"Don’t be alarmed, it’s to do with sex"

 (Sherlock meta by mae-jones and o0katiekins0o)

[Mycroft: Don't be alarmed, it's to do with sex.
Sherlock: Sex doesn't alarm me.
Mycroft: How would you know?]

mae-jones:

Some took this to mean Sherlock was a virgin, especially with Sherlock being referred to as “the virgin” later. However, one could extrapolate many things from these exchanges.

Mycroft’s “how would you know?” could be a dig at how Sherlock has utilized sex to get what he wants. Sherlock is the ultimate control freak at this point in time. He has never been in love with a potential partner. He very well could have had sex a million times but I imagine he would have done so for perfunctory reasons. So, of course sex wouldn’t alarm Sherlock if it was always on his terms and he was in complete control of his emotions.

Mycroft’s ‘how would you know?” could very well be, “how would you know what it’s like to be so desperate for someone that you lose your mind with them and get turned inside out by your physical desires?”

As per “the virgin” comment, it could be the same vein of thought. Without being into someone, with having the emotional connection to them, sex would be functional for someone like Sherlock. Sherlock, for all intents and purposes, is a virgin when it comes to romantic love and I think that is the ultimate message they were trying to instill in us as viewers.

In series 3, this comes full circle when Mycroft says, “I’m not lonely!” Sherlock uses his brother’s words against him. Again, it’s a parallel in emotions, not physicality. Sherlock is stepping out of the “virgin” emotional role. It shows how his feelings are developing, how he’s come to recognize the absence of romantic love in other people’s lives.

Sherlock’s physical virginity is ultimately irrelevant (as it really is irl). The sex part of the equation is unimportant, it always has been. ie/ Emotional context.

PS - From a Sherlolly standpoint, it’s kinda cool to think that the creators may have ALWAYS intended for Sherlock to fall in love romantically. These little hints are insights into where they were going with the show, not just opening Sherlock up, but a complete transformation. That’s what the virginity trope has always been about, not the fetishism of the physical, but how love can change us.

o0katiekins0o:

And it was brought up again in The Final Problem when Mycroft said he’d asked Eurus if she felt pain and she said “Which one’s [pain]?”

How would you know if sex alarms you if you have never been able to make the connection between sexual expression and romantic love?

How would you know that you’re lonely if you fail to connect your isolation with your unhappiness?

How do you know what pain is when you feel so intensely that you can’t suss out one emotional state from another?

I have said for a long time that the Holmes weren’t born with the empathic connection of emotional state and cognition.

Sherlock actually tries to make the connection on a very basic level aided by John: X means happy, Y means sad, Z means angry. We watch him learn to form these connections through the progression of the series.

The only emotional-physical state Sherlock seems to inherently understand and respect is fear. In The Hounds of Baskerville he gives his “body betrays me” speech and in The Abominable Bride when he told Lestrade “Fear is Wisdom in the face of danger”.

If you subscribe to the notion that all emotions exist on a spectrum between fear and love, then it starts to look as though the entire show is Sherlock starting at fear and working his way through the entire spectrum leaving “The Final Problem” aka Love.