Ask Beastly: Why Sex Matters
My advice for a 53-year-old virgin.
My name is Alexander Cheves. Friends and lovers call me Beastly. I write about sex.
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Why is sex so important? I am a 53 year old virgin and don't miss something I have never had.
Sir,
I am much younger than you and can't tell you what you what's important. You've lived more life than I have. I should be asking you what's important.
No teacher is better than experience, and you have 53 years of experience avoiding sex — no small feat in a world that bombards us daily with sexual messaging. If, after 53 years, you haven't found sex appealing enough to try it, maybe it's not needed in your life. You have had a lifetime of opportunity and have gone without. If you're happy, why change things?
I don't know if you've avoided sex for a religious reason. If you have, I can't help. It's not my prerogative to dissuade anyone from their beliefs. If there are medical reasons why you've avoided sex, again, I don't know what those reasons are, so I can't address them.
If you're capable of sex and not morally opposed to it — if you're simply not aroused at the idea of it — you might be asexual. Asexuality is an emerging identity we are only beginning to understand. Asexuals do not feel human sexuality and connect to people in other ways. Asexuals often experience romantic or emotional connections but are disinterested in sexual ones.
Frankly, there's a lot of information missing from your question. Why have you avoided sex? And what definition of sex are you using? By "sex," do you mean gay sex? Do you mean oral sex? Does all naked physical touching (mutual masturbation, etc.) fall under your definition of "sex"?
Most the world operates with a pretty narrow definition of sex — the penis-in-hole definition ("hole" here refers to any hole, front or back). I encourage readers to expand their definition of sex beyond this narrow one to include any experience that makes you feel aroused with someone else. Some people enjoy painting each other with finger paint. Some people like tickling. Some love watching porn together or giving mutual massage. Whatever. The erotic buffet is endless.
If you've avoided all sex and you are a gay man (I can't tell your sexuality from your question or email address), I'm going to hazard a guess as to why you've avoided sex. Considering your age, you lived through AIDS in the '80s and '90s, and like many gay men, you decided that sex was simply not an option — too dangerous. You've avoided it all this time because you don't want to die.
If that's the case, I can only assure you that modern medicine has changed the reality of AIDS — thanks to activists from your generation, many of whom we lost. I'm HIV-positive and have an active, happy sex life. With modern anti-HIV medication, my life expectancy is the same as an HIV-negative person's. We have made medical leaps in HIV care and prevention. HIV is no longer a death sentence.
However, there are still health risks associated with sex. The risk of HIV persists and meds are costly, although in most of the U.S. and Europe, there are state-funded programs that provide meds to HIV-positive folks for little or no money (I've never paid anything for my meds). And the risk of other STIs like gonorrhea and syphilis is higher for sexually-active gay men.
To be sexually active, you must weigh these risks against the value of sex with consideration of the ways you can keep yourself healthy. These ways include: taking PrEP if you're HIV-negative, using condoms, frequent STI testing, and taking anti-HIV medication diligently if you're HIV-positive. To me, sex is so valuable, and these safer sex practices are so non-invasive and sensible, that I choose to be sexually active, even as an HIV-positive person. Not everyone makes that choice. There's no shame in choosing differently.
I can't speak to the trauma you've faced — I didn't live through the plague years — but I hope I at least provide some comfort that the story of AIDS, after so much darkness, got better. We've reclaimed our sex lives and taken sex out from the shadow of death. We can celebrate sex again.
Even when AIDS was new, intimacy and pleasure were still strongly encouraged for the sick. There are many ways to be intimate with another person that do not directly involve bodily fluids or penetration, and I count these as sex.
If you've avoided all intimacy, I imagine you've lived a lonely life, and I'd encourage you to do whatever it takes to experience intimacy and connection with someone as soon as possible. One of my best recent sex nights was with a friend, and neither of us could bottom or top — penetration was not allowed because of his relationship. So we kissed and touched for hours, and it was beautiful. I'm excited to have that experience again with him. That's a powerful kind of sex everyone should have, where you simply touch someone's body and let them touch yours.
Life is meant to be shared, so any way you are able to connect with someone is valuable and valid, and if it brings you pleasure, it's sex.
I encourage people to do what they want, whether that's sex or BDSM or making balloon animals. I don't encourage people to do what they don’t want to do. When so many religious institutions villainize people for wanting things, I exist simply to remind people that they are free to want whatever they want. That's my job. So if you don't want sex, I won't tell you to want it. And if you do, I'll tell you to seek it right now.
The problem is that you don't really know what you want. You have not given yourself any experience in order to have that knowledge. You do not know if you dislike sex, because you've never tried it. It’s odd to say “I don’t like bagels" when you’ve never eaten a bagel. The very obvious response is, "How, then, do you know you don't like them?" You are doing the same thing. You are saying no to something you've never had, and it would be a shame to be saying no to something all this time that you might actually love.
And this needs to be said: sex isn’t a bagel. Sex is something that connects people all over the world. It drives commerce, weaves together our greatest stories and epics, and marks our best experiences. Some people live for sex. It's inspired the greatest art and is one of the highlights of being human. Refusing bagels is one thing, but refusing sex is something else. You're potentially missing out on a life-defining, life-enhancing experience.
I can't tell you what to value, but I think you should experience sex — the traditional, penetrative kind. If that sex doesn't do it for you after a few tries, expand your definition of sex to include all intimacy, and then your options are literally endless.
Be close to someone. Appreciate their body. Let them appreciate yours. Try not to worry about how your body is perceived. If they give you consent to be close to them and touch them, your body is enough — they want to be there with you. You don't have to get into penetrative stuff if you don't want to. If you do, communicate your desires, get their consent, and try it. You may get uncomfortable and need to stop — that's okay. Try all this a few times and, if you can, with a few different partners before deciding it's not for you.
Try massage. Try porn. Cuddle. If none of that does the job, you may be asexual — that's okay too. No matter what you choose to do, you need connections with humans. Because that's what living is all about.
Love, Beastly