Existential Ennui And The Absence of Want
Thoughts on nurturing desire in a world gone mad.
There are a million and one ways in which sex, or rather, being sexual, is used against us.
If you want more sex, you’re “too horny” or “promiscuous.”
If you want different sex, you’re “a weirdo” or “a deviant.”
If you don’t want sex, “something is wrong with you” and you’re “broken.”
We don’t even have to hear these accusations out loud before we start to believe them. They settle in quietly, like background noise we stop noticing, until we’re repeating them to ourselves.
The trouble is, in almost every case, they’re wrong.
But we tend to absorb the beliefs and values of the society around us unless we actively and critically examine them, and that is almost never easy. Even the most self-compassionate and self-aware among us can feel the sting of those assumptions. What they miss is this: libido is not a fixed menu.
It’s a living, breathing, mutable part of being human. It’s meant to change.The fluctuation is the feature, not the flaw. And yet, we are quick to judge. Quick to call a shift a failure, to call a pause a problem. Quick to believe that wanting more, or less, or differently, says something unflattering about who we are.
But our wants are always in motion.
And lately, the world hasn’t made much space for wanting at all.
There’s a heaviness in the air that feels impossible to escape. The news cycle resets by the minute, information and misinformation crowd every feed. There’s no quiet, no reprieve, especially online. That constant din puts strain on desire. It can dull it, distort it, or wrap it in shame. So, if you’re feeling overstimulated, and not in the sexy way, you are not alone. And there’s nothing wrong with you if your engine isn’t revving like it used to.
I wish I could say I was immune to these libido lows. I live in sex culture; I read it, write it, talk about it, all day, every day. And still, I struggle with the weight of expectation around desire.These last few months, I’ve been in a personal dry spell, processing my cervical cancer diagnosis, the treatment, the unknowns. There have been small but stubborn shifts in how I see my body, my gender, my choice not to have children, my autonomy, and the lingering effects of abuse.
These are necessary reckonings.
But they are not sexy.
There is nothing hot about pulling these threads, nothing that ignites desire in me. Other times my body is simply out of commission for certain kinds of sex, or wholly uninterested in others. Given all that, you’d think I’d feel entirely justified in my low desire. And yet … I still feel a certain way about it. A little guilt, a little shame, the voices of those old societal beliefs, still humming. Even without the cancer, there’s a blankness where my libido usually lives.
Not gone, but barely warm, not even simmering when it’s normally at a rolling boil. There’s too much to carry, too much to process, and it feels like there’s no room to feel anything more.
I had a hard-earned orgasm the other day and then lay there sobbing. Not from the release, but from the thought that it was selfish, frivolous, to feel so good when the world is burning. Earthquakes. Genocide. The goddamn Epstein files.
How dare I feel good when there’s so much bad?
But desire doesn’t always return in full force, all at once. Often, it arrives in fragments, it needs coaxing, and quiet spaces where it can be remembered. A warm bath. A touch that asks nothing of you. A book or a song that stirs your mind. Even a hand brushing against your own skin can be enough to remind you that your body still has wants, still has language, still has life.
These moments don’t have to lead anywhere; their purpose is simply to keep the channels open. To tend to the flickering flame of want, even when the world feels too loud.
And when the blankness threatens to swallow everything again, you keep leaning into it. Small acts of noticing, of listening, of letting your body speak without judgment, these are tiny revolts against overstimulation and despair. Each fragment of pleasure, each hint of warmth, is a signal that desire is still there, waiting, shifting, changing, just as it was meant to.
Maybe that is the point.
Maybe pleasure in dark times is not selfish, but survival: a reminder that even in a world of disaster, even when our engines falter, our bodies can still whisper in the language of want, and we are still allowed to listen.