Nothing's Happening, But I Feel an Intense Attraction Toward Almost Every Strange Guy I See.

Something is terribly wrong with my vagina. One day, about a year ago, it decided (again) that to feel sexual attraction to anyone, or to have sex at all, it needed me to drink at least two alcoholic beverages. This was frustrating. I'd recently stopped drinking for beauty reasons, and my then-new-boyfriend wasn't so into plying a kiss from me with booze. I guess that I've since given up on beauty, because now, two months post-breakup, just a few weeks after I've started tipping back Amstel Lights on weekends, I feel an intense attraction toward almost every strange guy I see.

I've been hanging out with beautiful men at beautiful parties, drinking beautiful drinks and doing everything I can, lately, to rein myself in, short of knocking myself out. And what's worse, I've no control over the reining. It's all or nothing. I practically ignore my lust objects, for fear of jumping them. I'm so attracted to some men I can't even look in their direction. I have to try not to lip-gaze. My eyes strain to look away from bulging crotches and the smooth, clean, sensitive backs of necks. Even old, ugly guys break into my sexual consciousness. I try not to become comfortable invading their personal space, so that I retain the ability to back out of it. Of course, I fail miserably, because I'm numb from the booze, and my body's unable to do what I tell it.

On some Animal Planet/National Geographic level, I think the men of the world have recognized this change in me. They charge at me in waves, it seems, and I've nothing but a girlish stupidity/innocence act to fight them off. Sexual innuendo tends to go over my head, but only because I'm bent over so constantly, sucking some emotional dick that I have created for whatever guy I'm talking with. "I'm a baby, but I'm an adult," I say with my body language. "You can take me to dinner, but I'll never fuck you?in fact, I'm not so sure what fucking is. You can tell me about it at the restaurant. And make sure it's tres chere, because I can buy my own cheap dinner."

I am invariably drunk when this happens. I have convinced myself that this girly act is sexy. It clearly is to some men, but to others I'd imagine it's just disconcerting. It certainly disconcerts me. Mostly because I am not play-acting.

I am an adolescent in a 24-year-old's body. Recently, on my newly acquired cable, I saw Trees Lounge, the mind-numbing Steve Buscemi film in which the main character tries to overcome his self-loathing by, among other things, letting a teen girl pick him up. Later, after Buscemi's character and the girl don't have sex, he explains to a friend that he did nothing wrong.

"Nothing happened," he says. "We just ended up making out like a couple of high school kids."

"She is a high school kid," the friend says.

"I know, Raymond, I was there," Buscemi whines.

That girl is me. And Buscemi's character is my ex-boyfriend, and every other guy I have ever flirted with or kissed. They feel I'm not quite the girl to fool around with, then get upset when I prove their intuitions right. Anyone who takes a good look at me and listens to me talk a bit knows that I am emotionally immature. So why is my sexual immaturity such a frightening surprise?

A couple of months ago, I met a boy in a bar in a subway station. We talked and Instant Messaged for days and days, me slurring loudly, "I cannot date," with an unsubtle regularity, my eyes tearing up each time. Even as I said it and took a slug of my beer, I felt myself thinking the opposite. I could do you here and now, my mind would say, and I'd lick my lips.

But when the time came, I backed down like the proper girl I is, grew scared and sat in my room moping about my asexual state, my prim mind. Even as bar-boy asked, I saw him transform magically into that first, horrid fuck I had with the boy with the humongous penis and me so small and dry and unattracted to the process. I can barely remember my first time. I remember it was horrible and that I was drunk.

I read somewhere once that sexual attraction for the sexually abused grows out of the sexual pain of the past. I'll admit that pain excites me some. I'll admit that drinking turns me on. I'll admit to being abused by boyfriends. But if it's the pain that turns me on so much, why is it that I need to be numbed with drink before I feel sexual attraction at all?