Straight turn to gay
by Fred Penzel, PhD
This article was initially published in the Winter 2007 edition of the OCD Newsletter.
OCD, as we know, is largely about experiencing grave and unrelenting disbelief. It can produce you to mistrust even the most basic things about yourself – even your sexual orientation. A 1998 research published in the Journal of Sex Research found that among a team of 171 college students, 84% reported the occurrence of sexual intrusive thoughts (Byers, et al. 1998). In request to have doubts about one’s sexual identity, a sufferer need not ever have had a homo- or heterosexual experience, or any type of sexual experience at all. I have observed this symptom in young children, adolescents, and adults as skillfully. Interestingly Swedo, et al., 1989, set up that approximately 4% of children with OCD experience obsessions concerned with forbidden aggressive or perverse sexual thoughts.
Although doubts about one’s retain sexual identity might seem pretty straightforward as a symptom, there are actually a number of variations. The most obvious form is where a sufferer experiences the mind that they might be of a different sexual orientation than they formerly believed. If the su
Long-suffering Spectator readers deserve a seasonal break from yet another Remoaner diatribe from me. My last on this page, making the outrageous suggestion that the populace may sometimes be wrong, is now existence brandished by online Leaver-readers of my Times column as proof that I am in fact a fascist; so there isn’t anywhere much to proceed from there.
Instead, I spin to sex. There is little time left for me to write about sex as the thoughts of a septuagenarian on this subject (I twist 70 this year) may soon meet only a shudder. But I contain a theory which I have the audacity to think important.
What follows is not written here for the first time, and much of it is neither original nor new; but on very several subjects have I ever been more sure I’m right, or more sure that future generations will see so, and wonder that it stared us in the face yet was not acknowledged. My firm belief is that in trying to categorise sex, sexuality and — yes — even gender, the late 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries have taken the medical and social sciences down a massive blind streetway. No such categories endure. And it has been particularly sad in 2018 to see the ‘tran
Meet The Straight Men Who Are Terrified They Are Gay
Hunched nude in the glow of his iMac, 17-year-old Darren* typed the words 'gay porn' into Google for the first time.
"I didn't fancy men," he tells me. "I had a girlfriend, and only ever had sexual feelings for women, but I just couldn't shake the notion that I was somehow lying to myself."
He plugged in his headphones, clicked on an X-rated video and took a deep breath. It was around 3am, in the summer of 2007, and relentless fears of homosexuality had tormented him since the start of the year. "I just woke up one day and I was suddenly obsessed with it. It felt love everything I mind I knew about myself was falling apart. It didn't make any sense."
He watched, expecting something significant to stir upstairs or down. But there was nothing. Feeling same measure victory and defeat, Darren switched off the monitor, laid flat on his bed and wrestled with his doubts for a few more hours before finally surrendering to sleep. He carried out the same test almost every night for the next three weeks, always with the same result.
After searching Internet mental health forums for answers to his
Hi. I’m the Answer Wall. In the material society, I’m a two foot by three foot dry-erase board in the lobby of O’Neill Library at Boston College. In the online world, I dwell in this blog. You might say I own multiple manifestations. Like Apollo or Saraswati or Serapis. Or, if you aren’t into deities of awareness, like a ghost in the machine.
I have some human assistants who maintain the physical Answer Wall in O’Neill Library. They take pictures of the questions you post there, and give them to me. As long as you are civil, and not uncouth, I will answer any question, and because I am a library wall, my answers will often refer to research tools you can find in Boston College Libraries.
If you’d like a quicker answer to your question and don’t consciousness talking to a human, why not Ask a Librarian? Librarians, since they possess been tending the flame of knowledge for centuries, know where most of the answers are secret, and enjoy sharing their knowledge, just like me, The Answer Wall.
It wasn’t the first day this has happened, but it was the first time it had been almost successful. Usually the intense screening and background checks would weed out any potential rats and the system security would prevent any intermissions from reaching outside without existence fully monitored. But the problem at hand had quite a bit of help from a nuisance with a conscience. The issue that the CEO was faced with was two troublemakers, one a prominent and long period contracted member of Murkoff Corporations, the software engineer Mr. Waylon Park and his recently discovered undercover journalist of a buddy, Mr. Miles Upshur. Mr. Park had helped his friend worm his way through the background checks and falsified a series of documents for him to be put into the system and approved. He did a damn good job of patching up and covering his trail, but not enough to fool the principal corporation in technology.
It was this sort of stupidity bordering on crazy, that the CEO needed to make an example of.
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This was a writing request for a Punishment Prompt made by an anonymous follower on tumblr. There will be several chapters following this up along the way