Sexuality, sexual surprises, sexual problems or sexual help!!

By Clive Mutame Siachiyako

Courtesy: http://fsssonline.org/

Let’s say your child comes home and tells you s/he’s in xxx rated movies to earn extra income? I mean s/he’s into pornographic acts for money? I wonder how many parents are ready for such news. But with the 21^st century drama and freedoms, expect baffling experiences. Children make all sorts of decisions behind our backs, some of which could be distasteful to parents, family members and community.

I am not getting into gay sexuality debates, but trying to make us think about the possibility of our children telling us they have a particular sexual orientation which we don’t ascribe to...I am talking about how to get help to handle the news and live instead of dying of the shocking news of a child’s choice. It’s ease reading these things about other people's children. But when it dawns in our home, it's a different story. 

I don't know what comes to mind when you hear the word sexuality. But in this article, a couple of things amounting to sexuality are explained borrowing several ideas from different ends mostly from psychologistanywhereanytime.com and from a French scholar Michel Foucault’s history of sexuality.

Secrets, repressions and taboos have characterised sexuality for centuries, mostly to deny others from engaging into educative debates for reasons best known to initiators of those repressions. In some cases parents have been made to lie that they ‘bought’ a bay from the hospital to keep children in total ignorance about sexuality. Such lies still go round...even among religious families. If I can preach a bit ...“God is watching you” lol

A lot of talk revolves around sexuality in everyday lives. We talk about it, we invest in it, we seek it, we fight over it, and some countries even get economic sanctions over it. It cuts across social, economic, psychological and religions circles. I think it's then important to put few points into a summative piece about it.

Sexuality means different things to varied people. It’s about our bodies or our hormones, about our feelings and our relationships, or about touching and being touched. It's also about doing or engaging in one kind of sex or any kind of sex, or about wanting, seeking out or experiencing certain kinds of pleasure, etc., (http://www.scarleteen.com/).

This article looks at sexual problems summed up as paraphilia, which is about sexual arousal in response to objects or stimuli not associated with normal sexual behaviour patterns (psychologistanywhereanytime.com). At times people exhibiting such paraphilias are mocked, imprisoned or left to sort themselves out or die deemed abnormal by others. Mostly little help is offered to enable them get by. But since people who manifest paraphilias also exhibit personality disorders, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and other substance abuse problems, or affective disorders; it’s important to know about paraphilias and know how to help others get over them.

Some of the common paraphilias include exhibitionism, which is an urge or behaviour to expose one's genitals to an unsuspecting person e.g. sending nude photos to others...it makes some people pleasurably happy doing so. Fetishism is the other paraphilia. It’s about use of non-sexual or nonliving objects or part of a person's body to gain sexual excitement. One of the fetishism is partialism which refers to fetishes specifically involving non-sexual parts of the body e.g. hand, toe, knee, etc.  

When it comes to frotteurism it’s an urge or behaviour of touching or rubbing against a non-consenting person like on a bus sitting next to an admirable person and busy rubbing them to get the satisfaction. Just that rubbing nothing more takes the person home.

The other is masochism which is about the urge or behaviour of wanting to be humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer. Similar to masochism is sadism. It’s the recurrent urge or behaviour involving acts in which the pain or humiliation of the victim is sexually exciting. Sadistic acts such as dominance, restraint, blindfolding, beating, pinching or electrical shock. In worse cases drives someone into rape, strangulation or torture.

Sadism and masochism are often grouped together under sadomasochism. It means sexual pleasure from pain or suffering inflicted upon the self or someone e.g. sexual urges for being beaten, humiliated, bound, tortured, or otherwise made to suffer, either as an enhancement to or a substitute for sexual pleasure. If you have watched fifty shades of grey you have an idea what I am talking about...the tying, the spanking...  

Voyeurism is the other paraphilia which is the recurrent behaviour to observe an unsuspecting person who is naked, disrobing or engaging in sexual activities, or may not be sexual in nature at all. Transvestite fetishism on the other hand is about sexual attraction towards the clothing of the opposite gender. It gets that bad how we get satisfaction from what may seem strange to others.

Other paraphilias lead people to seek sexual please from infants i.e. chronophilias e.g. infantophilia. This is a sexual attraction to infants or pedophilia...a sexual attraction to prepubescent children [before a child turns to puberty stage]. Gerontophilia refers to sexual attraction to the elderly.

Other paraphilias: this is a grouping of rarer paraphilias including such problems as telephone scatalogia (obscene phone calls), necrophilia (corpses), partualism (exclusive focus on one part of the body), zoophilia (animals), coprophilia (feces), klismaphilia (enemas), urophilia (urine).

To all these paraphilias, there’s help one can get. If you really want help dealing with your feelings and emotions, changing your behaviour, and improving your life and the approach and office hours of typical therapists and counsellors do not fit your life style or personal needs, psychosociologists may have a solution.

If you can’t find anyone in your locality psychologistanywhereanytime.com lists a number of people to help. You can use flexible office appointments, telephone consultations, email, teleconferences, and the willingness to travel and meet in person. You can be helped any time and anywhere.