why do i feel uncomfortable that my sisters and female friends are getting married?

[Enphery]

I feel uncomfortable that my sisters and older female friends are getting married. I feel weird that they going to have sex with their partners and then talk to me as if nothing happened, and I am supposed to behave as if its okay. I don't know if I feel anger or jealous or just sad. I'm asking this because I don't know how I should handle this situation. Sex is a new topic for me even though I have been exposed to it for a long time, having a real person do and live with that is different. I feel disturbed in some sense. Growing up I never thought of sex as something that feels good to girls and I was told that it brings pain and humiliation to girls. And with the videos I grew up with pretty much made me think that girls like that, and I couldn't wrap my head around it.. why would they like such a thing? I couldn't think of them as humans at some point because they don't think about the pain it brings to those close to them and care about them. Almost as if its a self harm for them and insulting thing to do to those around them. And then there's concepts of pure and impure things involved. It maybe has to do something with how weird I feel at the same time about girls who don't care about sex whatever and who ever they do it with doesn't matter to them, I.. just don't know. I don't want to think of them in that way.

[Sam W]

Hi Enphery,

I actually think the answer to the question in your title is a simple one: you grew up with a concept of sex that lead to you viewing women who engaged in it as less than human. Which means that, when you're confronted the fact that women you know and care about are probably having it, it makes you uncomfortable because you've told yourself that women who are sexually active are deliberately hurting themselves (and that in doing so they're insulting the people around them). To me, that's a recipe for being uncomfortable if someone mentions sex around you.

Now, how to unlearn the mindset that's leading you to feel this way is a bit of a trickier task, because you're going to have to unlearn a LOT of incorrect ideas about sex. Let's start with perhaps the biggest one: women, and indeed people of any gender, can and do find sex to be an incredibly positive, fun, painless, and pleasurable experience. Now, sex can be a negative experience too, for people of any gender; it really depends on a whole host of factors, including communication, what our bodies are doing that day, etc. But it's not automatically a good or bad experience, it's a dynamic experience that's shaped by the people involved in it. Do you see what I'm saying there?

Too, what other people choose to do in their sexual lives is, ultimately, none of anybody else's business. Those choices are between them and their partners and what feels comfortable and desirable to them. So, I think it would also help to adjust your mindset to one where you spend less time thinking about other people's sex lives overall.

[Enphery]

Hi Sam W,

Thanks, It is going to take a while for me and I do have to sit with that to fully come to terms with the biggest one. I think it did take influence from the fact that even the normal form of porn I have consumed has elements of maledom within it and not any neutral side of it and after being in a bad position as a child and somehow engaging with it with some older kid and realizing how much I hate it, has to do with it.

It does put my mind at peace to understand that it's none of my business what they do outside of my interactions with them.

"me wanting to do the same things with them that they do with others (and knowing that its
maybe or maybe not its wrong to think like that and I'll be reprobated (even though in reality I really wouldn't even try to do anything close to that))" is that weird to feel like that? Should I even feel like that? Is that normal? Is that jealousy? I don't understand what I am feeling there but I think just putting a word on it or knowing more about it would hit the nail on the head.

[Sam W]

Hi Enphery,

It may also be helpful to read up on the ways porn does--or, more often, does not--reflect people's day to day sex lives. These two pieces are great starting places for that: Making Sense of Sexual Media, Sex on Screen: Reality-Checking Mainstream Porn . Too, if you want to talk about what happened between you and that older child, that's certainly something we can discuss or offer support around.

If part of your reaction to your friends talking about sex is wishing you could be the one doing it with them instead of their partners, then yes, I would say jealousy is playing a role here as well. Jealousy, like any of our emotions, isn't normal or abnormal. It's just one of the many feelings we can experience when encountering something. What matters more is to recognize when or if it's happening, and figure out how to address that feeling in a constructive way, rather than taking it out on other people.