Content Warning: This story describes sex in detail.
Since high school, I, being the hopeless romantic that I was and still very much am, slightly fantasized about losing my virginity — the perfect moment, the perfect time, and most importantly the perfect partner. My room was filled top to bottom with cheesy historical romance novels where gallant and chivalrous knights made love to maidens on heaps of surprisingly soft hay, the golden glow of medieval firelight radiating off their dewy skin. My television screen exuded images of John Cusack holding a boombox above his head, Ryan Gosling’s arousingly rain-soaked beard, and Leonard DiCaprio’s tender Titanic car sex caresses. Now, I always knew that young men were most definitely not gallant knights, not gentle and kind, but nonetheless still physically majestic both in stature and skill. Most young men did not stand out in the rain, sentimentally blasting Peter Gabriel. At least, no young man that I had met. Impossibility was only a gut feeling, not a confirmation. Yet, my well-intentioned and romantic heart kept hope for the day that I had my very own boombox holder, whisking me away under the covers. Being autistic, my mind fixated on a moment that I felt was always just slightly out of reach. To say my myriad of hopes, dreams, and fantasies came true is putting it mildly; utterly and distinctly, purposefully mildly.Â
There was always a fear of sex within me. How would it feel? As an autistic individual, sensation is everything to me. Sensation is everything I simultaneously worry about and cherish once I have felt it. What did sex feel like? The sensory side of sex was what worried me most and caused me the most anxiety, not t the faceless man in my fantasies. I stressed about the feeling of skin on skin in that close of a proximity. My anxiety was about the inevitable physical contact that penetrated my every nerve.Â
In February of 2024, I finally lost my virginity, and it was everything my anxiety had feared. It was not lost with patience and comfort, nor a sense of ease that made the notions of right sex and wrong sex, good sex and bad sex drift from my mind. My partner was certainly not a John Cusack nor a Ryan Gosling. He wore wrinkled khakis, disheveled Patagonia jackets, and gifted me a contemplative fiction book about famine in China. Nor did I lose my virginity on anything resembling a silken bed of golden hay. I, the private and thoughtful autistic, lost my virginity on a dusty, creaky bed in the distressingly beige basement of a PhD student’s apartment, the permeating, lingering smell of freshly baked sourdough bread an olfactory accompaniment. Passion need not apply to how I felt surrounded, stressed, and filled with pressure and pain in the arms of a near-sexual stranger. Sex was supposed to make you feel closer to your partner, or at least feel an overwhelming sense of pleasure that I need not feel the most significant connection.Â
Yet his touch made me drift away from this realm and out of my body, not in a positive way. I felt the room start to spin as more of my clothes were removed. I felt my muscles clench and my heart beat faster. My hands shook with an intimate tremble — a vulnerable earthquake as he climbed above me. As his skin collided with my skin, I felt more cold than warm. Wasn’t I supposed to moan and gasp like in the movies? All I remember, as I closed my eyes tight and dug my hands with instinctual fear into his back, was a driving sense of pain that permeated through my entire lower body. A slow burn that anguished my nerves and drew sweat from my brow from the sheer force of convincing myself not to cry, not to be a baby. I began to feel trapped in my thoughts, stuck in a downward spiral of all that was internal instead of right in front of me. This wasn’t pleasure. This was an active erasure of my security and my ability to be autonomous. Instead, I was replaced with a sexual agenda I felt the inexplicable need to accomplish, a list magically appearing in my mind of what was necessary. Instead of talking to my partner, I was talking to the little man who was nicknamed Mr. Downfall of My Mind. He inevitably always threw me into a worse frenzy than I was already in. My brain, erased of logic and as autistic as ever, thought sex was a series of semi-connected acts able to be found in Men’s Health Magazine, one after the other, until pleasure or exhaustion set in. I was literal and fearful; a lethal combination. I wasn’t having sex for myself; I was having sex how I thought it should be done.Â
I chalked up my internal unease to the lack of connection to Mr. PhD and the rite of passage awkwardness of losing your virginity. It had to get better. Yet, what was getting better for me? Shortly thereafter, I began a second sexual relationship with my ex. He seemed kind and goofy, and more arousing than anything was his apparent acceptance of my autism and all the quirks that traveled along with the label. I thought the fear and the sense of uncomfortableness would subside. Now, I was with someone that I had a genuine connection with, someone who seemed to cherish each day and date with me in equal measure. Someone who, after they vulnerably told me they were falling in love with me after our second date across from the Dushanbe Tea House, with their kindness and compassion, made arousal, at first glance, less pain and more pleasure.Â
Yet, sex was still the same for me. It was painful and suffocating, and the sensation of another individual against me was one that I needed to approach with trepidation. Sex was merely an anxiety activity between me, my autistic insecurities, and by extension, my impulses to just be normal, like everyone else. The bed felt a lot like the outside world. It was just another location to mask, hide, and engage in complex games of overcompensation. Sex heightened my sense of self-awareness to the point of feeling that I was never making love how I wanted to make love. I made love as a checklist. During sex, I disappeared, and my internal expectations and insecurities related to the complicated social sphere arose. I had sex as if I knew that I must engage in particular acts that I somehow telepathically knew my partner wanted, even if he had said naught. I felt that I had to check off certain acts that were deemed “normal” or whatever else did. Sex, as an intimate personal realm, became malnourished and was brought back to life as a mountain of societal expectations, ones that I could put faces to. These were expectations that felt as heavy and hard as any that had come from an ableist society. I was internalizing the world and was putting hefty expectations both on my brain and now my vagina. It was exhausting for me. Every day without sex was an uphill climb, and the days I had sex were battles, battles with my worst selves, enemies. Sex was an argument with my rawest insecurities and my most meaningless but nagging expectations.Â
As an autistic person, the world was ripe for triggering expectations and insecurities, and sex was no exception. Instead of feeling happy, safe, and confident in my body, I felt worse. Sex was an erotic variation of my public self. With a couple of sexual partners under my belt, what made sex worse for me, was the exposure both my partners forced me to confront with criticism. “I don’t believe you, I don’t think you were having a good time. You didn’t seem to finish, so how do I know that you experienced any form of pleasure? You were a C+ but maybe by the end of the night you can move it up to a B”, said my first sexual partner. My sexual reactions, like my reactions in the public world, did not match “the standard”. My reactions weren’t obvious and notable. I did not scream, nor clench the sheet under my hand, nor call out the name of my partner. Pleasure for me looks different. The pressure of sexual encounters is enough to scare me. I do not place value on an orgasm as a marker of pleasure. It is arbitrary and meaningless. My body feels a delayed response to physical sensations and thus I have felt the need to perform, rather than sit there. I am extremely sensitive to sensation but physically half-numb to pleasure. Still, away with the arbitrary! Real pleasure comes in a reaction unique to that person’s emotional range of expression. For me, I feel most pleasurable when I feel incredibly giddy and I cannot stop smiling at my partner. In that giddiness is a sense of security and safety that allows me to feel at ease, excited, compassionate, and carefree. My body is inherently more self-aware than others, and thus expressions of physical pleasure connect me to social expectations, where I am lost, submerged in what I feel my partner and the world wants me to do. Yet pleasure, in arbitrary definitions, are shallow markers of little importance, more checklist and pressure cooker than pure pleasure. For all the intimacy and the personal nature of sex, the external world transformed sex into intimate expectations, erotic acts to prove that one could measure up to a painful, looming, exhausting but pathetically meaningless status quo. I internalized those criticisms, for it felt a lot like how I experienced the public world as an autistic person — constant criticism and being stuck in a state of my best is never enough, nor correct. Sex was a carnal extension of my everyday life. Laying wrapped up in sheets stained with the most intimate of scents made me feel immeasurable to silent standards that should not have mattered, yet held a vulnerable hold over me. I have lost more than just my virginity in the past year; I have lost a sliver of confidence and awareness in my physical form. Yet, I have also come to understand that sexuality is not a value intrinsic to my nature or my form. Engaging in physical intimacy feels like acting out a script, the words and actions stemming from me feeling more performance than personal. While my expression of pleasure does not resemble that of others, that does not make me any less in the sexual realm, nor in any realm of life. Perhaps my idea of pleasure is way less carnal and kink, and much more hobby and homework. Still, I am attempting to sustain myself on my own definition of pleasure, as I still struggle with managing to fight the pressure against a sexually obsessive society, a world whose entertainment, and milestone markers are neurotically caught up in the loss of a heavy-laden metaphor rather than of anything so tangible. I still struggle in the fight between socially acceptable pleasure and what pleasure means for me. Still, it has been hard to feel that I am enough when even in the most intimate moments, I still come up short (no pun intended).Â
Throughout my brief couple of intimate sexual encounters, I have learned that sex is not what I value in partnerships and connections. I do not wish to spend a significant amount of time placing value on an outlet that reinforces negative notions of myself. For me, the bedroom is an extension, a corner of the room that is the world and my universe. Yet, if someday I may be so lucky to meet someone who appreciates that pleasure is not one size fits all, perhaps sex will feel less like erotic expectations and more like a pleasant set of explorations. Until then, I do not feel the need to engage in acts that make me feel pain and destroy my sense of self. If pleasure is not one size fits all, nor limited, why then must worthy pleasure only be sexual pleasure? Life is infinitely bigger than the bedroom, so why not start valuing pleasure for its real size? I am different, but it is time that we appreciate that pleasure is different. Different for everyone.