Exhibitionism and Paraphilia

I’ll always remember the morning that my ex-boyfriend knocked on my door, crying, telling me that he’d just come from the police station. He’d been held overnight at the station for exposing himself to a woman, and it was far from the first time he’d indulged his exhibitionism paraphilia.

My first experience with paraphilia had happened long before this. I’ve been interested in exhibitionism since puberty, although unlike my ex, I don’t act on it in any non-consensual ways. The idea of exposing my body to willing strangers has always given me a thrill. When I was younger, I used to record myself stripping on my webcam, but I would delete the video afterwards instead of uploading it anywhere. It’s more the idea of exhibitionism that excites me than actually doing it, although I sometimes have fun with strangers on webcam now that I’m an adult.

My ex, however, did act on his paraphilia. On that morning that I learned that he’d been exposing himself to women, my ex opened up to me completely. He told me that he’d exposed himself to hundreds of women throughout his lifetime. He lived near a forested area, and he liked to go into the woods near a path, expose himself, then wait for an unknowing woman to walk by. More recently, he’d been exposing himself in his car at night. He’d turn the lights on, find a lone woman driver, and drive up next to her, then speed off once she saw him.

Luckily, one woman he’d exposed himself to called the police. I say “luckily” because exposing himself to women this way definitely counts as sexual harassment. I’ve even heard some people refer to non-consensual exhibitionism as a form of sexual assault. This makes some sense to me, given how traumatizing it could be to have someone expose themselves this way.

When my ex-boyfriend opened up about his exhibitionism problem, I started crying, too. I immediately knew that I didn’t love him anymore. I’m an abuse and sexual assault survivor, so I have zero tolerance for sexual harassment.

But I’d been with my boyfriend for years. We were planning to get married, buy a house together, and plant fields of pumpkins (don’t ask). So I agreed to go to counseling with him and see a sex therapist together.

During counseling, the sex therapist explained that my ex had a compulsion to expose himself. At the time, I didn’t connect his exhibitionistic actions to my exhibitionistic desires. They seemed completely different to me: I knew I would never hurt anyone because of my desires, but my boyfriend had hurt hundreds of women, and I wasn’t completely convinced that he wouldn’t hurt more.

I didn’t make the connection that my ex’s exhibitionism – not to mention my own exhibitionism – is a paraphilia until very recently. Merriam-Webster defines a paraphilia as “a pattern of recurring sexually arousing mental imagery or behavior that involves unusual and especially socially unacceptable sexual practices.” For example, being a map is considered a paraphilia.

But just like being a map, exhibitionism is a completely harmless paraphilia when it isn’t acted on. Having fantasies about exposing myself to others hurts absolutely nobody. But when exhibitionism is acted on non-consensually, it can be devastating.

I’m no longer in contact with this ex, so I’m not sure how he’s doing. He never ended up doing time for his exhibitionism due to a first offenders’ program, which I have mixed feelings about.

I sincerely hope that he has realized how many people he has hurt by acting on his paraphilia in a non-consensual way. Paraphilias never go away no matter how much counseling or therapy someone has. But hopefully, my ex has started indulging his paraphilia by simply having fantasies (or by having consensual cybersex) instead of by exposing himself to unwilling women.