Sex worker Isabelle Fox talks in this video (backup link) about the year she went without sex and how the truly remarkable thing for her wasn’t missing the sex as such but rather the realization that she simply missed physical touch:

I went 12 months without sex, which was a record for me because I’d been a professional for six years. But I went through something really heavy in my personal life and it made interactions with men feel almost impossible.

But what it did do was for the first time I truly understood why so many of my clients used to come and see me. While I did eventually miss the sex, that is not what hit me first around month nine. What I really missed was physical intimacy, like just the feeling of another person’s skin, completely non-sexual.

I was a hermit alone in my apartment for basically that entire time. And the most physical contact I got was in the infrequent sessions I have with the personal trainer where they measure my body.

Now babies who don’t get touch die from lack of it. That’s how essential it is. Then around month 10, I started missing the smell of men. And this was sexual. I was in a gym in New York and this guy was near me and I just thought, oh, that smells good. And from that moment, I started noticing men again. And over the next two months, that feeling just kept growing until it became undeniable and I finally acted on it with a man.

It was enjoyable and honestly incredibly cathartic. Up until then, my compassion for my clients had been mostly intellectual. Like I got intellectually what they were dealing with because they told me about it, but I’ve never really been through it to understand. I had always been in relationships even throughout my entire time as a sex worker. I’d never experienced a total lack of emotional or physical intimacy. And wow, it was hard. We really are made for intimacy.

Meanwhile I’m having a parallel reaction to her “discovery”, as I suspect many other men will too. What’s a revelation to her, is just the normal experience of life for a great many men, as she acknowledges when she talks about hearing about it from her clients. Indeed, the trick might be finding a man who hasn’t had the experience while he’s actually living with a woman he’s committed to.

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