A word for someone who's excessively interested in sex but rarely partakes it?
I'm looking for a word or succinct way of describing someone who's interested in lewd stories, dirty jokes and the like, but does not necessarily have the chance to have sex on account of their unattractiveness. To be clear, these people are probably not trying to hide their sexual interest; they might openly ask for dirty jokes or flirt inexpertly, for example.
Context:
Curiously, whether the protagonist is described as a chaste suitor of a single lover or an industrious womanizer correlates greatly with the number of ____ in the tavern.
I considered the word "lecher", but the word implies that the individual in question actually succeeds as getting laid, whereas the sort of people I'm trying to describe are not the kind that succeed much in that regard.
Solution 1:
Difficult. “Voyeur” has some of the mental attributes of such people but is not appropriate because it involves seeing sexual activity for vicarious pleasure rather than imagining it for sexual arousal or titillation.
A search for synonyms was fruitless and all I am left with is the aural memories from youth of:
A dirty mind, a dirty old man, sleazebag, sleazeball
“You are just a dirty mind.” “Rotten joke, you dirty old man!”
Strangely, Google ngram finds no occurrences of “a dirty mind” as a noun phrase.
If we descend to offensive slang, a wanker has overtones of low morals, stupidity and masturbation, which itself implies inability to get the real thing. So it fits your specification but may be offensive.
Perhaps dirty old men in the tavern* is the best I can offer.
= an older man who has an unpleasantly strong interest in sex
Cambridge dictionary