Question When I was a teenager, I started to think about sex all the time, but nobody ever talked to me about it. I may have been talking with someone of the opposite sex, for instance, whose dress deliberately accentuated their sexual features, and yet both of us would go on idiotically talking about something else, which neither of us was probably really thinking about. Why is there such a prohibition about pointing out the elephant in the room? Why is it considered morally suspect to make one's sexual reaction to someone an explicit feature of a conversation?

Accepted:
June 5, 2014

Comments

Probably one of the main reasons we shy away from talking with others about sexual attraction unless we are doing so with a partner in a sexually intimate relationship or conversing with a therapist or discussing medical issues (from STDs to pregnancy to birth control) or advising a friend who has asked for advise, is because we see sexual matters as amazingly / profoundly personal and we would find it positively intolerable being told by all sorts of people whether they find you sexy or not. Imagine that in the course of sitting in a coffee shop for an hour you are set upon by hundreds of people who tell you all about their sexual desires as grandmothers who like to have sex while cooking apple pie, former medical students who were expelled from medical school for public nudity, lawyers who have been accused of sexually harassing interns, politicians who will say anything or do anything to get your vote, two tax collectors who have strange, contagious rashes all over their hands and faces and want to touch you.

Back your observation about an elephant in a room: someone's interest or lack of interest in sex with whomever and whenever is rarely (in my experience) a matter that is as easily spotted as an elephant, even a small elephant. But if you do find joy and satisfaction in an intimate relationship, there will be a time and place when "pillow talk" will be so valued, in part, because it is private and such intimate things cannot remain intimate while being talked about as though one is talking about seeing elephants at the zoo.