Have you ever been in a relationship with someone with dysfunctional views on this topic [NSFW]?

I think the closest I have come to a partner who had dysfunctional views about sex was a man who was very into watching porn. It wasn’t really extreme, but he enjoyed things that were pretty annoying. Pulling on nipples, wanted to have anal sex (which I could not do at all with him) wanted a blow job every time we were having sex, couldn’t ejaculate within a reasonable time (which I now have learned is not that unusual for porn obsessed men, and they also can have trouble getting hard and staying hard). I feel he lost his enjoyment of sex by watching porn all the time. I could go into even more detail, but I will just leave it at that. He wasn’t so weird about sex that it seemed perverted, just more annoying. Or, more extreme than most men on the visual, which men already tend to be so visual that can be annoying too.

I dated a woman when we were in our early twenties who was completely conflicted. On the one hand, she drank excessively and was sexually voracious but never initiating; on the other hand when sober she felt a great shame.

And when she was home alone and had a few drinks in her, she would call me at odd hours and want me to come over and talk dirty to her and have sex. The next day she’d call and apologize profusely.

We didn’t go out for very long.

I have a problem with the word “dysfunctional”. That’s most often a clinical used to describe a specific problem. I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.

In my experience, I have been with women whose libidos (and predilections) were different from mine. Sometimes stronger in different ways, and sometimes weaker. I wouldn’t say they were dysfunctional in any clinical way – it was more a matter of “different strokes for different folks”.

Or maybe, as an old friend once said – relationships are like ocean liners crossing the sea. Sometimes you’re going in the same direction for a while, but eventually we each turn to out own port.

In any event, my experience is not with dysfunction, but rather different tastes at different times in our lives.

A few weeks into my relationship with my ex, he started talking about sex and I had to tell him that I had a vaginal injury and that sex wouldn’t be safe or fun for me at that time. I should have mentioned it before getting into a relationship, but I was dumb and young and didn’t know how to handle the situation. He was OK with it at that time.

Six months into the relationship he started being pushy about it again, dropping subtle hints that he was not willing to wait much longer. My injury was not as painful anymore but the thought was still scary to me and I didn’t really want to do it. He brought up anal and I told him that’s not an option for me also because of my health, and he argued about it with me because he had googled my condition and the internet told him it was safe for me to have anal sex. Ugh. I very nearly broke up with him then and there, but I was a pushover and said I’d talk to my doctor about my vaginal injury even though I really didn’t want to have sex. Doc said it was okay and I was out of excuses – as if I actually needed one. I had cripplingly low self esteem and thought he deserved some kind of medal or something just for waiting six months. I don’t know, I was stupid.

With the start we had, I don’t know that I ever could have gotten to a point of enjoying sex with him. But the whole thing was made worse by the fact that he did not, as a rule, masturbate. He never had and didn’t want to start, he thought it was gross. He liked to say he was “so straight that even masturbation felt gay” (ugh). Is it weird that I find this statement really alarming? His discomfort with his own body seemed so fucked up to me. He wouldn’t kiss me if I had gone down on him. Some kind of deep-seated homophobia? I don’t know.

So I was in this terrible position of not really enjoying sex but being his sole source of sexual satisfaction. If I tried to say I wasn’t in the mood he would pull the “please please please” bullshit and I would always cave because I was like that at the time.

When I broke up with him, it was in large part because I had begun wondering if I was asexual.

I’ve been very surprised to find out, with my current boyfriend, that I actually like sex very much.

To clarify the question, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a high or low libido – that’s not what I’m getting at here. I don’t have a specific definition of “dysfunction” in mind – just interested in hearing about anybody else’s partners who had some kind of fucked up view about sex – I realize that’s very subjective.

@Mariah He was screwed up, although I don’t think that sort of thing is very uncommon. I have known a couple guys who say they won’t masturbate, which I find alarming also. Women are there for them to get their release, it is like they are masterbating inside of us, which is awful. However, your experience of feeling pressured to have sex would not be that unusual even if the guy seemed nornal about sex otherwise. Young men want to have sex usually and become impatient. Your ex does seem to be a little dysfunctional though, I have to agree, and incredibly selfish. Not so much because he wanted to have sex, because like I said the majority of young men expect sex inntheir relationships, but that he really could care less if you were in pain and that your fear was completely understandable.

I’m glad you have a better time of it with your new beau!

@Mariah Unfortunately, a lot of that sounds like normal teenage boy macho nonsense. Shitty, yes, but not fucked up in any non-normal way if that makes sense. They’re trying to be men and have a bunch of fucked up ideas about what a man does that have been thrust on them by society. Sex is a necessity. Cum is a waste product. Blah blah blah. Plus he’s got his hormones kicking his rationality as hard as possible at every opportunity. A lot of them grow out of it, a few never had it, and the rest become the predators and assholes of the adult world.

The masturbation line was almost certainly a lie, though. “Too straight to masturbate” is like “too religious to masturbate.” It’s just a social mantra with very little connection to reality. Boys masturbate, and boys lie about masturbating. Some lie out of shame. Others lie out of machismo. The ones who actually abstain are the ones who have some history of physical or sexual abuse holding them back.

I am the sexually dysfunctional one. However, I think it would qualify as clinical. It’s pretty much due to my PTSD and effects of childhood abuse. I have been dealing with this for 26 years since the PTSD symptoms started cropping up. Sometimes (very rarely) I can be very sexual. But most times my libido is non-existant. I have a lot of shame tied up in it. It sucks. And before you mention therapy. I was in therapy for this for a good 10 years.

I was engaged to a homosexual in deep denial. This man wasn’t physically attracted to me and had no interest in “straight” sexual relations.

I use the word “homosexual” because I reserve “gay” for someone who’s accepted and come to terms with his/her orientation. A gay person might choose to be private (what some call “closeted”), but that person knows that he/she is gay.

Why was I stupid enough to get myself in such a situation? First, the guy hid his tendencies well; until our relationship became very close, I really didn’t know. Second, we’d had an unusual courtship. We dated for a few months, then he spent 6 months out of the country for business. During his time away, we wrote everyday and thought we’d fallen in love. Shortly after he’d returned, he proposed. Third, I had just recently ended a long, aimless relationship with someone I’d loved deeply, so I was vulnerable, ignoring my common sense, and not thinking with a full brain.

I grew up in a Catholic family and there was a bit of guilt and shame about our bodies. When I started dating and wearing make up, I felt completely rejected by my father. The good thing about it was that my Mom was REALLY cool about it. She grew up in a sexually liberal French family and even my grandfather (her father) talked freely to me about sex and boys. I knew I could go and talk to her about any problems I was having with a boy or with my own feelings. For them, it was just a natural part of life that I would get to enjoy when I was old enough. I waited until I was almost 18, as it turned out, and I’ve been very particular about who I jump into bed with. I think I’ve been lucky and that I haven’t connected with anyone that has had any horrible hang-ups. I don’t think that type of person would get anything more from me than a handshake.

I was in a long term relationship with a guy who was a bit of a control freak, but the sex was pretty great. He was super fit and sexy. He had to keep stimulating himself to keep himself erect during foreplay and that took a bit to get used to. I used to wake up to the bed wiggling. It was him, wanking in his sleep. Kinda funny when I think about it.

With one of my exs, the first time I had an orgasm, he teased me about it the next day, said I was “flopping like a fish out of water.” Embarrassed the hell out of me.

Also, the first time I initiated sex he made comments the next day that made me feel ashamed. Among other things he said, “Boy, you must have really been thinking about one of your old boyfriends last night!” The second (and last) time he shoved me away and said, “I’m not a light switch you can just turn on and off!” The relationship was still new so we were having sex pretty much every day…initiated by him. But I had never said those words to him! He must have been channeling an ex of his.

I cut it off not long after that.

Yeah. Fucked up.

@Dutchess_III Wow, those are some really messed-up experiences.

I know. He was pretty immature in a lot of other ways, too. Like I said, it didn’t last long.

@Dutchess_III That does suck. He’s got more problems than anyone could deal with.

Well, that’s someone elses problem now!

Yeah, but’s still sad someone has to deal with him.

I too cannot decipher ”dysfunctional”, what is dysfunctional to one, is the cat’s meow to another; so the question cancels itself out to me.

A few weeks into my relationship with my ex, he started talking about sex and I had to tell him that I had a vaginal injury and that sex wouldn’t be safe or fun for me at that time. I should have mentioned it before getting into a relationship, but I was dumb and young and didn’t know how to handle the situation
Big red flag, here are your walking papers. Why did he have to know that before the relationship if we wasn’t in it for the sex? Walking papers…….don’t let the doorknob hit you where the good Lord sits you on the way out.

Right, I clarified above that dysfunctional is subjective.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable in your 20’s to anticipate that a long-term relationship might lead to sex. I was definitely in the wrong (at that step) for not informing him of my limitations earlier. Oh well.

It makes me sad that many people seem to consider his behavior average. I am glad I am now with a guy who has enough empathy that he would be upset if sex were uncomfortable for me.

I wanted to answer this question the other day, because this is a subject that hits close to home. By the time I was nearly finished with an insanely long answer, my computer crashed. Actually, there are a couple different things here I want to address, so I’m going to split it up into different answers.

You said:

With the start we had, I don’t know that I ever could have gotten to a point of enjoying sex with him. But the whole thing was made worse by the fact that he did not, as a rule, masturbate. He never had and didn’t want to start, he thought it was gross. He liked to say he was “so straight that even masturbation felt gay” (ugh). Is it weird that I find this statement really alarming? His discomfort with his own body seemed so fucked up to me. He wouldn’t kiss me if I had gone down on him. Some kind of deep-seated homophobia? I don’t know.

So I was in this terrible position of not really enjoying sex but being his sole source of sexual satisfaction. If I tried to say I wasn’t in the mood he would pull the “please please please” bullshit and I would always cave because I was like that at the time.

I’m also disheartened that people think this is normal. Maybe he is dysfunctional for not wanting to masturbate, but that kind of seems like an incidental side problem here.

The really damaging part, I think, is that he pressured you into sex that you didn’t want. It sounds like he did it again and again and again, and that he made you feel guilty for not wanting to (“he deserved some kind of medal.”)

Here’s something I’ve never understood. Why are we up in arms if a guy forces himself on a woman, but nobody really cares if he uses subtler tactics to get the same result? (Sex that he wanted but she didn’t.) And why do women allow this to happen?

This happened to me in two relationships when I was younger. It’s hard to explain what it feels like to have sex you know you don’t want. It’s this queasy feeling of icky repulsion, like your desire shrivels up and dies. I read an article that described it as “every time he tries to touch you, it’s like his hands are covered in cheetos dust.”

Nobody talks about it. The only time our culture seems to brush on it is those “how to save your marriage” articles in women’s magazines, where one person loses their desire for their partner. Just about every time, they’re advised to “compromise” or “schedule date nights,” which is a feel-good way of saying they should just go through with it.

@JLeslie‘s answer up above was pretty telling. She said:

Women are there for them to get their release, it is like they are masturbating inside of us, which is awful. However, your experience of feeling pressured to have sex would not be that unusual even if the guy seemed nornal about sex otherwise.

Which is the two-sided coin I’m talking about here. On the one hand, having sex you don’t want feels awful and dehumanizing. But on the other hand, the messages in our culture say that it’s normal.

Why does it keep happening?

Being pressured for sex is pretty widespread and people talk about it openly. But when it happens in a relationship, suddenly it’s a secret that you’re dealing with alone. I really want to understand this.

All I have is anecdotes (Q&As from @Mariah and @JLeslie in this thread, furtive stories from friends, advice columns for women) plus my own experiences. Nobody wants to say that they consented to sex they didn’t want, because that’s two failures: a failed relationship, and failure to stand up for yourself. And people usually don’t see what the problem is; after all, you did say yes. And at some point, you chose this guy.

It comes down to socialization, the different expectations that boys and girls are raised with and the way that’s reinforced in our lives. Girls are taught to be cooperative and to value relationships/family as a life goal. Traditional toys for girls are baby dolls and dollhouses, and traditional kid’s movie for girls has getting the guy as the main plot of the story. For boys, their childhood things encourage action and adventure. This article explains how it is damaging:

Boys are told from a young age that whatever they do will be excused under the “boys will be boys” mantra, and that mentality leads to what I call the “boiling frog” problem of women’s sexual boundaries. If you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump right out, but if you put a frog into a pot of room-temperature water and slowly heat it, the frog will acclimate as it heats and never jump out, eventually boiling to death. Similarly, when we learn as young girls to tolerate “low-level” boundary violations like the ones we often are forced to suffer in silence at school, at home and on the street – bra-snapping, boob-grabbing, ass pinching, catcalling, dick flashing “all in good fun” relentless violations that adults and authorities routinely ignore – it makes it harder for us to notice when even greater boundaries are being violated

It follows you into adulthood. If you’re a woman, there’s an implicit expectation for you to be in a relationship, and to be agreeable. I looked back on my past experiences and thought, if it sucked so much, why didn’t I just leave? But basically, everyone around me but me seemed to be on board with it. Friends and relatives will ask stuff like, “so, are you seeing anybody?” and be disappointed if you’re single. Or they’ll say stuff like [hisname] is such a great guy, you two are so cute together.

We’re so excited for people when they get engaged, married, or have kids. We celebrate it with weddings, engagement parties, baby showers, bachelor/ette parties, and anniversaries. But if someone is single for a long time, we wonder if something is wrong. We’re only a couple generations removed from times when a woman needed a husband for financial security, when marriage was a baseline expectation, and when nobody wanted to be an old maid. We’ve been building society and families on marriage since time unknown. Stuff like celebrity relationships and royal weddings are a spectator sport. Nearly all of our stories- fairytales, novels, action movies, and fucking romcoms especially- end in a relationship. How many love songs are there, and how many happy single person songs are there?

Against all that, there’s only your own unhappiness. I’ve heard enough times before, “this relationship/ my marriage is so great, and he’s perfect, except for this one small thing.”

In that situation, women have a couple things going against them: 1) nobody talks about it, so they feel alone and have nobody else’s experiences to guide them. When you feel alone, it is hard to trust your own instincts. 2) the world wants you to be together. 3) your partner is pressuring/ manipulating you, and you’ve been subtly taught all your life to be cooperative. 4) If it’s your partner pressuring you, people don’t see anything wrong with it.

So a woman in this situation pretty much has to figure it out all by herself.

These posts make it seem like I think men are monsters and women are helpless victims, and that’s not how I feel at all. It’s more like we’re all caught in a web. All the generations before us helped make it, but no one person was completely responsible. Mothers raised sons just as much as fathers raised daughters, teachers taught children, and all of them in some way reinforced these expectations of men and women.

When it happened to me, I don’t think either of those people realized how they were making me feel. I think all they realized was, they wanted sex, and they should keep trying until they got it, using any means they could think of. They would pressure, manipulate, make me feel guilty, threaten to end the relationship, sweet talk, say it was really “for me,” etc- this relentless barrage from the first time I said no until I finally gave in. If I continued to say no, it would turn into loud arguments, anger, and accusations- it was really easier just to say yes.

The moment you begin to pressure someone, that’s the beginning of them losing desire for you. Both of the exes where this happened thought I just had a naturally low sex drive, and that we should “compromise.” But from the very first time it happens, subconsciously, it’s like “this person puts his boner above my well-being,” and it never gets better after that. Once they’re the author of that icky cheetos dust feeling, there’s no coming back from it.

Maybe it’s too late for our generation, and the best we can do is try to recognize and avoid these patterns. But for the next generation, I feel we have some responsibility to teach them better behaviors, or warn them at least. If nobody tells you about something, the only way you can learn is the hard way.

@Haleth Here’s something I’ve never understood. Why are we up in arms if a guy forces himself on a woman, but nobody really cares if he uses subtler tactics to get the same result? (Sex that he wanted but she didn’t.) And why do women allow this to happen?
Tackling the first part, for a guy to be able to talk her out of the cookies makes him a “player”, a real “pimp daddy”, someone smarter than the “mark” (the woman he will soon bed for the night). Why does this happen? Fear of loss vs the desire to gain. Women fear losing the relationship with the douche bag man more than they desire to have some cajones and command their dignity. If she says “no” on Monday, he might fire her and she will be alone, then when she is horny on Thursday, there is no one to have sex with. In between time she has no ”special person” to chat with, because he left to go find some woman ready at the drop of a dime to serve him whenever he is ready; that is why women allow it to happen.

@Hypocrisy_Central – isn’t that the question in all sorts of different areas?

For instance, we would never allow someone to come up and frisk us going into a McDonalds, but when we get the the airport, we put up with the TSA.

We would never let a person take 30% of our salaries jsut by walking up to us, but we let the IRS do it every month,

And so on and so forth. It’s all situational and it’s all about how gradual it is. Surely you have heard the folktale about the frog in bouiling water.

It’s about convincing, not forcing.

@elbanditoroso […isn’t that the question in all sorts of different areas?
Yes, I would agree with that fully. With most occurrences it is by the choice of the person of which it is directed.

For instance, we would never allow someone to come up and frisk us going into a McDonalds, but when we get the the airport, we put up with the TSA.
In both cases it would be the choice of the person. If I knew I would be frisked going to get my Big Mac, but knew I could get a Quarter Pounder without being frisked, I would get the Quarter Pounder. People do not feel as desperate finding something to eat as to subject themselves to being frisked over a hamburger and fries. They don’t have to fly, they can take a train or drive, but most people are too lazy or too impatient to take that much time traveling, so for the expedience or ease of travel they put up with having to be there hours before the jet leaves and being frisked like they stole something. They fear being in a car for 6 hours more than they do being frisked at the airport to be in the air for 90 minutes; when they calculate the time they waited in the terminal, and on the tarmac waiting to take to the air, they may not have saved as much time as they thought, and to save an hour or so they got frisked as if they were home in the dark with a lover.

We would never let a person take 30% of our salaries jsut by walking up to us, but we let the IRS do it every month,…]
Law is a little trickier. One really doesn’t have a chance to opt out of the taxes without the penalty of losing one’s freedom. Of course, everyone could get fed up and demand a change in the law but fear wasting their time lobbying for it or attending meeting than gaining tax relief, so they pay year after year.

@Haleth I enjoy your analysis on this very much, thank you.

It’s hard for me to assign “blame” in my case. He was pushy about sex, but I was a pushover when I should have stood up for myself, and I did a bad job communicating my feelings, so who knows if he even knew what he was doing. Did he know he was coercing someone who didn’t really want sex? It’s hard to say. I thought I made it clear, but when I eventually tried to talk to him about how the whole debacle had made me feel, he was shocked and oblivious.

Why was I such a pushover? It’s not as though my beliefs line up with my actions. I don’t believe women owe their boyfriends sex, I really don’t. But it’s different when that woman is you. Was it fear that he’d leave? Partially, but I don’t think that was the biggest part. My feelings for him were never even that strong, I definitely wasn’t of the mindset “I’d to anything to make him stay” or something.

More than anything, it was me undermining my own feelings and trying to be some kind of culturally-defined “normal.” I still have some kind of self-esteem issue where I don’t trust my own judgment to be “normal” – I see myself, my feelings, my behavior, as really unusual, because I have been treated like I am unusual, for whatever reason, for my entire life. I don’t want to put people through the “hassle” of dealing with my unreasonableness, so I hide my feelings away. I look to the media, things I read, things I hear about, to define normal for me. Those sources told me that normal is letting your boyfriend have sex with you long before you’ve been together for six months, and having a sex drive that desires sex more than once per week. I didn’t want to be weird, I didn’t want to be unreasonable.