Basic Trope: A character desires romance and/or sex, but is too afraid of sexuality.
- Straight: Alice is afraid of having sex with her Love Interest Bob.
- Exaggerated: Alice shuts down completely when anyone mentions anything sexual, even a minor dirty joke.
- Downplayed:
- Alice considers having sex with Bob, but decides against it.
- Alice will get nude in non-sexual contexts, however reluctantly, but that's it.
- Justified:
- Alice was raised to believe that Sex Is Evil.
- Alice, Bob, or both have a debilitating inheritable disease, she doesn't want to risk giving birth to a child with said disease, and she refuses to get pregnant only to abort it.
- Alice was raped and has lingering trauma.
- Alice has an STD and is afraid to pass it on.
- Inverted:
- All Men Are Perverts or All Women Are Lustful.
- Alice is afraid of not having enough sex, leading her to have lots of sex.
- Subverted:
- Alice says she doesn't want to have sex, but then says she's joking and makes out with Bob.
- Someone assumes Alice has this problem, but it turns out she had a more practical reason for not wanting to have sex.
- Double Subverted:
- ...But then she realises how horrible it is and pulls away.
- It turns out it was a thin excuse.
- Parodied: Mentioning or showing even simulated sex around Alice is her Kryptonite Factor.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Some days Alice runs from the idea of having sex, other days she doesn't.
- Some characters have this mentality, while others do not.
- Averted:
- Alice doesn't express knee-jerk opposition to the idea of intercourse.
- Alice's attitude towards sexuality is not mentioned.
- Enforced:
- Alice comes across as a Mary Sue and this was the flaw the writers picked to thwart that.
- The writing process is driven by An Aesop about how Sex Is Good.
- Lampshaded: "I don't like sex. I find it viscerally worrisome."
- Invoked: Alice became sexually inhibited after seeing her friend Claire fall into degeneracy and die young from such a lifestyle.
- Exploited: Denise boasts about her own sex life to rub it in Alice's nose what she could be missing.
- Defied: Alice gets help from a therapist to get over her fear of sex.
- Discussed: "That Alice, she's still a virgin at thirty-five. ... She's never gotten over that worry of hers."
- Conversed: "Yes, Slut-Shaming is bad, but these shows go so far in the other direction that they create an equally bad attitude."
- Implied: The thought of sex makes Alice's eyes bug out and her heart race.
- Deconstructed: Alice's discomfort leads her to harshly judge people who she thinks are impure.
- Reconstructed: Alice understands her fear is not rational, so she can respect the choices of others, even as she feels they are wrong and disgusting.
- Played for Laughs: Whenever someone says anything remotely sexual, Alice gasps in an overdramatic fashion.
- Played for Drama: Bob isn't willing to deal with Alice's hangups, and dumps her for it.
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