Nymphomania

I wake up in the morning and think about sex. I go to bed at night and the last thing I think about is sex, which is just as well because it reminds me to take my contraceptive pill! I get in the car and go to work and think about sex. I have conversations on the way to work that make me think about sex. Every time I go to the toilet, I think about sex. I actually have to think about sex because of my job let alone the fact that I write about sex. When I am with my lover, my thoughts about sex increase from the frequent to the perpetual.
Let’s face facts, folks. I’m gagging for it!

So does that make me a nymphomaniac, or in new speak suffering from hypersexuality?
Or am I just a normal, honest woman who has rediscovered her sexuality and damn well wants to celebrate the fact?

Nymphomania implies abnormal. It suggests something that is uncontrollable, and despite all the jokes about guys happily meeting a nymph, it is seen as something that is debilitating, tiring and quite frankly, a bit of a problem.

Which indeed it is in the truest sense of the word. I pity women who need to have sex every minute of the day, think about it constantly, do not mind where it comes from and simply cannot cope without a cock up their fanny or arse.
However, as with so many things, it is all about balance. I also pity women who do not need to have sex, who do not think about it constantly, who are not open enough to appreciate the difference between loving sex and a bit of recreational fun and who are afraid to even touch their own bodies for fear that this is an abnormal desire.

So am I a nymphomaniac or not?

Time for a bit of research.

In history, women have really suffered. It is no wonder that they are worried about coming out, so to speak, as sexually enthusiastic.

As a woman, if you show the slightest bit of interest in your own body or that of others, then in the past you may well have been labelled as a sexual deviant. The official word is “nymphomania” or “furor uterinus”.
Here is a quote from Wikipedia
“Many Victorian era mental institutions treated nymphomania as an exclusively female mental illness. Women were classified as mentally ill for nymphomania if they were a victim of sexual assault, bore illegitimate children, masturbated or were considered to be promiscuous. Upon arrival at the asylum, doctors would give the woman a pelvic exam. If doctors felt that the woman had an enlarged clitoris, she would undergo treatments. These treatments included induced vomiting, bloodletting, leeches, restricted diet, douches to the head or breasts and at times, clitoridectomies”

Bloody hell! What on earth would they have made of my engorged organs that respond so dramatically to the sight of a certain cock? I think I might have been locked up. I think I would have classified as an over-sexed naughty madam under a couple of those characteristics written above.

And as for the treatment, douching the breasts? Why? Or are we back to the sexual desires of Victorian Doctors?

The famous sex researcher, Alfred Kinsey described a nymphomaniac as someone who “is having more sex than you”.
Excuse the pun, but this was a tongue in cheek statement but there is something quite valid in what he was saying. Isn’t it the case that some people measure everything by thinking that they are normal?
If you are someone who has sex once a week in a missionary position that lasts approximately five minutes, then the thought of someone having sex for over an hour three times a week – well it all sounds a little racy!
And those who get it three times a week think that those who are dropping their kegs more frequently must be right little nymphs (or in my opinion, bloody fortunate).

Okay, here is the tester.
On one website I saw there were some questions that one had to ask as to whether one might consider the “patient” to have nymphomaniac tendencies.
So here goes.

Over a period of at least six months, recurrent and intense sexual fantasies, sexual urges, and sexual behaviour in association with four or more of the following five criteria:

(1) A great deal of time is consumed by sexual fantasies and urges, and by planning for and engaging in sexual behaviour. (Yep)

(2) Repetitively engaging in these sexual fantasies, urges, and behaviour in response to dysphoric mood states (e.g., anxiety, depression, boredom, irritability). (Sometimes)

(3) Repetitively engaging in sexual fantasies, urges, and behaviour in response to stressful life events. (Well I might have been known to have a shag or a wank in response to a difficult day – and why the hell not?)

(4) Repetitive but unsuccessful efforts to control or significantly reduce these sexual fantasies, urges, and behaviour.(Nope. I have never made any attempt to control my sexual fantasies, urges or behaviour – well maybe a little)

(5) Repetitively engaging in sexual behavior while disregarding the risk for physical or emotional harm to self or others.(Oh yes- lots of times)

So apparently I am a nymphomaniac after all!

But words like “consumed” “control” “disregard” are dangerous. By default they imply a lack of self-government. If you took these words and associated them with other things in life like work or raising children or eating, they would be equally bad.

Balance again, dear readers. Everything always comes back to those damn scales!

More research.

I was going to offer a link but every time I try and return to this link, it requires you to register.

If you wish to do so, please follow the link. Otherwise, concentrate on the extracts below.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/groneman-nymphomania.html

In 1841, Miss T., the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of a Massachusetts farmer, was diagnosed with nymphomania. According to the physicians who described the case in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, her conversation and actions left no doubt that she suffered from the disease: she uttered the "most disgusting obscenities" and moved her body in ways that expressed her uncontrolled "libidinous feelings." Although in good health, she had been restless and morose, exhibiting a "paroxysm of hysteria" when the doctors arrived. After a vaginal examination, they determined that her uterus was enlarged, her vagina over-abundantly moist, but her long and "tumid" clitoris was the telltale sign of nymphomania. They applied various caustics to her genitals to cool her ardor and tried other traditional remedies, such as bleeding and cold-water douches. After several weeks, the doctors pronounced her greatly improved, with "not a symptom remaining referable to nymphomania." This time when she was examined vaginally, she exhibited "every appearance of modesty," including a retracted and very diminutive clitoris.
Well, I suppose the good news is that they even acknowledged that there was a clitoris. Having attended my daughter’s school for some sex education discussions with other parents, many people were utterly horrified to even admit to the youth of today that there was indeed a body part known as the clitoris.

“Her vagina over abundantly moist” – Whoops, I’d have been sent straight to the asylum. Sod the leeches!

 In the Victorian period, both doctors and the patients who sought medical help believed that strong sexual desire in a woman was a symptom of disease. Self-control and moderation were central to the health of both men and women, but women's presumably milder sexual appetite meant that any signs of excess might signal that she was dangerously close to the edge of sexual madness. Not surprisingly, physicians registered the greatest concern when the disease appeared in "refined and virtuous" women.

Look at that phrase, “women’s presumably milder sexual appetite”. These poor women were ahead of their time. Perhaps we should have left feminism to these folk to get a clearer understanding of the truth of female sexual empowerment and what it could have been.
1841, dear readers. It is just about excusable then to make assumptions or presumptions about a woman’s sexuality. That we still think a woman’s sexual appetite should be/is milder than men’s is a real indictment and travesty. Where the hell have we actually advanced in the last 170 years?

Mrs. R., described as a short, stout, recently widowed twenty-year-old woman with a lively disposition, came to Dr. Bostwick out of desperation. She explained, "If I can't be relieved of this agonizing condition, I am certain that the struggle between my moral sense and lascivious longings must soon send me to the grave." She blamed reading novels and attending gay parties in her youth as the cause of "my imagination [being] wrought up to the highest point." She appeared to be familiar with the assumption that women's reason was thought to be inferior to men's. As a result, she understood that stimulating the imagination in these ways was very dangerous. Her passions were so strong, she told Dr. Bostwick, that "it was with the greatest difficulty that I could conduct myself in a decorous and ladylike manner in the presence of the other sex." Even after her marriage, her "inordinate desire" was not entirely subdued and she continued to practice "self-abuse" (masturbation). Since her husband's death, "my passion has been more inflamed than ever, and I fear that, unless something can be done to relieve me, I shall go crazy."

Here is a classic example of a woman who has unbalanced the scales between learned expectations and her instinct. She wanted to have sex, she wanted to think sexual thoughts. That was her instinct. That was her! And yet, she “knew” that she shouldn’t be behaving or thinking in this way and therefore had to suppress it with the help of a learned man!

This is scary, abhorrent stuff and please do not think that this is a history lesson. It is happening, here, now, today – women thinking that their instinctual thoughts are wrong.

This case, presented in Mrs. R.'s words, reads like one of the cases Bienville described in his classic study of nymphomania. It contains all the elements that shaped the eighteenth-century understanding of the disease: inflamed imagination, uncontrollable desire, novel reading, moral struggle, and an inevitable downward slide into madness. Mrs. R.'s assertion that" I am sure my lascivious feelings cannot be natural—they must be the effect of disease," suggests the influence of "medicalized" notions about female sexual desire and women's sense of proper conduct. It is unlikely that Mrs. R. read Bienville or other medical texts, and yet she was obviously affected by the ideas they contained, including the notion that sexual improprieties required a doctor's help.

You see what you get from reading, imagining etcetera. Gawd only knows what would have happened if they had had to contend with the availability of hard core porn on the internet. I’d say the poor woman was lucky that she could actually find any arousing reading materials, and yet, surely it is what the mind chooses to do with text as well?
One person may find a passage of discreet sexual descriptiveness arousing where another would just glide over it without a thought.

 Dr. Bostwick used a speculum to examine the "irritated" and "inflamed" genitals, including an elongated clitoris. He treated Mrs. R. with various remedies: hip baths, spare diet, douches, bags of pounded ice applied to the genital region, and leeches to the uterus, presumably to draw off the noxious blood. After several weeks, Dr. Bostwick declared that he had completely cured this "highly respectable" Boston widow. She even married again.
“She even married again” – Oh yes, she was definitely cured!


    Here, as in several other cases Dr. Bostwick described, defining nymphomania was not simply the physician's prerogative. Patients shared similar ideas about the body and the passions. They, too, were highly suspicious and fearful of "unnatural" feelings and interpreted them to mean sexual disease.
That is because everyone at that time thought that women’s sexuality was an abomination. As I said earlier, how much has life really changed? People are still very suspicious of a woman who ‘outs’ herself as a sexually liberated and free woman who is prepared to admit that she likes sex.
Hence, pseudonyms for writers such as me.

In 1856, Mrs. B., a twenty-four-year-old, middle-class married woman, went to the Boston office of gynecologist Dr. Horatio R. Storer, future vice president of the American Medical Association. Described by Dr. Storer in his published case notes as small and pale, Mrs. B. sought the doctor's help for decidedly un-Victorian feelings. Excessively lascivious images of sexual intercourse with men not her husband, she told Dr. Storer, filled her dreams. Recently, whenever she met and talked to a man, she dreamed about having intercourse with him. Even during the daytime, if she conversed with a man, erotic feelings overwhelmed her. Up to that moment, she had resisted any actual sexual encounters, but she greatly feared that if the malady increased, she might not be able to restrain herself in the future.

Mrs. B. came to Dr. Storer not because she was concerned about the strong sexual desire she felt for her husband, the frequency of their marital intercourse, or her husband's possible impotence, but because she was afraid she was not going to be able to limit her sexual desire solely to her husband in the future. At a time when women were supposed to be innately less passionate than men, and during a period when Victorian modesty prevented many women from speaking about sexual matters to their physicians, Mrs. B.'s revelations to Dr. Storer suggest just how worried she must have been by her potentially adulterous feelings.
I always said that enforced monogamy was abnormal. We should have listened to the likes of Mrs B. She was not abnormal. All she was doing was expressing a genuine and real issue, i.e. that just because you are married, it doesn’t stop you feeling sexual desires for other people, be they out of reach or sitting next to you in the office.
It is perfectly normal. Sexual desire is a fact. It is there. It is normal. Doing something about it would be normal too but we have conditioned ourselves and our society to think that this is wrong.
What have we done to ourselves and our real liberty?

 Dr. Storer, like most nineteenth-century doctors, looked to Mrs. B.'s body to explain her disorder and interpreted her libidinous dreams about a man other than her husband as a symptom of nymphomania. After a general physical examination, the physician pronounced her in tolerably good health: normal heart and lungs; regular but scanty menstrual flow; daily bowel movement; and good appetite.
    He then turned his attention to her genitals. Like most gynecologists of the time, he undoubtedly was extremely careful in examining Mrs. B. Deciding that a speculum was unnecessary in this case, Storer reported on his examination: Mrs. B.'s clitoris was normal-sized, her vagina slightly overheated, and her uterus somewhat enlarged. According to Mrs. B., her clitoris constantly itched. In order to determine the seriousness of her condition, Dr. Storer gently touched it, at which point she shrieked, not with pain, but with excitement. Shocked and concerned about the extent of her disorder, Storer warned her that if she continued without treatment, she would most likely end up in an asylum.
Wow, lucky woman. Sounds as though she didn’t need much stimulation at all. I wonder if she ever had a vaginal orgasm? Her “disorder” was that, despite not having a pronounced clitoris, it seemed to work rather well. Instead of glorifying the fact that she was in full working order, she was messed around with and warned that such sexual excitement would lead her straight to the loony bin.


    The recommended course of therapy involved her whole family. First, Mrs. B. must totally abstain from intercourse with her husband. Because she was "unable to restrain herself," her husband was required to leave home temporarily. Her sister moved in and oversaw that Mrs. B. restricted her intake of meat, brandy, and all other stimulants that might excite her animal desire. The patient was ordered to replace her feather mattress and pillows with ones made of hair to limit the sensual quality of her sleep. To cool her passions, she was to take a cold sponge bath morning and night, a cold enema once a day, and swab her vagina with borax solution. Finally, she had to give up working on the novel she was writing. We learn nothing more about Mrs. B.'s literary output, but Dr. Storer was obviously concerned that dwelling on romance and passion was dangerous to her highly excitable mind.
Ah! So there you go. She mustn’t think about lurve or naughty rampant thoughts. And she certainly shouldn’t be writing about sex.
My downfall, apparently, as I am utterly aroused whenever I write about this subject.
And I love that feeling. Bloody love it!


So, according to all of this, I probably am a nymphomaniac.


Only I don’t see myself as such, and the purpose of adding all this Victorian melodrama is to try and explain why I do not see myself as a nympho.


What these women were allegedly “suffering” from was an openmindedness to their sexuality. It was not abnormal. The society in which they found themselves was abnormal and going against the grain of intelligent thought about sexuality.
‘Twas ever thus because I still think, despite pornography, despite the swinging sixties, despite the laws being relaxed on sexuality, we are still living in the Victorian times when it comes to that fact of women admitting that they are sexual creatures.
I know that some would disagree but there has been such a disservice to women and their sexuality over the centuries and it is still there.

I cannot “come out” properly as a woman who likes sex, as a woman who likes looking at other women, as a woman who is happy to feel the inside of her own cunt, as a woman who loves to suck and stroke cock because it is still seen as unseemly. I cannot “come out” as a woman with more than one or two unfulfilled sexual fantasies. I cannot “come out” and have sex whenever I want it despite being given the go-ahead to do so, because there are still rules and regulations in place, moral ones as well, that do not enable me to be sexually free.

And yet, I have far more sexual freedom than most. I’m one of the lucky ones.


But am I a nymphomaniac?


Well, the answer is probably yes for some and no for others.
I don’t want to have sex with anyone and yet, I would happily fuck my lover three or four times a day if there was opportunity to do so.
I do think about sex and have sexual fantasies, some of which I don’t necessarily want to actually do.
I look at porn and love seeing beautiful men and women enjoying their sexuality. I actually get a real kick out of watching women enjoying their sexuality, more so than seeing a man get his rocks off. I do not think that any time spent thinking or doing sex is wasted. It has to be the most important thing in life.
I want sex often. I need sex often but at the moment, I need and want that sex with a particular loving partner. Does the fact that I want his cock in my mouth, in my pussy, in my hand at any given point make me a nymphomaniac?


If it does, then I happily concede to such a wonderful affliction!