Um.

[j4]

Do you ever just get randomly horny for no apparent reason, so much so that you can't concentrate on your work at all? Or is that just me?

It's really deeply distracting.

Comments

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

It's not just you.

[k425.livejournal.com]

What she said.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Men have this all too often. But I thought the concentration problem was due to a rush of blood from the head, and therefore unique to males.

[j4.livejournal.com]

But, but, women get blood rushing to their bits as well. Don't they? Maybe not to the same extent, but.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

What Jo Brand calls a wide-on ?

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I'm being frivolous (and passing time while a long calculation runs on). Let's try a better answer. 'Horny' isn't just a physiological symptom characterised by a wooden clonk on the underside of the desk, and equivalent-but-more-discreet signs in women, it's a 'mind' thing, too.

Maybe they occur separately, maybe not. Unlucky me, I read body language too well (and no, it doesn't help you if you're geekishly inept with people, TMI is worse than too little when it comes to people, and I'd rather not have the talent) and I can tell you that most offices have someone, sometime, with your problem during every working day: I do see it and I do know it when someone's bloodstream is awash in sex hormones. You've indicated a desire too avoid TMI, so I won't give the subtle signs, but I've seen one devastatingly cute business analyst stuck in her chair, eyes glazed, back arched, legs apart and hips tilted forward into her jeans *trying* to get on with the software install she's got to do before lunch, glazing over again and visibly snapping out of it when the 'Insert Disk' prompt comes up (Ok, it's an Extreme case: her boyfriend was a week away on the other side of the world). Other people noticed (she had it that bad) and she got some attention from the traders which I think she found rather unwelcome. Milder episodes are commoner than you think, age status and shape are no issue, boredom at work maybe is an issue, now that I think of the places I see it most often, and I have to hope that women are less obvious to each other than men's comically inept attempts to function 'normally' while keeping an erection out of public view.

But yeah, that's trivialising it again. When you're chemically (not just anatomically) 'rushing', and your brain's definitely not going to do the daytime stuff you think its supposed to, there's not a lot you can do. I have Ki-Breathing and you may have other meditative exercises that are a mental equivalent of three laps round the games field and a cold shower. If you haven't maybe you should look into that, because it helps.

Which leaves the question: even if you want to, should you? It happens, Janet, and it's very common. Normal, even. Uncomfortable, frustrating, potentially embarrassing, inconvenient. And annoying because there's a time and a place when you'd enjoy it, thoroughly, and you're not there and you don't have time, and you're not in the company you'd share it with.

Which is to say: you wouldn't give it up just because your libido's got a habit of showing who's boss at the wrong moment.

[j4.livejournal.com]

it's a 'mind' thing, too

Oh, I certainly don't mind. But seriously: yes, 95% of erogenous zones are in the brain, or something like that. Which is why there's a certain fun to be had in being in an open-plan office in that state of, um, 'mind'. It's probably just as well for the sake of my sanity, though, that today was a day when the sexiest person in the office wasn't in. [Cnegvphyneyl fvapr fur'f zl obff.]

I'm not avoiding TMI out of embarrassment or prudishness (I didn't think I was really avoiding TMI very much at all, unless you count tucking things behind a cut and not going into details about why I'm not big on gusset-typing [as Jo Brand calls it]) -- more just because it gets boring and some people really don't want to hear it. Yes, they can stop reading, but still.

And I'm not really worried about it. More just curious. It's funny to think of all the other people at work feeling like that from time to time. "Naked beneath our clothes", etc. And if I really need a mental cold shower I can always read some of the documents on the Finance Department's website. :-)

No, No, and No.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

What if it didn't work, reading the Finance Department's website, and your state of, er, mind persisted?

You would become habituated to physical sexual arousal while reading departmental budget projections.

Dear God, No.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Could you please mail me a translation of [Cnegvphyneyl fvapr fur'f zl obff.]

[j4.livejournal.com]

It's only ROT-13 -- how do you manage with uk.misc?! There's a sekrit decoder ring here (http://www.rot13.com/), but I will mail a translation if you prefer...

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

At times I've skipped over about a quarter of UK misc, on the assumption that Welsh is perfectly acceptable on a board intended for the entire United Kingdom.

Fixed frame-shifts, I can read them by eye (Cxrkdwhz fhudr ld z mzstqzk zcuzmszfd) providing they are within five letters or so (the natural limit of visual-cortex arithmetic) but rotating shifts are sufficiently challenging, and I'm sufficiently lazy, that I haven't bothered.

Meanwhile, I can see why you encrypted that!

Re: No, No, and No.

[j4.livejournal.com]

*shudder*

[pir.livejournal.com]

Frequently.

[sparrowsion]

Rarely so badly as to distract me from work, but often bad enough to affect displacement activities. And always bad enough to depress me.

[j4.livejournal.com]

:-(

Why does it depress you?

[sparrowsion]

Unrealizability of fantasies, strongly associated with personal sexual -- well, uselessness. And outside the work context the general non-specific guilt and downness associated with the aftermath of, ah, attempts at relief.

[j4.livejournal.com]

You're not useless!

A lot of my fantasies are things I wouldn't necessarily want to realise -- good as fantasies, less good in real life -- so I guess I don't really get the oh-no-this-will-never-happen thing...

And I'm sure you know that you needn't feel guilty about, well, any of it, really, but I suspect telling you that doesn't help. Have you any idea why it makes you feel guilty? Do you think it's bad for other people to take themselves in hand, as it were -- should they feel guilty? -- or is it just you? Did somebody tell you it was Bad and Wrong?

[sparrowsion]

Useless I meant more in the sense of hopelessness of getting together with someone than in relation to performance once past that hurdle, although I have my doubts about that too.

The guilt thing I don't think is subject to that kind of analysis -- it's a very visceral reaction to the moment, rather than a general view on the matter. I'd guess at least part, perhaps the greater part, of it is distaste for my body, and it's silly desires getting control of me.

[rmc28]

Sometimes.

[besskeloid.livejournal.com]

I've not had that trouble since I were a teen. I think I'm getting too old too fast.

I once pulled myself off in a Tameside Council building cubicle when I was on the YTS. Now *that's* TMI!

[j4.livejournal.com]

Yup, that's definitely TMI. :-)

TBPH I don't find I can, ah, get much relief that way. Which is probably TMI as well, though not as much TMI as I could go into...

[besskeloid.livejournal.com]

>TBPH I don't find I can, ah, get much relief that way.

By that method, or in that kind of location?

[j4.livejournal.com]

Oh, I meant the method. (Well, the equivalent method. Obviously tugging my todger wouldn't work on account of me not having one. :-) The location doesn't bother me in itself, but ... Well. The problem is... no, that really is going to get into too much information.

[besskeloid.livejournal.com]

I won't pry.

Not with people watching, anyway.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Now wondering where you're going to pry. (As it were.)

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

No, it's not just you..

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

... and your remedy was to post to LiveJournal?!

[j4.livejournal.com]

You're surprised that my remedy involved telling a potential audience of several million people about it?

Just be thankful I was at work at the time, or I'd've included pictures.

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

Pictures? Some people need a diagram ;)

[j4.livejournal.com]

I refer you to addedentry, above, who is (or was, I may have lost track of his glittering career) an Obs&Gyn librarian.

[vatine]

"Tounge A goes into slot B", that sort of thing? One can probably find them, half-broken, with the IKEA assemble-yourself sex life.

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

Flatpacked partners, with names like Strejs and mädnés, and definitely not enough nuts and bolts? I see a fake dating agency website appearing...

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

The story is that when Dorothy Parker found herself in your predicament, she went out and painted on the door of her office the single word MEN.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I'm in an open-plan office. ... Make of that what you will.

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

An audience.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

This is a question for girls, right?
Coz, like, boys are just horny, all the time (pretty much)

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Er how many times an hour is it, that Us Blokes think of sex? Or is it per minute, it's a while since the research was published. We kind of cope by not coping, it's the natural landscape of the male mind. Except for times of extreme physical, er, enthusiasm.

At which point we all wish we were stray dogs: "Now's the time and the place, spectators what spectators, Woof!"

[j4.livejournal.com]

What, horny enough that they can't think straight, all the time?

I suppose that explains a lot about male behaviour, actually. ;)

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

Well, no, not quite that bad. And I for one can count on the fingers of one thumb the times I've been inconvenienced by an inappropriate erection (oh, except for a couple of times when ... but they were induced by a certain person)
Most men are horny in a "I can be ready in N seconds" kind of way. And no matter how happy one is with one's partner, one finds oneself biologically programmed to look at all the others - and some part of one's mind, albeit tiny, wonders.

A lot of it about

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

it's the weather + a certain amount of job boredom.

My worst cases were always, always, during this type of muggy summer heat, whilst processing Stuff either in the lab or at a computer: something about repetitive gestures, probably [vwg]. Soooooo bad to lose count at number 367 out of 1250...

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I can't remember the last time this happened to me at work. *shrug*

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Do you ever just get randomly horny for no apparent reason

Um, yes. Why do yopu ask?

[j4.livejournal.com]

I asked cos I was feeling ridiculously distracted at work & I thought that asking the question might elicit interesting replies. And it did!

(Next time you get randomly horny, email me... ;)