Hype Is Short for Hypersexual #
Hey there, I’m hype. That’s short for hypersexual.
You may be familiar with folks who are ace, which is short for asexual. Asexuality awareness has really taken off in recent years, which is a fantastic thing. Here’s a post on asexuality, aromanticism, and polyamory that I enjoyed. (Update: Since I wrote this original piece, I’ve also gone on to write about asexuality and aromanticism in polyamory on this blog. And of course demisexuality.)
Hypersexuality is quite a different creature altogether. I have essentially what amounts to a bottomless pit of sexual desire. This means I cannot have enough sex. I pretty much always want more.
Now, that doesn’t mean I necessarily want sex with any given person. And I do get physically tired.
But when I want someone, I want an awful lot of them.
Previously, hypersexuality, sometimes also known as sexual addiction, was considered a psychological disorder. Pathological, y’know. They thought it meant that there was something wrong with you. But the American Psychological Association left it out of the DSM-5, their most recent edition.
Hype Can Be Very Confusing, Especially to Someone Raised Conservatively #
You would think being hypersexual would be fairly obvious. But I grew up in a religious family in a rural area in the days before the Internet.
When I was a young woman, my hype caused me to think I was asexual (which I had actually heard of, biology class due to asexual reproduction, not quite the same thing, but it had started the conversation with our teacher). Naive about sex, I walked around horny with no clue about my body or what was going on. Since I was pretty much always turned on, and I was attracted to both girls and guys, I kept waiting for “special sexual feelings” to kick in.
Once I started to have sex, I found that I became dependent on it. I wanted to do it again and again. I tried to be monogamous but quickly wore out partners.
And I still craved sex with others. Especially women. I broke off my monogamous relationship. And started to say yes to everyone. At one point, I was the booty call for half of the straight pillow queens on campus. And I had an awful lot of awkward threesomes.
It caused a lot of inner conflict. I wanted to be a good person, and I wasn’t acting how I was raised to believe that good people acted. Hookups never stayed very long. And I wanted to have someone always there for me. Why was I slutting around? I wondered. Plus, people were starting to gossip, and that was annoying. And inconvenient. Especially when I’d meet a new person who already had negative notions about me because I’d fucked this or that person.
So I tried to date an old friend with low libido. A boy I had always loved emotionally who is and was basically asexual. Somehow I felt he might cure me of my hunger.
And he did. Sorta. He bought me a sex ed book with a chapter on how to masturbate and sent me off to my dorm room with a vibrator. Friends had to check on me. I quickly lost large swaths of time masturbating. And I found I could masturbate to just about anything — Harold Pinter scripts, infomercials, voices in the hallway, my imagination.
The more I masturbated, the more I wanted to masturbate. It never felt like enough.
I would masturbate and cry because I couldn’t stop. For hours. I missed classes. Went days without seeing people.
I felt so out of control.
Hypersexuality Strains My Relationships #
“I’d give anything to find an oversexed girl,” a lot of people say.
Until they date me. Then they’re like “too much sex, too much sex.”
Trust me. It’s a thing. Hype hasn’t been great for my relationships.
Even after I learned to warn people up front that I had a high sex drive, it would still cause problems. Reliable rifts would form.
My ex-husband was stunned. “I never thought I would say this, but you want sex way too often.” He had low libido at the onset of our relationship. A few years in, he told me that he was “trisexual,” which he would use to mean that threesomes were his sexual orientation and that monogamy was a large compromise. We went long stretches without sex because of this. While normally we might have sex a couple of times a month, one dry spell lasted over a year. I stayed physically faithful to him (although I was tempted to cheat and did have emotional online affairs). We later opened our marriage, something I was reluctant to do because of how unstable and disrespectful my former experiences with non-monogamy were. But when I discovered very responsible and mature friends of ours were having luck with polyamory, I agreed to give it a try.
Poly didn’t easily satiate me either. Even when I had 2 girlfriends, a husband, and a boyfriend, I didn’t actually feel sexually satisfied until I added the fifth partner: Justin. Who is on the cusp of hype himself. Although not quite.
Especially during the period when I was only dating him, I even heard a bit of weariness from Justin over my sexual focus, “I said love. Why does that always translate to something sexual with you?”
How I’ve Adapted to the Hype #
It has been a long road of trial and error. Delaying gratification.
Sexual side effects from antidepressants helped. Once it became near-impossible to orgasm, I started to gain control. I learned to push myself mentally up over the hurdle in order to climax. And I found that I could use the same “pushing-up” trick to push myself back from arousal and calm my libido down. Most of the time anyway. Took lots of practice. Got slowly better. And I’m still learning.
I also have a list of things I can think of to instantly turn myself off. This is a risky tactic though because a few of them have turned into weird fetishes.
I’ve also iced my genitals at times when they wouldn’t go back to normal. Yes, really. With an ice pack. And yeah, okay, one time with a bag of California blend veggies. You might laugh, but when you’ve had 20 orgasms and you’re tired and miserable and you need to do things like go to work, you figure something out.
And the biggest thing? I always stop well before I’m satisfied. I practice restraint. If I think that 8 orgasms might be nice, I have 1, maybe 2. Or I don’t have one at all.
Saying no to myself in small ways has helped me train my body into a better state of “okay, that’s enough.”
Building up impulse control and willpower in general has been a huge boon to me (see this and this).
It’s made life more manageable. And helped me out in other areas. Self-control is hard to build, but the more you do it, the better you get.
So I’m a Dirty Slut With No Self-Control, Right? #
Nope, actually. If anything, it’s the opposite. Because I have to control my sexual urges to be functional, I’m good at it. And I default to controlling myself.
It does have some interesting side effects. I tend to not be much of a cuddler. Since I grew up in New England in a religious family, I didn’t experience much in the way of non-sexual physical affection. So I definitely limit physical contact with folks I’m not sexually interested in. Why make things more difficult for myself? Especially when I can just sit a few inches away and tell people I’m not a cuddler.
Everyone’s super touchy feely in the Midwest though. When I moved out here a couple of years ago, it was a major culture shock. I had to learn to hug people socially. But hugging is like a handshake out here, so I’ve slowly adapted. Still feels a bit like “New England dry humping” though. One day it’ll feel normal maybe.
But yeah. When you cannot ever have enough sex, it also means that there’s no pressure to really try.
Once you get the hang of it, it’s not so bad.
Although… If I could stop being so weirdly attracted to asexuals (more on that later), it would be really freaking nice.