Stress Makes Me Horny

Illustrations by Wren McDonald

“Ten minutes remaining,” the teacher cautions from between the pages of People magazine. I have four test pages to go and I'm stressed out. My heart begins to pound; I feel it beating in the crotch of my Mudd jeans. Aside from the inexplicable rash last summer, it’s the first time I’ve felt anything down there.

By the time the teacher says five minutes are left, I’m solving for circumference and full-on riding the seat. All this repositioning has broken the concentration of a classmate behind me, who kicks my chair hard and menacingly whispers, “We all know you’re farting, Meg. Stop fucking moving.” Suddenly, the bell rings with five problems to go. My stress has reached a breaking point and so has my clit. I finish the test and come hard. I turn my test in to the teacher, who unknowingly became my first sexual partner by administering a routine unit assessment.

Since that hot and sticky summer afternoon in my middle school geometry class, stress has been my biggest turn-on. As a teen awkwardly stumbling into her sexuality, I tried to find other things that could stimulate my senses in the same way that my geometry test had done. I’ve watched the grimiest, grainiest porn. I’ve read erotica from every Geocities site left on the internet. I’ve experimented with role-play ranging from the doctor-patient scenario to fake Hanson brothers porn. No matter how hard I try, the only things that consistently get me off are situations that induce a particular type of acute anxiety.

My top three sexy situations are traffic jams, getting trapped in bad conversations, and being late to an event. (Not all stress turns me on, though. Financial obligations are a definite turn-off. I don’t derive any pleasure from being submissive to Sallie Mae to the tune of $12,000, or turning in my rent check.) From that first experience of trying to finish an assessment with a rigid deadline to the more adult struggle of battling traffic to make it to the airport, my anxiety around time is both awful and arousing. It’s like my brain and nervous system are unable to separate the two; it's a twisted form of sexual control.

The best part about it is that when I’m masturbating and imagining these scenarios, I’m able to think and feel like I’m running late to a meeting without actually facing any of the real-world repercussions that come with tardiness.

“Tell me how much you like it,” Forgettable Sex Partner whispers in my ear in between half-assed efforts to give me a hickey. Meanwhile, I'm more concerned with whether or not he plans to spend the night. If he does, I don’t have any breakfast food. I also worry about sleeping with my mouth open. Now he’s speeding up, grunting like my grandpa when he tries to fix the sink. Between grunts, little droplets of sweat fall onto my face. I yawn and try to contort my face into something sexy but realistically more akin to that Edvard Munch painting. The grunts have become staccato eighth notes. He’s going to come soon. The cheap vodka has long since worn off and I’ve got to refocus. I shut my eyes and queue my go-to fantasy.

The clock is moving fast, and the traffic on the freeway is stopped. The car in front of me has its left-turn signal on for no reason; the radio is playing one legal commercial after another. My breathing speeds up. “Injured? We can help,” Sam Benson’s voice booms as I grip the wheel. I’ve got 15 minutes to make it to the airport, or I’ll for surely miss my flight home for my little sister’s wedding. I’m rubbing my clit (it’s a real Where’s Waldo for him—he can’t find it). At the airport with five minutes to go, I’m trapped in the security line behind a senile old lady who is talking in riddles to the TSA agents. Breathing harder. I make it through, running to my gate as it’s closing. Gripping the sheets, I climax.

Don't get me wrong, I still like having sex with other people, but it can be hard to focus my attention on my partner. When a seemingly nonsexual, ordinary, and unpleasant happening is your main source of arousal, it’s hard to work that into a two-person affair. It’s not like we can role-play with my partner as a flipped-over semi-truck blocking my only way to work, or timing me while asking GRE questions.

I’ve tried to talk with all types of people about it. Hoping to find a community for this form of arousal, I posted on FetLife, where only one user responded, commenting, “It helps me relive the stress of those kind of situations ;-).” They then corrected “relive” to “relieve,” which is totally different. Thanks for that, anonymous user. My doctor's response was similarly unhelpful. “To my knowledge, there isn't a medical term for these specific symptoms. Definitely with anxiety and depression, there are unusual things that the brain can do, but not everything we can explain.” I've only met one other person who wasn’t shocked or weirded out by it—a friend of mine who told me that stress is a regular turn-on for her. To this day, she's the only other person I know of with a similar disposition.

I had always assumed that this stimulating sort of stress was common, just not openly discussed. My family was the Catholic use-a-thermometer-for-birth-control (after marriage) type, where sex was reproductive and the clit was still confused with the “pee hole,” resulting in a plethora of God-fearing urinary tract infections. I definitely didn’t discuss my blossoming habit with my mom or sisters.

After my hymen broke like a banner at the start of a marathon on that fateful day in seventh grade, I began a sexual sprint from teenage years into adulthood. Friends and I talk openly and often about sex, but mostly in relation to others. We sift through each other’s encounters with partners, but rarely talk in depth about what was going on in our heads during those acts, or any type of intimate fantasies. Vulnerability is a natural part of the sexual mix. Revealing yourself to someone, engaging in a way that exposes fantasies or behaviors that may be publicly repressed due to shame or stigma or Catholic guilt—it’s easier to talk about a shared experience, to talk and laugh about someone taking a shit on your finger when it’s up their ass. But it’s a whole other thing to talk about what goes on when you’re essentially fucking yourself.

It’s a mindset that affords me maximum sexual fulfillment, yet I haven't found many others who can relate. Until then, my libido will remain gridlocked, alone and aroused somewhere on I-75.

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