What is this "over" sexed you're talking about?

My little half-baked dictionary on my computer defines oversexed as "having unusually strong sexual desires". That seems a beige and generalised definition to me. For it to have any relevance, then we'd need to establish a baseline as to what usually strong sexual desires might be.

(Side note: I'm aware all kinds of studies have been done. I'm also blissfully and wilfully unaware of statistics in these matters. Some things can be measured and quantified, and for me, some things shouldn't be. After all, it's not how big it is, it's what you do with it...right? Am I right? I'm right, right? When you're right, you're right...right? Right.)

One of the issues with that particular definition of oversexed is its apparent focus on quantity or frequency of feeling. What about quality? Or range of tastes? A person can feel a completely normal amount of lust, yet feel it for an enormous range of people (and/or objects). A bisexual person has twice the range of lust objects a heterosexual person has. Polyamory, just as a word, sounds oversexed. Yet none of those examples automatically fits the definition. A person can be bisexual but still have a low libido, for instance.

Personally, I gladly and wholeheartedly confess to being utterly oversexed. At least in a mental and emotional sense. Like most people, I don't act on it physically every time I feel the urge. Hell, I'd never get a scrap of work done.

And it's not the bikini-clad models on billboards or the ice-cream-licking strumpets in advertisements that work me over. Blatant overuse of sexuality to sell crap has been pounded so hard it's gone numb.

But it's partly being a writer which has honed my particular oversexedness. A need to try and understand more people, and understand people more. The need to make educated guesses about motivations. Essentially, to sound overtly and tritely male, to get inside them.

Every day, all around me, I see desirable women of all sizes, shapes, ages and colours. Those with a finely tuned fashion sense, and those who, like me, think Jimmy Choo is a character from Thomas the Tank Engine. It's clear, too, that as I've aged, so my tastes have expanded.

Nowadays it's the subtle and unsuspecting sexiness of people around me which gets me all worked up. People as average as myself. In comments with the previous round of posts here, I discovered I was not alone in finding small, rogue slivers of skin to be one of the sexiest visual treats ever (hi, Annabeth!) That moment when a woman takes off her sweater and her blouse rides up a little, revealing a gorgeous plump belly, maybe with a few little stretch marks she'd normally take great pains to conceal. The velvet skin of a throat either side of a black choker. Or the holy grail; the sweet skin of a curvaceous thigh between a skirt and a three-quarter-length stocking.

As a means of contrast...a drunk woman running up to me in the street, pulling out her breasts and shaking them at me would be a sensory assault. A businesswoman removing her glasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose is way sexy. It's those intimacies which really set my pot a-simmerin'. Little nothings that hit hard because that person has let you into them just a little, without even realising it in most cases.

Living in a subtropical city, with its barely-there winters and free-wheeling spirits, those moments arise so very often. On the bus, at the shops, in the park. Taking into account the vast array of feminine physicality which appeals to me, I simply cannot go anywhere without seeing a hundred different moments which hit me.

Moments which provoke in me an unusually strong sexual desire.