A Sex-Repulsed Sex Blogger

Content note: this post refers to both self-harm and sexual abuse, but doesn’t go into excruciating detail about either, and of course deals with being sex-repulsed as a result of sexual trauma. If that’s gonna be hard for you, give today’s post a miss – as always, your wellbeing comes first! 💙


don’t exactly keep it a secret that I’ve experienced sexual abuse. There’s no shame in having been subjected to that, and I try to be vocal about the importance of consent and the devastating effects its absence can have. I talk about struggling to masturbate and about PTSD symptoms like anxiety, hypervigilance and self-hatred, both on and offline. But one thing I feel vulnerable and frightened to post about is the sex repulsion that so often accompanies sexual abuse.

Among my friends, I am the sex nerd. I am known for loving sex – having it, learning about it, celebrating its importance and beauty. I started a sex blog because I love to think about and write about sex. The fact that I sometimes experience severe sex repulsion is not exactly in line with this branding; even though “sex-positive” and “sex-repulsed” don’t have to be mutually exclusive, it feels incongruent and, frankly, embarrassing. My personal branding aside, I’m a human adult in 2021 and to admit that there are times I find even hints of sexual activity decidedly icky kind of makes me cringe. I’m also worried about lending credence to the perception of all promiscuous people as traumatised individuals who secretly hate sex, and themselves for having it, because there are people who have a lot of sex simply because they really like it. Typically, I am one of those people.

Except when I’m not.

There is nothing about experiencing trauma-related sex repulsion that makes you less sex positive. Our brains are great at finding and remembering patterns; the traumatised brain will link various sensory experiences to memories of abuse, so that the same suffering can be avoided in the future. Fear of, or being grossed out by, sex in response to trauma is common and it’s your brain trying to keep you safe, regardless of your values regarding sexual freedom that exist separately from all that. Going through this doesn’t mean you’re weak and it doesn’t mean you’re permanently doomed to be afraid of sex, either; time as well as counselling and other mental health support can help you to tackle that, if it’s something you’d like to work on. With work, you can decouple the sensory experiences of sex from the abject terror and ickiness associated with your trauma, so you can return to enjoying sex (when and if you want to). I know all of this, and I say it to you compassionately, but I struggle to believe it when I say it to myself.

It sneaks up on me. I find my interest in sex education-y content waning, but chalk it up to unusually-limited processing power, and wanting to “save that for when I’ll actually absorb the information”. When my fiancée, who I live with, suggests sex or kink things, I end up giving her a thousand reasons why “not tonight” – I’m tired, my joints hurt, I just ate and my stomach is still full, anything that makes it clear it’s nothing to do with her or my attraction to her. I kind of convince myself that the reason I give her is the only reason, because I don’t want to dig into why sex and kink seem unappealing. I ignore porn on my Twitter timeline and assume it’s because, you know, there’s a lot of porn around and I’m looking for news. Eventually, though, I run out of excuses, or get tired of making them, and I acknowledge that I am experiencing a problem. It becomes apparent that the thought of sex makes me increasingly anxious, and that my own arousal in particular triggers a desire to just turn inside out, escape my own body somehow. Trying to engage with sex and kink when I’m in this state is likely to give rise to thoughts of self-harm, and/or dissociation. And then I have to ask myself: do I care?

Once I’m sufficiently sex-repulsed, usually through a refusal to address whatever is triggering me, sex is scary and gross on an animal level, and it takes effort to walk my brain back to a state of neutrality around it. I realised recently that one of the reasons I typically immerse myself in sex ed materials and kinky communities is so that I can’t reach the level of disconnect I’m currently at, and can instead maintain near-constant contact with the bit of my brain that actually likes and is not scared of sex. Once I’m this far out to sea, though, I’m well aware of how much effort it will take me to swim back, and I’m too disconnected from the liking-sex part of me to actually want to put that effort in, because I can only understand on the most abstract of levels that I will enjoy sex again, but that the longer I wait the harder it is. The more often I’m triggered by sex or kink things, the more closely my brain links sex and suffering, as is always the case with encountering triggers outside of a very purposeful interaction with them. It’s therefore necessary for me to find ways to encounter sex/kink things without spending the whole interaction in fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode, if I can actually find the motivation to arrange those encounters.

So what now? Well, tonight I’m going to a very familiar kink event populated by very familiar people, with the option of hiding or leaving if needs be. Things which are specifically sex-related are really challenging for me to engage with, but the biggest challenge is engaging with my own arousal, so I think a good first step for me is to engage with educational media rather than strictly erotic media. Hopefully, the familiar educators whose content I follow will reassure my brain that sex is not a faraway scary thing, but a familiar and safe part of my life. From there, I also have to, at some point, try to actually do sex things with my actual body. I can’t even contemplate having solo sex yet, so I imagine I’ll end up doing some kink things with my fiancée that maybe do or maybe don’t escalate into sex-and-kink things, since she is also very familiar and safe-feeling. Eventually I’ll be back up to my neck in sex ed stuff, kink plans and orgasms, but I am going to try and take it slowly to avoid reinforcing the stress response.

Wish me luck!

Am I A Victim Or A Survivor?

Note: this blog post discusses, but doesn’t go into detail about, trauma resulting from being the victim and/or survivor of abuse. If that’s tricky for you, ignore this blog post but watch my Twitter for other, sexier posts in the future!


Originally, this blog post was going to be one word long, and that single word was going to be “yes”. But that seemed a tad bit brief for a blog post, so I thought I’d go into a little more detail.

Y’all know I dislike binaries. The victim/survivor binary might not look so much like a binary, but it is one, because it’s a pair of uncomfortable, mutually exclusive boxes, neither of which I can cram my traumatised little self into – and I’m sure that’s the case for other people, too.

A lot of people who have survived things want to call themselves survivors, and I personally have very little interest in policing the language that individuals use to describe their experiences of the world. I also understand the impulse to reframe trauma so that instead of being something that happened to you, it’s something you actively engaged with and survived. That puts you in more control of the world around you, and highlights how vicious of a fight it can be to make it through trauma alive. I get it.

What I don’t get is the insistence that survivors of trauma are only that, and not also victims of it. People shy away from the word “victim” as though it’s contagious, and I know that they’re trying not to step on the autonomy of already-traumatised individuals by using language they disprefer or by implying that they simply passively endured their trauma. The problem comes when someone wants to describe themselves as a victim and then they’re contradicted by people who think that the word “victim” is disempowering.

Listen, for other people, I’m sure it is disempowering, and it’s not the word I default to for referring to every individual survivor (I usually tend to refer to them with their names). But for me, personally, it’s not disempowering. It feels accurate. I don’t feel like I passively endured my trauma – I feel like I fought with it, and I do feel like I survived – but I do feel like I have been a victim. I have been intentionally selected from a world full of people by abusers looking for the easiest target within arms’ reach. I have been victimised repeatedly, assigned the experience of the victim by people who had more power than me to decide our roles. For me, the word “victim” is helpful.

The thing is, I survived my trauma, sure. I fought against it wherever I had the strength. But I also survived by doing things I’m not proud of, lying and screaming and hiding, and through unique combinations of privilege and sheer luck. There are plenty of people who wouldn’t have survived my trauma, and that’s no fault of their own. I don’t want to imply that I’m stronger than people who die at the hands of their abusers by celebrating my feat of survival. I do want to celebrate my survival, don’t get me wrong, but that usually involves a sarcastic toast to people who’ve wanted me dead every birthday and graduation, rather than any particular label I give myself.

The other thing that gets under my skin about victim discourse is the notion of “playing the victim”. This is a sort of vague and nebulous concept that seems to be applied at random to people who are having a whine, people who are rebelling against legitimate injustice, people who are disagreeing with you, etc., etc. Someone who is “playing the victim” is implied to be illegitimately casting themselves in the role of victim when in fact they are the antagonist, but it’s a very convenient trio of words to apply to someone you are in the process of abusing. The way that “playing the victim” gets thrown around creates an even more hostile environment for people recovering from trauma to discuss their experiences, because we already do enough second-guessing ourselves about who the true aggressor was (hint: it wasn’t the traumatised person) and we already convince ourselves that our feelings of hurt, mistrust, fear, injustice, anger, grief, etc., are a melodramatic response to a situation in which we weren’t really the victim.

“Victim” is a helpful word for me because it helps me to understand my role as someone who was victimised, who was harmed by inescapable power dynamics and choices made by human beings. “Survivor” is a helpful word for me because it reminds me that I fought, that I didn’t just allow my trauma to happen to me but that I actively survived the process of victimisation. I think we need both words! I just also think that if you ever correct someone’s self-description from “victim” to “survivor”, you’re being a dick, because while both of those words can be accurate, it’s polite to use the one that a person actually supplies to you – kinda like pronouns, and names, and most other principles of addressing or referring to someone politely.

(That’s pretty much the only politeness rule I know, on account of being an autistic gremlin with little interest in social niceties but some interest in communicating compassionately and effectively with other humans. Just… believe people when they tell you who they are.)

Being Alone With Arousal

Note: this post talks about my eating disorder, including mentions of purging through vomiting, and my experiences of being sexually abused, including subsequent dissociation and general difficulty being alone with arousal. If any of those are tough for you, give this one a miss – I’ll be back on Saturday with a post about why you might find more autistic people than you’d expect in your local kink scene!


My fear of wanking came up in eating disorder therapy.

This is not wholly a surprise. Lots of things come up in eating disorder therapy, because eating disorders are deeply rooted, born of decades of cultural conditioning, dysfunctional coping mechanisms and adverse childhood experiences. But the more I’ve reflected on it, the more I’ve come to realise that my fear of wanking and my fear of food are two heads on the same beast.

One common starting point for eating disorder therapy is to consider what we’re actually afraid of. In my first round of it, two years ago, we unpacked a lot of my internalised fatphobia and my fear of taking eating to its extremes, which is an offshoot of my anxiety: it’s pretty common to consider the logical, if unlikely, extremes in any scenario. But I only got six sessions, and we didn’t have time to dive any deeper.

This time, I get a whole eight.

The thing that scares me about food is that I enjoy it. Enjoying things, I have learned, is scary and dangerous and often has real and terrible consequences. Having lived with abusers during a few critical formative periods, I learned and internalised that nothing good is without cost and that the more pleasant the calm is before the storm, the more devastating the storm will be. Best not to let my guard down, enjoy anything too much, or trust my senses to tell me when something is safe or nice.

Then there’s the complicating factor of having learned to wank through being groomed. As well as reinforcing my existing belief that my own sensory pleasures must always come at a cost, it created some really specific associations between the physical act of masturbation and a strong sense of danger. Specifically, fucking myself with an object when nobody is watching feels so wrong that it’s akin to practising a secret handshake on your own,  and fucking myself with fingers is very much the same. If there’s no webcam between my legs, nobody watching my face and nobody talking dirty to me – if there’s no audience to validate my pleasure and benefit from it – it not only feels asymmetrical and disconcerting, but dangerous.

Indulgence has always led to violence in my life.

I am now, of course, free of all the abusers who have made and reinforced that connection, but that doesn’t undo it. It’s wired into my brain like the connection between an object flying at one’s face and one’s inclination to duck. And because I’ve had so much else going on, and so many spectators available to me, I haven’t had time to rewire it.

Being horny alone feels like being in pain. It’s frightening and distracting and I don’t want it. If I do attempt to masturbate, I usually dissociate, failing to orgasm and also failing to feel my own face or entirely remember where I am. If I don’t, I have this constant nagging sensation somewhere in my physiology that feels like an alarm going off, reminding me that indulgence is possible, and therefore, so is danger.

I am fucking sick of it.

I wrote out a plan for a Masturbation Boot Camp (and yes, I titled it exactly that) which instructs me to spend day zero practising mindfulness, day seven touching my body and exploring sensation, and day fourteen actively attempting to come, with every day in between requiring an incremental step towards these goals. I showed it to my tipsy, dyslexic girlfriend, who saw straight through me and said, “And how much of this is procrastination so you don’t actually have to wank?”

It’s a great idea and it’s one I’m going to try, but she’s right. I live in fear of my body and the pleasure I can experience within it, and even the idea of self-massage or watching porn for fun fills me with sickening dread. I suck at most mindfulness activities because, between the chronic pain, the chronic trauma and the violations I’ve been subject to when I have indulged in pleasure, I don’t want to be in my body. I don’t want to ground myself in it. It’s a horrible place to be.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any other vessels to contain my soul (this is a Kingdom Hearts joke), so I’ve got to get used to this one.

I’m getting better at indulging in food, and even at indulging in food without punishing myself. Sometimes I devour cheap kebabs with gusto, and sometimes I go halvsies on a £27 Hotel Chocolat Easter egg with my partner and savour tiny mouthfuls of gourmet chocolate. I’ve managed to bully myself out of the bulimic practice of purging my meals – at first, this was because I was and am on oral hormonal birth control, and consider it a consent violation to jeopardise that without notifying anybody who might jizz in me, but over time, once I’d detached the act of eating from the act of puking, the mere hassle of purging became enough to deter me from it. Eating can still be a challenge, but it’s a rewarding one.

I’ll get back to y’all about my success with Masturbation Boot Camp. I’m hoping it’ll be a challenge, but a rewarding one, and I’ll learn to indulge in self-pleasure like I’m about to indulge in a sliver of salted caramel chocolate.