Can you look for yourself and see whether you really do want to have sex with these random people? I was thinking that if you found you actually didn't, that might make it a little easier to shrug off the voice -- like, what's it talking about, anyway?

If you find you do want to have sex with some or all of them, you've probably already noticed that that doesn't mean you're actually going to do anything about it. I don't even see any harm in thinking about it, as long as you get to choose when you think about it and when you don't.

(Now if you happened to have something like two voices, one of them telling you you wanted to think about sex, the other one telling you you mustn't, I can see where you might feel kind of caught in the middle. That doesn't sound like exactly your problem, though)

I didn't get unwanted thoughts that often but I used to really hate them because it seemed like I didn't have any control over them. Quite the opposite: the harder I'd try to make them go away, the more they'd keep coming back. I'd read about that little experiment (or demonstration, or whatever it is) where you try not to think of a white elephant (it's always a white elephant, for some reason) -- and of course that was all it ever took to get me thinking about white elephants for the next 15 minutes. I'd make up my mind to really concentrate hard on something else, a green goat maybe, but in half a minute at the most, there would be the darned elephant peeking out from behind something.

"For the next 15 minutes," I said. So what would happen after that? I don't know, I guess I forgot to not think of a white elephant. I also started to notice that there had been many days when I'd never once tried not to think of a white elephant -- and never once though of a white elephant. How very strange.

I'm not exactly sure how I got to this next point, but after a few years of trying this dumb try-not-to-think-of-a-white-elephant game I was getting pretty bored with it. One time I decided I'd try once again (ho-hum!) not to think of a white elephant, but I really didn't care in the least if I thought of a white elephant or not. That was all -- about fifteen minutes later I realized I never had gotten around to thinking (or not thinking) of a white elephant. I'd forgotten all about it.

By any chance, does trying not to think of sex turn out for you anything like trying not to think of a white elephant used to turn out for me? Come to think of it, trying not to think about sex did work a whole lot like that for me too, except that I didn't usually try very hard not to think about sex, so I only thought about it for as long as I did.