex' by Daisy Chainsaw is a song spinning its wheels in a laboured sonic quagmire of its own making. Its parent CD currently occupies a small stack adjacent to my hi-fi. It is performed by Katie Jane Garside; then an emaciated, khol-eyed, Victorianesque waif, dressed in a torn negligee. Even in this information age, the words to 'Sick of Sex' appear to have been lost in time, though I assume that they are unfavourable.
I worked in a hospital for many years. Occasionally one of my friends would make an off-colour remark regarding the nurses or the female doctors. These people had obviously not spent a great amount of time around nurses, who will perform, with a brusque and impersonal efficiency, acts upon patients that, in a different context, might embody a certain sexual tenor.
Hospitals are largely female-dominated on the employee side of things. While working there, I had my arse grabbed on numerous occasions by female members of staff. I once mentioned this in the comments section of a Guardian article on everyday sexism, only for my post to be deleted by a moderator, who evidently couldn't come to terms with the fact that sexual harassment might not exclusively be male on female.
Sexuality among patients sometimes expresses itself in unwanted or undignified ways. A female patient furtively masturbated under the bed sheets, in front of me, as I was trying to get the name of her GP. There was no malice in it. She had suffered a serious cognitive episode.
I remember another male patient - a predatory individual, who was enabled by his sister, who took pleasure in exposing himself to the nurses and rubbing himself against them; an awful man.
A nurse who had done some work for a private hospital recalled how she had walked in on a teenage female patient having sex with her boyfriend, who she had smuggled into her private room. Both were underage and it caused a lot of problems.
While the sex act might be relativity short lived, the possibility of sex sets the scene for so much in life that society as we know it might as well be regarded as a form of procrastinatory foreplay. The development of the Internet, and arguably other avenues of technology, has been driven mainly by the demand for pornography. Some readers may be aware of Rule 34 of the Internet: “If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions”, and the somewhat contradictory follow-up Rule 35: “If there is no porn of it, porn will be made of it.”
That being said, I am often amused by young men who are adamant that a heterosexual male cannot have a relationship with a woman that isn't to some degree based on sexual attraction. Maybe that is the case when you are young; I don't recall. I several female friends to whom I am not remotely attracted. I can guarantee that the feeling on their side is mutual.
As I get older, the sexual archetype, proffered by Iggy Pop, of “a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm” seems increasingly absurd and out of reach.
I am happy to have the lion's share of my sexual encounters behind me. I still keep my hand in, figuratively speaking.
"It doesn’t follow that I feel no enthusiasm anymore; I do". So good to read those words about enthusiasms generally! Derek Jarman wrote "sexuality is as wide as the sea" - so maybe some currents are different now, or quieter, but your humanity, curiousity and openness are as strong as ever, and sensuality is infinite and ever evolving (you are the guy who wrote of Omar bathing Johnny's bashed up face after all!), and can be tiny subtle things too. p.s. Am sure you have already thought of this but the changes could also perhaps be a side-effect of medications.
Better than pharna and drugs for healing & recovery in the longer term perhaps...there is always sensual experience as well, which is lovely and comforting, but not sexual. Just the gentle touch of hands from loved ones...
It’s physical, hard-wired in from birth, and in maturity driven by the effect of hormones in animals. . .
but also (in animals including humans) psychological, driven by other needs, for closeness, caring, interaction.
It’s evolutionary: in all sexual entities including plants, even to a weird extent in bacteria. Even though some entities can reproduce asexually, the evolutionary tendency is to develop the ability, usually through two sexes, to have some form of sexual interaction that mixes the genomes, and that mixing apparently allows more organisms to thrive and continue the species.
It’s a means of control and asserting dominance for some animals. . . including members of our own species.
And the mix of all these things makes up a part of who we are as humans. I think this is why it has the importance to us.
However, as you have noted, it is just a part of ourselves, and while one may miss the excitement and pleasure it often brings, it is not the only source. And so, we can seek and find those things in other ways, and so you shall.
This is wonderfully written and deeply thought provoking. Someone close to me had prostate cancer and lost all their desire for sex, just like you. He remarked to me how strange it was that it could be turned off just like a light switch. Then his friend got prostate cancer too and had to have the same treatment, in the knowledge that he (who had a very beautiful wife) would lose all desire for sex. My friend told his friend, both of whom had a great sense of humour, ‘don’t worry, it will make you a better person.
I can comment! She shouted (in her head) you always Hanif strike the hammer in the right place. Now I bought into all of that and here it is. We are sexual beings and when the sense of that is absent - to me (and you right now) this takes away our definition / I mean without that energy connecting me to someone else I feel a bit invisible and androgynous- it truly is our life force I think if it is seen at the highest level (and not trapped at the base) ecstasy - that’s the mystery isn’t it. And it may be sleeping in you who is to say? In any case it has come out in your writing - your progress is astounding - you seem to be catching up with yourself - there is a settled thing going on. Now I will just briefly update you on what I am watching and current obsessions- it’s the Ottomans and their empire. Incredible really. The oldest empire I think except for Japan. Power eh. Thank you for your writing especially as you owe me nothing - I am just a poor woman (unless my lucky dip shells out) Happy to witness your recovery and read your thoughts. Big love from a little village in North Yorkshire Maddi xx
Your raw candid writing, without intervening editors to fuss over it, is the most powerful stuff. This installment on the loss of sexuality expresses a reality I’ve often felt even as I was a sexual creature. I kept to myself my feeling that it was this mad governing force yet it was, as you say, something we spend a disproportionate amount of time on in our lives. How curious, I thought. And now, finally, you’ve written something I know to be true but couldn’t express. That is my definition of genius.
My first spouse and I went off for a weekend together in a vain attempt to save our marriage. In the hotel lobby we had a “chance” encounter with a very wise traveling salesman named Lieberman (“Love Man”). He said something in our very brief conversation I have remembered for half a century:
“Sex is an important part of self expression, but an infinitesimal part of love.”
Love those traveling-salesman-in-the-lobby stories! Wise and witty and on point!
Dr. Sweet, for instance, tells one about a doctor she met once in an elevator - and never bumped into again after the doors opened and closed - who gave her the medical equation that she would carry for the entirety of her career.
Can I ask what it was
<< … Did he have any words of wisdom for me, a medical student?
<< The door of the elevator opened and he stepped in. But he held it open for a moment.
<< We doctors think we’re so important,” he told me, “but the way it works is that in any disease about a third of patients get better, a third get worse, and a third stay the same - and all we do is change who does what.”
<< Then he let go of the elevator door and it closed and I never saw him again … >>
I have had similar thoughts about menopause.
I did not lose my sexual feelings after menopause. Quite the opposite.
Right there with you.
Another fascinating insight into your world, Hanif. I wonder how many other people who are suddenly paralysed feel the same? Can they discuss their feelings? Are there online support groups? And how strange that I can address you as Hanif when you don't know me! We, your readers are all getting to know you very well. I hope it helps you to share
Bafflement, exactly. Turns out what we have believed all our lives to be the essence of who we are, just isn't. What gave us meaning, purpose, direction, vitality, just doesn't. I look back at myself and feel such affection and tenderness, and estrangement. The 'empty core' of Buddhism has always been horrific to me, but the older I get, the more I get it. Ugh, and the more I don't want to get it! For me, the bafflement about who I was is also a bafflement about who I am and what 'essence' I'll shed next. xx
I made some extreme choices on the back of sexual desire. It has mostly eased now and I can see it for the madness it was and the chaos it caused. I don’t miss it. Reading your essay has made me realise that. Sex had a power over me that I feel a bit awed by. Did it make me behave out of character? No - it was my own all consuming flaw! I’m glad I’m no longer at its mercy. I do love that I had it though. It might come back - if it does I’ll know it better this time round which will be interesting. Haven’t thought about it like that until now. Thanks X
Always many things to say in response to your pieces. Responses- are they not sex in a sense?
'Losing one’s sexuality overnight, in a sudden blow, is like losing a sense' Absolutely! Just thought of that terrifies me... But on the other hand, I know people who've lost sight, hearing, and they can enjoy life too. (Am I just comforting myself with this thought?) Thank you for your writing, Hanif. Sending warm thoughts.
Back in the early 80s, I was 'released' from a spinal unit, aged twenty, into a 'Young Disabled Unit' (average age fifty). After about two months a delegation from Denmark visited to see how things were done over here.
One of the first questions they asked was: 'What happens about sex?'. You could hear a pin drop (aside from the sharp intake of breath). An embarrassed silence ensued. I looked at my nurse and she looked at me as if some sacred taboo had been breached. A word that couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't be mentioned. It was a subject that was obviously considered of prime importance in Denmark, but here in the UK, despite the 'swinging sixties', the experimental seventies, the tabloid obsession, in a care setting, the official line was still: 'No sex please, we're British'!
The expression goes, You could see the blood drain from the face.
‘Prime importance’ brings to mind the famous ‘Prime directive.’
I am thinking of a characteristically eloquent line, penned by Mark Eitzel in the song 'Love Doesn't Belong To Anyone': “A key that turns you your whole life long...”
It does feel as though the sex drive is a tightly-wound mechanism; a force of nature that exerts itself with great vigour in our early youth and then slowly tapers off through the decades, though some of my friends seem to be in the midst of an Indian Summer; a resurgence. I once spoke to a woman who does outreach to communities that are regarded as vulnerable to HIV (she herself had the disease and had been disowned by her church as a result). She told me that one of the unlikely demographics were people over the age of 50, many fresh out of divorces and, obviously unburdened by the potential for accidental pregnancy, gleefully scattering years of pent-up wild oats.
Eitzel lost a number of friends to AIDS and wrote several songs around his experiences. The most poignant and ridiculous of these (the two states often appear to go hand in hand) is 'All Your Jeans Were Too Tight' which captures him in the act of clearing out the possessions of a dead friend.
“I put my flowers in your window, to hide a world nobody would ever prize,” he reflects, before questioning whether the Soundtrack from Diva is a good album, and expressing his belated sorrow for ever saying “anything about the tattoo.”
'Sick of Sex' by Daisy Chainsaw is a song spinning its wheels in a laboured sonic quagmire of its own making. Its parent CD currently occupies a small stack adjacent to my hi-fi. It is performed by Katie Jane Garside; then an emaciated, khol-eyed, Victorianesque waif, dressed in a torn negligee. Even in this information age, the words to 'Sick of Sex' appear to have been lost in time, though I assume that they are unfavourable.
I worked in a hospital for many years. Occasionally one of my friends would make an off-colour remark regarding the nurses or the female doctors. These people had obviously not spent a great amount of time around nurses, who will perform, with a brusque and impersonal efficiency, acts upon patients that, in a different context, might embody a certain sexual tenor.
Hospitals are largely female-dominated on the employee side of things. While working there, I had my arse grabbed on numerous occasions by female members of staff. I once mentioned this in the comments section of a Guardian article on everyday sexism, only for my post to be deleted by a moderator, who evidently couldn't come to terms with the fact that sexual harassment might not exclusively be male on female.
Sexuality among patients sometimes expresses itself in unwanted or undignified ways. A female patient furtively masturbated under the bed sheets, in front of me, as I was trying to get the name of her GP. There was no malice in it. She had suffered a serious cognitive episode.
I remember another male patient - a predatory individual, who was enabled by his sister, who took pleasure in exposing himself to the nurses and rubbing himself against them; an awful man.
A nurse who had done some work for a private hospital recalled how she had walked in on a teenage female patient having sex with her boyfriend, who she had smuggled into her private room. Both were underage and it caused a lot of problems.
While the sex act might be relativity short lived, the possibility of sex sets the scene for so much in life that society as we know it might as well be regarded as a form of procrastinatory foreplay. The development of the Internet, and arguably other avenues of technology, has been driven mainly by the demand for pornography. Some readers may be aware of Rule 34 of the Internet: “If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions”, and the somewhat contradictory follow-up Rule 35: “If there is no porn of it, porn will be made of it.”
That being said, I am often amused by young men who are adamant that a heterosexual male cannot have a relationship with a woman that isn't to some degree based on sexual attraction. Maybe that is the case when you are young; I don't recall. I several female friends to whom I am not remotely attracted. I can guarantee that the feeling on their side is mutual.
As I get older, the sexual archetype, proffered by Iggy Pop, of “a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm” seems increasingly absurd and out of reach.
I am happy to have the lion's share of my sexual encounters behind me. I still keep my hand in, figuratively speaking.
« ...[the whole of] society as a form if procrastinatory foreplay...» is a very amusing thought!
Okay, y’all. Razor blades all ‘round.
"It doesn’t follow that I feel no enthusiasm anymore; I do". So good to read those words about enthusiasms generally! Derek Jarman wrote "sexuality is as wide as the sea" - so maybe some currents are different now, or quieter, but your humanity, curiousity and openness are as strong as ever, and sensuality is infinite and ever evolving (you are the guy who wrote of Omar bathing Johnny's bashed up face after all!), and can be tiny subtle things too. p.s. Am sure you have already thought of this but the changes could also perhaps be a side-effect of medications.
Wonderfully said, Juliette.
I’ve always admired the way you write about sex. Your openness.
And after reading this, I still do.
Something to look forward too ...one day maybe.
Better than pharna and drugs for healing & recovery in the longer term perhaps...there is always sensual experience as well, which is lovely and comforting, but not sexual. Just the gentle touch of hands from loved ones...
Sex.. . It’s. . . complicated.
It’s physical, hard-wired in from birth, and in maturity driven by the effect of hormones in animals. . .
but also (in animals including humans) psychological, driven by other needs, for closeness, caring, interaction.
It’s evolutionary: in all sexual entities including plants, even to a weird extent in bacteria. Even though some entities can reproduce asexually, the evolutionary tendency is to develop the ability, usually through two sexes, to have some form of sexual interaction that mixes the genomes, and that mixing apparently allows more organisms to thrive and continue the species.
It’s a means of control and asserting dominance for some animals. . . including members of our own species.
And the mix of all these things makes up a part of who we are as humans. I think this is why it has the importance to us.
However, as you have noted, it is just a part of ourselves, and while one may miss the excitement and pleasure it often brings, it is not the only source. And so, we can seek and find those things in other ways, and so you shall.
This is wonderfully written and deeply thought provoking. Someone close to me had prostate cancer and lost all their desire for sex, just like you. He remarked to me how strange it was that it could be turned off just like a light switch. Then his friend got prostate cancer too and had to have the same treatment, in the knowledge that he (who had a very beautiful wife) would lose all desire for sex. My friend told his friend, both of whom had a great sense of humour, ‘don’t worry, it will make you a better person.
Wishing you healing and a healthy body Hanif.
I can comment! She shouted (in her head) you always Hanif strike the hammer in the right place. Now I bought into all of that and here it is. We are sexual beings and when the sense of that is absent - to me (and you right now) this takes away our definition / I mean without that energy connecting me to someone else I feel a bit invisible and androgynous- it truly is our life force I think if it is seen at the highest level (and not trapped at the base) ecstasy - that’s the mystery isn’t it. And it may be sleeping in you who is to say? In any case it has come out in your writing - your progress is astounding - you seem to be catching up with yourself - there is a settled thing going on. Now I will just briefly update you on what I am watching and current obsessions- it’s the Ottomans and their empire. Incredible really. The oldest empire I think except for Japan. Power eh. Thank you for your writing especially as you owe me nothing - I am just a poor woman (unless my lucky dip shells out) Happy to witness your recovery and read your thoughts. Big love from a little village in North Yorkshire Maddi xx