Anxiety about a fetish
October 5, 2010 6:44 PM   Subscribe

Can you help me get rid of anxiety about a fetish and my sexuality?

I'm an anxiety-prone, 23-year-old male. Looking back, I probably could have been diagnosed with OCD or an anxiety disorder but never was -- I'm an INTJ personality by nature so I tend to overanalyze everything. In the past, I worried about dumb things like having a heart attack and asthma attacks, but I've overcome that completely.

Somehow, when I was a young teenager I developed a weight obsession. My entire family is overweight and I am not, so I think it started as a worry about gaining weight. I began to privately wonder how much other people weighed (so that I could compare my weight to theirs).

In the midst of that worry and teenage hormones, I think that I unintentionally developed a sexual "fetish" about weight gain. (Classical Conditioning?) Dumb things, like a TV cartoon in which a cartoon character gains weight, would arouse me (with anxiety too, because I didn't want it to happen!). Not even people, necessarily -- animals had the same arousal effect. ("Aha, this animal ate too much honey and got stuck in this tree branch!". Dumb.) This caused me great distress.

What worried me most was this: In addition to dumb things like cartoons, the arousal/anxiety would also happen when the overweight person was male, causing me to worry that I would be gay. But I don't think that I am gay and never felt that I was, and so it made me worry.

To try to prove to myself that I wasn't gay, I would force myself to look at pictures and articles about weight / weight gain to "check" that I wasn't aroused. Always fully-clothed, NEVER anything sexual in nature, because I have and had ZERO desire to look at other men naked. That "checking" made me more anxious because it didn't work; I would just get anxious to the point of shaking and feeling sick, being aroused at tge same time. (My psychoanalysis is that this checking was just strengthening the classically-conditioned response.)

Several years ago, I stopped "checking" and tried to stop worrying about it. For the most part my worry subsided, except when people would bring up the topic of weight and such: again, dumb things like someone saying "I weigh 150 pounds" would cause my anxiety to peak and me to feel like I should feel "down there" to make sure there was no response [read: semen/erection].

[TMI:] What caused my anxiety to return last week was this: I saw an article on reddit about a chocolate cake shake, and stumbled upon a link to a documentary about a study on why people gain weight. While watching it I became anxious, and despite me not having an erection, semen came out. I'm hopeful that this was just spontaneous recovery, psychologically speaking.

Looking back and reading about HOCD (a persistent worry about that you might become or are gay), I now realize that I fit the symptoms of HOCD perfectly. It's uncanny. Let me be clear: I have only ever had crushes on girls. I have never had any interest sexually/romantically/emotionally in men. While I have no problem with other people being gay, I don't believe that I am. I believe that I am heterosexual with every fiber in my being. I hope that, when the time is right, I will find a caring, beautiful girl to spend my life with, have children, and grow old together. I enjoy my identity as a man. And if I really thought I was gay, I would have no problem coming out. But I don't.

I really hope this is just a case of classical conditioning and not my body saying you're-actually-gay-and-in-denial. I have not seen a therapist, but I have begun to try to use self-induced exposure therapy to stop the anxiety and the response, and I think it's working.

I'd shake this worry off easier if I had more romantic/sexual experience, but I'm an introvert and currently work from home. I'd guess that this is a chicken-and-egg problem: I worry more because I haven't had any serious girlfriends, but I haven't had any serious girlfriends because I'm an INTJ personality and have only been interested in a few girls (but zero guys). I've never been interested much in masturbation (I've always been really busy working and in school, so historically haven't had much downtime to develop an interest in that kind of exploration I guess). I've begun to try to masturbate a little, but that hasn't yet been for real pleasure -- my mind was always thinking "I need to get a reaction to prove that I'm attracted to women", which just aggravates the anxiety and doesn't prove anything. Vicious cycle syndrome.

This line of thinking has caused me a lot of anxiety over the past decade: I want this fetish and obsessive worry to go away for good. I think I've finally confronted the root of the problem and can work toward recovery. Hashing it all out here has helped, but any advice and/or reassurance would be greatly appreciated. (I know if this worry continues I should seek professional therapy.)

I guess I'm looking for external validation that (1) yes, I can overcome this "fetish"/association, that I'm on the right path, and that (2) the fact that I had this fetish in the past doesn't make me gay if I don't want to be and don't think that I am.

(Throwaway e-mail: mefi.donewiththisworry@gmail.com)
posted by anonymous to Human Relations (12 answers total)

 
It sounds to me like you have some sort of anxiety disorder, or problem, anyway (IANAD). Obsessive thoughts about almost anything - if they're interfering with your life and causing you stress - aren't good.

You've been struggling with this for more than a decade: why wait longer to get professional treatment for it?
posted by rtha at 7:01 PM on October 5, 2010 [6 favorites]


I have not seen a therapist

If you're spending this much time diagnosing yourself over the internet, why not?

Unless this is completely out of the question for financial reasons, I recommend seeing a therapist instead of waiting to see if a random Mefite might tell you what you want to hear in response to your questions.
posted by John Cohen at 7:20 PM on October 5, 2010 [2 favorites]


Psst: This should go without saying, but there's nothing wrong with being gay. Maybe you are, maybe you aren't. Stop trying to convince yourself one way or the other, and go after whatever it is that you happen to be attracted to, be it guys, gals, both, or neither.

If you have an encounter with another dude, and don't enjoy it, that doesn't make you gay.
If you have an encounter with another dude, and you do enjoy it, that also doesn't necessarily make you gay either. The idea of rigidly-defined sexualities is a fairly modern one, and doesn't really have much basis in anything.

Really. Stop stressing about this aspect of it. Also, as far as fetishes go, yours is pretty benign. People are into all sort of weird stuff -- being attracted to heavier people is more of a "type" than it is a fetish.

In the meantime, put down your Freshman Psych textbook, and go find somebody that you can talk this out with in person. There's no shame in that either. (Also, CC Dan Savage on this post. He deals with these sort of questions all the time)
posted by schmod at 7:42 PM on October 5, 2010 [5 favorites]


You know Ask MetaFilter - therapy therapy therapy. So: therapy! You sound like a great candidate for it. You have such a head start in that you've already done so much thinking about yourself and have done some research. So often therapy is this vague cloud of whatevs and you're not really sure what's wrong or what you're aiming for or how therapy works or things like that. You on the other hand have some very specific issues and worries that you don't have to dig around to uncover. You have a pretty good grasp of them too. Many people in therapy would kill for your specificity! I'm no therapist, but this sounds so ripe for some quality action. It sounds so addressable. I bet the therapist would quietly say hooray that they have something so tangible to work with rather than another lost soul who doesn't really know why they're there. And the outcome might not be a "fix" necessarily, it might just be a level of comfort for you, so you can feel OK about things. Nobody's keeping score and you can be however you are. Or if you'd like to change how you are, that's OK too.

On the gay front - if you don't feel gay right now, you're not gay right now. You can relax a bit and feel comfortable that you don't have to make some kind of formal/final pronouncement. If you want to engage with women to whatever degree, go do it (and don't hold too tightly to a Myers-Briggs label so it doesn't become some kind of crutch or shield for you). If your sexual preference ever changes or evolves or becomes more clearly homosexual or bi, it sounds like you're in a good place mentally to go with the flow and feel OK about it. And if it never does, plug right along, heterbro. It seems to matter a lot less these days. More wiggle room.

I hope you won't feel any shame or embarrassment at all about telling all of this to a therapist. Just go for it and spell it all out matter of factly on the first visit and then let them steer. They aren't there to judge you and have almost certainly had to wrestle with much more difficult subjects with other clients. Good luck, man. I see a more peaceful state of being in your future.
posted by Askr at 7:49 PM on October 5, 2010 [1 favorite]


(1) yes, I can overcome this "fetish"/association, that I'm on the right path, and that (2) the fact that I had this fetish in the past doesn't make me gay if I don't want to be and don't think that I am.

(2) is correct and always has been. (1), on the other hand, might not be possible. Fetishes are really primal things. As far as I have ever heard, it's not possible to get rid of them. Be wary of a therapist who tells you he/she can get rid of them.

What you CAN get rid of is feeling anxiety about your fetish. Fetishes are completely morally neutral, no matter how weird or even inherently wrong they might seem. They are imaginary and do not hurt anyone. Fetishes do not reflect on your character, your sexual orientation, or anything else. They're dealt out pretty much at random, and learning to find a healthy outlet for them will be much more productive than trying to eliminate them.

Not only that, but you are never the only person with your particular fetish (no matter what. Yes, even that one). It's just the weird diversity of how people are wired. You can indulge/explore it or not. There's just no reason to feel bad about it.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 8:15 PM on October 5, 2010 [2 favorites]


Psst: This should go without saying, but there's nothing wrong with being gay.

While I totally agree with this and have no problem with repeating it, I think it's worth noticing that the OP already said as much:
While I have no problem with other people being gay, I don't believe that I am. . . . And if I really thought I was gay, I would have no problem coming out. But I don't.
So I don't think it's going to do much good for us to calmly explain to the OP that there's nothing wrong with being gay. Again, it can hardly be said enough times: there would be nothing wrong with it if you were gay.

Not having ever met you, I can only take your word for it that you're not. It sounds like you're straight, and you have (or at least, have had) a strong fetish. The fetish was so strong that it activated your arousal even when the object of your fetish was ... I'm not sure quite how to put this, but ... "attached" to a man.

Imagine a straight, 25-year-old man who has a strong fetish for leather. Not BDSM or anything -- just leather. Imagine that he's generally attracted only to women who are reasonably close to his age. But what if, by some weird chance, he sees a 75-year-old woman walking down the street wearing a leather hat, leather jacket, leather belt, leather pants, and leather boots? Gee, do you think he might be aroused? I'm thinking ... yeah. But does this have anything to do with him wanting to date a woman who's 50 years older than him? Nope. It just means he has a powerful fetish. He might have been attracted to the leather clothes if they were just arranged to be in the shape of a body, as part of some art project, with nothing else but empty space. He could still be aroused. So it's not that surprising if he can also get aroused if the clothes are filled up by any woman (even a woman who'd normally be unattractive to him), or any man (who would normally be unattractive to him simply due to gender). You could draw an androgynous stick figure in there and he'd still be aroused. Once he starts being sexually fixated on a thing, there's no reason the arousal has to be confined to the human beings who are the object of his general sexual orientation.

In your case it's a little different because weight gain isn't like leather. It's not an inanimate object that someone can hold or wear, but a quality -- or, rather, a change in quality -- of someone's body. But I think the same principles I've mentioned above still apply.

If I'm right about all that, then I see no reason for you to try to condition yourself not to have the fetish. The fetish doesn't make you gay. It doesn't make you gay even if it can lead to you being turned on in a way that incidentally involves a man. Even if that were somehow defined as gay, there wouldn't be anything wrong with that (as you agree, right?) -- you could just redefine yourself as mostly straight with some slight bisexuality. Again, that is not how I view you, but it would be fine if that were the case.

I am guessing that nothing I've said here is going to solve your real issues at all! I'm not trying to be modest by saying this. The reason I say this is: I've tried to explain how I view things, rationally. But you're not me, and, frankly, your thinking about this doesn't seem entirely rational. I don't think the real issue is whether you're gay or whether you can "overcome" the fetish. I think the issue is obsession and anxiety. I don't think I'm really telling you anything you don't already know, since you clearly pinpointed obsession and anxiety in your question. However, I think it's unfortunate that you still framed your question to us as being about overcoming the fetish and ensuring that you're not gay. At this point, I would just repeat what I and others have said: it's time for therapy.
posted by John Cohen at 8:22 PM on October 5, 2010


I'll admit this is not the most in-depth of responses, but the third row of this image seems fairly directly applicable to your concerns.
posted by Fizzgig at 9:43 PM on October 5, 2010 [3 favorites]


It's seems pretty obvious to me that all of your fears about being gay are due to the OCD. The thing that tips me off is how the focus of your obsessive thoughts has shifted through the years: asthma and heart attacks, then weight, then sexual attraction to weight, now being gay. So the first thing is that even though you say you've managed to control some of your fears, you might have just moved them to something else. You need to get yourself to professional who specializes in OCD and not try to do it by yourself. Some points that might be helpful:

- The physiological response to fear and sexual arousal is very similar, so it's not very difficult for it to transmute from one to the other - that's why guys used to take their girlfriends to see scary movies at the drive-in. This might mean that you're aroused by your fear of becoming overweight rather than overweight people in themselves. You don't say if you are usually attracted to overweight women, but if you aren't, this may also be a manifestation of OCD.

- Even though you're afraid you're gay, you're not homophobic. Some HOCD sufferers are gay and are terrified of being straight, and some try to have same-sex encounters (or opposite sex if they are gay) because they think this will resolve their anxiety. But mainly, the reason you aren't homophobic is because your fundamental fear is that you're secretly not who you are. Not in the sense that you might change, but that you might already be not you, that your identity as a heterosexual man is false. There is another form of anxiety where people believe their loved ones have been replaced by imposters who look exactly the same, and you can see how this has a similar structure - your wife is not your wife even though you know that's who she is. One way to look at your anxiety: you are afraid that a gay imposter version of yourself threatens to replace the straight you. The key point here is that in order for this to work, you must already know that you are straight.

To elaborate this a little further, think of the opposition between the two terms living and dead. When we say something isn't alive, the meaning is clear: it's dead. And vice versa, 'not dead' means it is alive. But what if you say something is undead? This doesn't mean "not dead", it's something completely different: the living dead, zombies who are dead and yet somehow still alive, and this is why they provoke intense fear, because they aren't simply alive or dead, but somehow they are both. (Undead is also not some indeterminate middle ground between living and dead, like a human embryo or a person on life support might be - a zombie occupies both extremes fully, even excessively.) In your anxiety, the two terms are "you" and "not you" - you are not simply afraid of being not you, of changing and becoming someone different, maybe discovering you are really gay. Instead, you are afraid of discovering you are "un-you", a kind of monstrous anomaly who occupies the position of you and not-you at the same time. This is why it doesn't work to tell you that there's nothing wrong with being gay, because you aren't afraid of that. And why your fear can easily transmute into something else, since the straight-gay binary is just a particular rendering of the more basic identity vs. non-identity.

And for the record, there is nothing wrong with being gay. And gay people are definitely not undead - at least, no more so than anyone else.
posted by AlsoMike at 11:18 PM on October 5, 2010 [1 favorite]


You're not gay. You have anxiety disorder, IMO, but IANAT. See a therapist. Speaking as someone who has anxiety disorder, a few years of therapy & a drug regimen that works for me has changed my life around.

It may take sorting through more than one therapist and/or drug regimen, BTW. I hit the gold mine on my first therapist, but moved. Took a while to find my next "keeper". My first prescription (Prozac) worked, but had unfortunate side effects. I now have two prescription drugs I can balance as needed, and a variety of non-prescription drugs (including things as "trivial" as chamomile tea).

After you get your anxiety under control (which will take months to years - you're fighting a problem you've spent decades developing, mentally!), if you find the thought of sex with guys turns you on, then, yes, you actually are at least bisexual. But nothing you've said suggests you're repressing homosexual urges; you're just anxious that you might be doing so.
posted by IAmBroom at 5:43 AM on October 6, 2010


Life is too short to first learn enough to be a therapist and then to treat yourself. Find a professional.
posted by callmejay at 6:59 AM on October 6, 2010


Steve Phillipson wrote a great article about this. http://www.ocdonline.com/articlephillipson7.php
posted by DTHEASH1 at 3:16 PM on October 6, 2010


You provided a very compelling description of the internal torture you're experiencing.

It does sound like there are multiple variables at play. Your introversion is part of the clinical picture-- not a small matter, as it keeps you from reaching out and having good experiences with the opposite sex, only adding to your obsessive fear that you might be gay.

The "J" in your INTJ profile is also at play. It sounds like you are very hard on yourself-- perhaps judging in black and white, and less tolerant? Certainly does not help.

You also present a clear OCD picture-- sounds like the target of your anxiety shifts from thing to thing, and the fear of being gay is the ultimate obsession.

Whether you're gay or not seems less relevant than what's underneath the fear that you're gay. Obsessing about being gay could be a distraction from a deeper set of worries that you haven't even begun to explore? With OCD patients, the obsession is often emblematic, but usually just the tip of the iceberg.

As all the others have stated, you are a prime candidate for therapy.

Can you afford treatment? If not, there are clinics with unlicensed therapists (supervised by seasoned & licensed professionals) that can offer more affordable treatment in every major city. Even better, call a psychoanalytic institute in your city and ask about their clinics. You may be able to find a very seasoned clinician for less than you think.

You would be an excellent patient. Go get some help.
posted by drjmac at 10:02 AM on October 27, 2010


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