Dear anita
thank you , can i still write to you about this topic ?

RO

Dear RO:

You wrote 3 days ago: “I did read about it all – OCD , HOCD trying to figure out if it’s just intrusive thoughts or really my real sexuality“.

Let’s look a bit at Wikipedia‘s entry on OCD:  “the primary symptoms of OCD are obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are persistent unwanted thoughts, mental images, or urges that generate feelings of anxiety, disgust, or discomfort. Common obsessions include … intrusive thoughts about religion, sex, and harm. Compulsions are repeated actions and routines that occur in response to obsessions. Common compulsions include excessive hand washing… seeking assurance, and checking things.”-

– doesn’t this description fit with your experience perfectly, and isn’t your obsessive questioning a compulsion meant to seek assurance that your sexual orientation is heterosexual?

Back to the Wikipedia‘s entry: “Similar to other intrusive thoughts or images, some disquieting sexual thoughts are normal at times, but people with OCD may attach extraordinary significance to such thoughts. For example, obsessive fears about sexual orientation can appear to the affected individual… as a crisis”- doesn’t this fit your experience as well?

center for anxiety disorders. com/ obsessive compulsive disorder/ hocd starts with: “If you are questioning your sexuality, how do you know do you know the difference between having HOCD and actually being gay?”. It then lists “Typical HOCD symptoms”, which include: * Currently suffering from OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) * Recurring unwanted or intrusive thoughts about your own sexuality…  *Homosexual thoughts are repulsive to you, rather than arousing…

“Typical Homosexual characteristics include: *Homosexual thoughts are enjoyable and/or arousing to the person, even if they hide their sexual orientation from others or are ashamed of it * Having had past sexual experiences with those of their same gender… * Often, people who are gay report having felt differently than their same-sex peers at an early age. Additionally, researchers have found they preferred to engage in activities associated with the opposite sex from early childhood onward“- in your cases, the first time you experienced sexual orientation thoughts was at 19, about a dozen years removed from “an early age”.

To elaborate and clarify my reply to your question an hour and a half ago: you are welcome to share more about (your obsession with) your sexual orientation, and other members will reply to you as they will, but I will not answer questions that are part of your obsessive questioning because like you stated yourself on Sept 23: “I know obsessive questioning is never satisfied with answers“.

I wish you no longer suffer from this (or any other)  obsession. I wish that you will soon experience a lifetime relief from obsessive thinking!

anita

Dear RO:

*If the following reply will be full of access print, I will re-submit it for easier reading.

I spent many hours on this very long post, so please take your time reading it. Read patiently, do not rush:

“I was always looking for man attention, wanted to talk to them, wanted for them to like me…  had dreams about a prince charming“- this is romantic attraction: a girl looking up to a boy, a prince charming, to rescue her from boredom or trouble and carry her to a “happily ever after” emotional paradise.

Romantic attraction is not the same as sexual attraction. The two don’t necessarily go together.

“I was wondering many times (not always) what is arousing about the male body when I had intercourse with a man (and this was very disturbing to me) or it was the act itself that was arousing for me and not the man“- maybe you experience romantic attraction to men,  but not sexual attraction.

“I get aroused by breasts (not of a specific woman)“- this is evidence of  sexual attraction to women’s breasts.

“I get aroused by… fantasies, stories about the first time of  a lesbian experience“- this too is evidence of sexual attraction to images and descriptions of women having sex.

“I get aroused… by seeing (not even feeling) my breasts touched by the man I have intercourse with.”- again, evidence of sexual attraction to a woman’s breasts.

“Therefore,  I cannot say that: ‘homosexual thoughts are repulsive to you, rather than arousing’“- seems to me that you are indeed sexually attracted to women’s breasts (I did not understand this before typing this reply).

“I fit to the enjoyable and/or arousing and it might not be intrusive thoughts, rather than real attraction and I might be denying it“- if you are denying that you are sexually attracted to women’s breasts then you are indeed denying what is true. You really are sexually attracted to women’s breasts.

“After thinking about it these days, I started seeing other women as attractive and ‘maybe I should ask her out?’, feeling I didn’t feel before, and it comes with a strong manly feeling like I’m a man inside and not woman for feeling like this“-  at least at times, you feel like a man inside, meaning that your gender identity, at times, is that of a man.

“I remember that when I was young (about 10) I saw a TV show where a woman had very large fake breasts under her T-shirt, and I very curious, and thought about it a lot“- clearly, you’ve been fascinated by women’s breasts since you were 10, if not earlier.

“I don’t find having intercourse with a woman as a thing I want in my life and I feel nothing for other parts of woman“- it would be very, very difficult for you to have a sexual relationship with a woman if the ONLY thing you are attracted to is her breasts, wouldn’t it.

Having done a brief research in regard to women who are sexually attracted to women’s breasts, I read in med help. org/ Straight Women Attracted to Breasts: “I am a man, 30 years old. Recently, a female friend (straight, married for 7 years) told me a secret that she considers to be very embarrassing. She says that she gets very aroused by looking at naked female breasts. She told me that she is very sure that she is not a lesbian or even bisexual, and that she has never pictured herself with another woman, neither in a sexual or romantic way. Even so, when she looks at other girls breasts she gets very aroused, to the point that she secretly watches girl-on-girl porn just to see girls breasts. So, she says is not aroused by looking at covered breasts or cleavages (like we boys are), but only when they are naked and there is sex involved (like porn)…. Again, she assures me that she is completely straight but she has this breast obsession from some time now”.

nylon. com/ straight women attracted to women, study: “A new study shows most straight women are attracted to other women. While we’ve come to the understanding that sexuality is a spectrum, a new study is suggesting that there’s a lot more we may not have realized about sexual attraction. A  study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by the University of Essex shows that a high percentage of women who identify as straight are actually sexually stimulated by both men and women. In the study, 345 women were shown videos of “attractive” naked cisgender men and women. Their responses that point towards sexual arousal (pupil dilation, etc.) were recorded and the results showed that 74% of straight women were aroused by both videos of men and women, while lesbians showed a stronger response to the videos of women. The study did not take note of anyone who identified as bisexual. The findings are also in line with a similar study that was release in August, that suggested women’s sexuality may be more flexible than men’s.”

psych forums. com/ I am a straight female with a breast fetish: “I know some of you may see that and immediately think I am gay or bi and don’t know it, but I highly doubt that. I am very sexually attracted to men. I also do not find other parts of women interesting to look at. I don’t like looking at v****** or butts. At all. I’m trying to think back to see if I can pinpoint a time all started but I can’t. I don’t remember not feeling this way. And I think it may be more than just liking breasts. So maybe I need to reword this differently. For example, if I see a woman with big breasts walking down the street I will not be aroused and it won’t be of much interest to me. However, I like porn a lot and to get off I need to see a woman topless with her breasts being constantly fondled to get off…. It’s just the breasts… Small breasts don’t really do it for me though. I cannot get off watching small breast..”, a responder: “this is very common. I have a good amount of female friends and from listening to them for years I can assure you that its more common than people think.”

My overall understanding at this point, RO, looking at the big picture:

Because of human complexity, medical doctors, scholars and others place humans in groups so to make life simpler. It is similar to you hanging your clothes in the closet according to their use (one group is sweaters, their use: to cover the upper body when it’s cold, another group is pants, their use: to cover the lower body). It makes life simpler. Notice: you are not limited to a just one grouping. For example, you can hang your clothes in groups according to color: all red clothes in one group, all blue clothes- in another group.

Psychiatrics in annual committees come up with new mental-disorder-groups every year (and delete old ones),  and doctors and other health care professionals place humans into these groups when forming diagnoses. But not all individuals in the same group (ex., in the borderline personality disorder group) are the same: far from it!

Current sexual orientation and gender identity groups have been decided on (as far as I know) primarily by political activists: people who are politically active in the LGBTQ community, including sociologists and other professionals. The LGBTQ activists group people into (1) Lesbians, (2) Gay, (3) Bisexual, (4) Transgenders and (5) Queer (an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or are not cisgender).

In your posts, RO, you’ve been endlessly debating whether you are (1) Lesbian (homosexual), (2) Bisexual or  (3) Straight (Heterosexual). But you can place yourself in a different group than the three that you’ve been considering. Let’s look at the following eight groups when it comes to gender identity and sexual orientation: (1) a cisgender woman is a woman born female and identifies as a woman, (2) a transgender woman is a person born as a male and identifies as a woman, (3) a nonconformist is a woman (cisgender or transgender) who does not conform to traditional gender roles, ex.: a woman who wears what is considered traditionally men’s clothing, who doesn’t like using makeup, and/ or a woman has a job and lives a life that traditionally fits a male gender role, (4) a lesbian is woman (cisgender or transgender, conformist or non-conformist) who is sexually and/ or romantically attracted to other women, (5) a straight woman is a woman (cisgender or transgender, etc.) who is sexually and/ or romantically attracted to men, (6) a bi-sexual woman… is a woman who is attracted to both genders, (7)  a pansexual woman is a woman who is gender-blind, that is: she is attracted to a person regardless of the person’s gender, no preference for one over the other, (8) an asexual woman is a woman who is not sexually attracted to anyone but may be romantically attracted to either gender or both.

Like I said, not all individual within any of the groups are identical: far from it. There is much more fluidity within each of these academically chosen groups than what you seem to detect. Seems to me that it is your rigid expectation that all individual within a group are the same that brings about your many doubts and distress.

Specifically, it seems like you expect that all women in the Straight group are sexually and romantically attracted to men all of the time (never to women) and that all of the women’s gender-identify is that of women, all of the time (never feeling like men, inside).

These is an unrealistic expectation and incorrect understanding: some in the Straight group of women are romantically attracted to men,  but not sexually. Some are mostly asexual. Others are primarily sexually attracted to men, but sometimes to women. Some straight women are attracted to women’s breasts. The billion dollars porn industry (which I detest) feeds and fuels this diversity a great deal.

I often felt like a man inside, from an early age. I really didn’t want to be a woman, not that I wanted a man’s body, I wanted to be the strong gender, to not submit. I almost never felt like a girly girl. For many years I kept my hair very short, extremely short. I was never sexually attracted to women, but then, most often I was not sexually attracted to men either. And that’s just me. There are millions of variations.

I hope to read your thoughts and feelings about this post after you take your time and think it through. It is my hope that this post helps you!

anita

How are you, RO?

anita

I didn’t realise this thread was 4 years old, if I did I probably wouldn’t have replied. Either way it’s an interesting predicament and I hope lady who asked the question has found kher answers, and to her satisfaction.

Dear Oops:

I would very much like to read your story, including how your gender identity exploration (and relaunching yourself as a transwoman) did not resolve every question that your HOCD postulated, if I understand correctly. You are welcome to share here, or better perhaps, start your own thread.

anita

Hey did she ever reply to you ?