The Awkward

I don’t doubt that, in America, a male losing his sexuality is kind of an awkward thing to behold. Men place so much on their ability to perform, their masculinity, their machismo. I know I’ve got the whole gender thing going on, but I’m still a guy. I was raised a guy, I have guy thoughts, and I have a guy body, and I don’t…necessarily want to get rid of either of those. Even so, here I am.

This is an ever growing collection of the awkward that goes along with this whole experiment. I’ll try to keep it up to date and try to keep things in chronological order as I build the list.

• Admitting it to myself – The conflict here lies in the fact that I’m a sexual person. I like sex. I mean.. I like the idea of sex, even though the act itself usually has the immediate effect of turning me off (I suppose I’d call myself a grey-asexual, in that it’s sort of a grey zone – I like the idea and sometimes it works out with people I really know and trust, but not often). The idea of turning the sex part off, while often intriguing, never really seemed to be actually interesting to me until recently, as I started to feel worse and worse about sex and sexual attention. Admitting to myself that I thought a break from sexuality might be helpful in sorting these things out (this experiment cast as a meditation retreat seems to be pretty common) took a lot of time and effort to actually reach. I think that it will, if nothing else, prove useful.
• Admitting it to James - This is another aspect that took some work, given James’ history with the subject, and my previous reactions to his experimentation. I can’t say they were positive, so much as tolerant. I initially made him start on a low dosage (a quarter of what we started with this time) out of fear of an adverse reaction, but slowly loosened my grip and let him do what he wanted, which I feel is more in the style of our relationship. After all that, it should have been easy to tell him that I wanted to go through much the same thing he had. It was easy, really, I just made it hard in my mind. I had to wait until he was out of town so that I could be awkward over texts instead of awkward in person. That’s one of many things I’d like to change about myself: the inability to confront problems when language isn’t on my side.
• Admitting it to a trusted outsider - K is a friend that I know and love, and both James and I are quite close to him. Like, very close. There are a few reasons that I don’t think a full-on relationship between K and I would not work, not least because I’m married, but they haven’t stopped me from developing some intense feelings, and I had really hoped that this experiment wouldn’t get in the way of them. I don’t think it has, really, though there are other things working against the relationship we do have, such as long commutes on both sides. Even so, working up the courage to inform someone of what was going on ‘cause a bit of internal strife on my end. On the one hand, it’s really kind of personal, and despite the occasionally sexual nature of our relationship, it’s almost always been me on the bottom, so that such a change need not necessarily be made public between us. On the other hand, K really helped me through an intensely emotional period of my life before, and I don’t doubt that this will be equally intense, so it made sense to have him in on the whole venture as a sort of support mechanism. And in case you read this, know that I love you lots!
• Me and my big fat mouth – After having started this treatment, or at least gone past the point of no return in terms of the initial dosage of Depo, I found out that someone with whom I’m quite close, and with whom I share not only a good number of sexual interests, but also an interest to share those, will be out in town in a month or so’s time. When he asked me if there would be the possibility of playing around, my “I should be discrete about the fact that I’m basically going through chemical castration” module was overridden by my “Omigosh that’s hot” module, and I lamented out loud that I wasn’t sure if that would work. It took an awkward conversation, but things seem to be alright, especially since he really appreciates me sharing a lot of the reasons behind this experiment, and is willing to play it cool while he’s in town, even if it means waiting until later for different sorts of exploration.
• Losing friends – This is more of an aspect of the gender thing, but it’s something that troubles me greatly about several of my current friendships. Who on Earth would voluntarily attempt to turn off their libido? A crazy person, I suppose, and friends may have a lower tolerance for crazy than they want to admit.
• Others’ libidos – The one thing I can’t really control about this is the fact that being a non-sexual person is not visible on the outside. It’s not as though it’s painted on my forehead, or the medication has turned me blue or something. This becomes a problem in that others are still sexual people, and dealing with them when the mood turns to sex is pretty damn awkward. Granted this is mostly online, as there aren’t a whole lot of potential partners in real life, and I’ve had to get creative in turning down e-advances. However, it has come up at least once in person, where I’ve had to tell someone to “pet me somewhere else” because rubbing at my crotch was just awkwardly ineffective.