I feel sexual pleasure without having to touch myself

[sunflower22]

Is it normal to feel sexual pleasure (not just sexual desire or being horny) even if you are not touching yourself, just by imagining sexual intercourse or stimulation? I don't even have to try very hard, when I'm imagining, watching or reading something sexual, I start to feel sexual pleasure, like a "tingling" in my genital area that feels good.

I feel horny if, for example, in my fantasy, no touch has been started, but when there's touch involved, it's like I can feel it without doing anything. I have never reached orgasm, as it is quite difficult to continue with the fantasy when the pleasure starts to be overwhelming. It's like a wet dream, just that I'm totally awake. I don't need any sort of preparation before-hand, it happens naturally. If I stop the fantasy, the watching or the reading, the pleasure stops, as though it had never been there.

I have tried masturbating in these moments sometimes, but touching makes the pleasure stop completely, it doesn't make it bigger.
I've never had sex before, so I don't know how this could affect my sexual life.

(Also, although I don't know if there's correlation, when I was younger, when somebody touched me, not sexually, just like touching my arm or something, I felt this pleasure, too. Not for a lot of time, just when the touch started, like some sort of jolt. This doesn't happen anymore, maybe only if the touch is very very sudden and big, it was just at the start of my teens)

I have searched on the internet about it, but I have just found about people that are able to reach orgasm after a lot of meditation and relaxation, or by doing some sort of pose, while I just do it naturally and anywhere. Really, I don't feel there's something "wrong" with the way my sexuality is, but I feel weird to be the only person I've found that is like this.

So, is this normal? What is it?

[Heather]

Yep, this is normal and common!

The idea that sexuality is only physical, or that people can only experience arousal and sexual enjoyment with physical touch is common, but it's false. In reality, people absolutely can and very often do feel "tingles" and the like -- can experience feelings of physical pleasure -- with just sexual thoughts, and sometimes even without those thoughts at all. People can and fo feel aroused and excited sometimes even without anything sexual otherwise going on at all. You seem to be simply describing feeling desire and arousal, and enjoying those feelings and the physical effects they tend to bring, without there being touch: that happens to many people. Conversely, some other people find that they need touch first in order to feel desire or, more commonly, to increase arousal and start feeling things like that tingling you're talking about.

It sounds like you might be a little confused, though, about what you're finding online that's about orgasm, when you don't seem to be talking about orgasm, but about desire and arousal. Orgasm can also happen for people sometimes without any kind of touch, but that's a lot less common than what you're asking about.