After talking it over with some friends recently, I have given serious consideration to crossing over to the Dark Side by seeing a legal prostitute in Nevada this summer to try to have just one successful sexual experience in my life (at the age of 55).

I discovered an interesting spread of experiences in talking to these friends, guys around my age or somewhat older. One of them had a sex-negative upbringing like mine, and he said he had his sexual debut in his early 30’s, but with a woman he knew socially. Another told me that he started to see prostitutes in his teens, and that he has had a lot of experiences with them.

I wish I didn’t have to do this so “late in life,” according to current definitions of human lifespans, and with a prostitute. I couldn’t make this happen organically, in the social environment I grew up in 40 years ago; and I have a lot of empathy for the younger men who have had faced similar problems which have interfered with forming sexual relationships starting at appropriate ages. (I know this sounds out of character for me, because I don’t feel much empathy in general.)

What about She Who Must Not Be Named? You might happen to know her. She provided the opportunity for my first and so far only sexual experience in 1994, but I couldn’t get an erection with her in that situation to save my life, just from the lack of conditioned responses for doing so for the first time in my 30’s. (I talked to a sex therapist a few years afterwards who explained this to me. Basically young men’s first sexual experiences, assuming they can get them, help to calibrate the equipment; and I didn’t have that calibration. Nothing wrong with me medically, though.) Because this woman insists currently on slandering me in public in my absence at inappropriate times and places for reasons which don’t make much sense, I have an additional incentive just to hit the “reset” button with a prostitute and pretend that the 1994 incident with her never happened.

As for my Dark Side comment, sex involves the irrational. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about my parents, because I had a happy childhood in general. My parents just conveyed to me a negative view of sex, and they had inadvertently damaged my sexual development by making me ashamed of sexual expression. But then my father died six months ago, and lately I’ve had the thought that I don’t have to live up to his standards of a “good boy” any more. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of my seeing a prostitute. But with his permanent absence, I don’t have to worry about his opinion of me from now on. And I admit the irrationality of my former way of thinking about this while my father lived.

I have some additional reasons for doing this – why not have more than one reason for a major change in your life? Not just to resolve finally the sex matter, but also:

To improve my position in the male hierarchy. Hey, advancedatheist has become a regular guy now. He has shown strength of character by overcoming a difficult personal challenge. Welcome to the men’s club, and better late than never.

To add the experience to my “Lazarus Long résumé.” Cryonicists want to stay alive so that we can continue to have experiences. Well, what would you call seeing a prostitute, especially if you have never done that before?

To start the process of developing better social skills for dealing with women in general. My current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,” as Texas Hold’em players say in their context, that women can pick up on that apparently make them feel uneasy about me. If I can gain some basic level of sexual confidence by having some sexual experiences with other women after a successful experience with a prostitute, I should start to give off a better variety of tells when I encounter women socially that might make them more receptive towards me.

Farther down the line, I have aspirations of writing at least one novel, so I would like to develop the experience base for writing about sexual relationships in a novel that wouldn’t sound implausible or ridiculous. I can sometimes tell when I read a story that the author tries to depict a feasible action that he clearly hasn’t done in real life, like shooting a firearm. Sex scenes in stories have the same requirements.

I probably have more to say about this, and I may address them in your replies.