Fun with anorgasmia

I began tapering off Prozac at the end of last year, and now, for the fist time in about three years, am SSRI free. It had stopped working for me, so I’m feeling pretty much the same as I was before, which is to say depressed, but managably so. I have good days, where I get shit done, and bad ones, where I don’t. Unless I use a ridiculously magnanimous definition of shit. [Moved a dirty mug from the living room to the kitchen? YAY I DID A THING

I don’t miss the side effects. Not one bit. And by the side effects I mean GENITAL NUMBNESS AND LIBIDO LOSS.

Being a smut writer is pretty hard when the idea of a nice nap is more appealing than sex. What little horniness I had transmuted into frustration, however, at the fact that the genital numbness made it really fricking hard to orgasm. Like, it would take an hour, no exaggeration, of expert fiddling to have the desired effect. It felt nice, but doing anything for that length of time gets boring. And it gets pretty annoying when reading favourite mucky blogs and pornography, and it seems like godammit everybody is having huge splurgy orgasms all over the place  at so much as a butterfly whispercurrent of air over their glans.

I began feeling disingenuous over my writing, too. I write about orgasmic characters because that’s what I want to read, but I felt like I was betraying myself at the same time, adding to a problem of depicting orgasmicness as normative. Not all sex needs to terminate with one or both partners cumming, but when writing stories it’s hard to deviate from having a beginning, middle and a drippy, satisfying end.

As I mentioned, I stopped taking the pills before I completely resolved the issue, but here are some things that helped me out.

But first: I’ll cop to being a well read hypochondriac with some experience in this area, but I’m not a doctor; talk to somebody who is. Sometimes side effects are genuinely better than the alternative, but make sure you’re not suffering unduly.

• Accept that sex, whether partnered or solo, is going to be different from now on. And probably worse, but not necessarily.
• Speaking of partners, it’s important to let them know that your anorgasmia isn’t their fault. People tie up a lot of their self esteem in their ability to pleasure a partner, and if they don’t understand this it will make them feel bad. This is not conductive to good sex.
• Regard sex as something that is necessary for your well being, like exercise or brushing your teeth. Set aside time for it. I used a habit tracker to make sure I gave it attention every day.
• Working by yourself can be a lot easier than partnered sex, at least until you find the combination of techniques that works.
• Try different toys or ways of touching yourself and note which ones work. Yes, note. I kept my notes on a secret text file with a suitably boring fake name.
• If you find a particularly titillating piece of porn, save it! It’s amazing how hard it can be to find that one video or story if you just close the window when you’re done.
• I found that I quickly became over stimulated and lost erogenous sensation; so I had to stop and start a lot. Warming up slowly also helped.

Good luck!