A sexual phobia is an intense, irrational fear of sex and a compelling desire to avoid specific or all sexual situations. Sexual phobias may be experienced by women who were sexually abused as children or raped as adults, or by men and women with a history of other panic disorders like fear of heights, flying, enclosed places, and so on.

Unlike avoiding sex to protect yourself from the humiliation of impotence, to make sure you do not contract a venereal disease, or to keep from performing an act you have learned to view as repulsive—all examples that are based on reality—phobic avoidance of sex is rarely connected to anything that is happening in the present or, for that matter, to anything you can pinpoint at all.

Eleanor, for example, is a forty-eight-year-old woman from an extremely wealthy family who was widowed seven years ago and remarried during the past year. The mere thought of making love with her husband panics her, just as it did with her first' husband. Yet, prior to her first marriage and during the years between her first husband's death and her remarriage, Eleanor was involved in a number of torrid love affairs. With these men, whom Eleanor described as "not the marrying kind," Eleanor enjoyed lovemaking and looked forward to it.

Throughout her life, Eleanor had experienced other kinds of phobias. As a young child she was so frightened by enclosed places that she would not retrieve clothes from her closets and insisted that car windows be kept wide open even in the most frigid weather. When she was in her early twenties, she developed a fear of heights so severe that she immediately moved out of her penthouse apartment, would visit no one who lived in an apartment any higher than the third floor, and became obsessed with plotting trips through the city that would not involve crossing a bridge.

Eleanor admits that she chose both of her husbands because they could offer "precisely the lifestyle I had as a child." However, in both instances, upon first meeting these handsome, intelligent, exceedingly kind men, she had instantly felt repulsed. "Sometimes I think that's why I married them," she says, agreeing that such a statement makes little sense. But then her phobic aversion to sex makes just as little sense. It is, according to Eleanor, "something with a mind of its own. These horrible doom feelings, these waves of fear and disgust literally possess me and make me do things I cannot justify or explain."

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Men's Health-Erectile Dysfunction