POCD arousals

Your brain can't automatically determine someone's exact age from an attractive physical feature. Take an extreme example and you can see why expecting it to work that way doesn't make sense. Imagine somebody is 18 and has a physical feature that your brain automatically registers as attractive. Now imagine exactly the same person one day earlier, at 17 years and 364 days. They would look essentially identical. It wouldn't make sense to expect your visual system to suddenly go, “That feature is now completely unattractive.” So yes, you might occasionally notice a teenager and experience some slight, automatic sense of attraction or think that they look good. The fact that this terrifies you doesn't mean you need to analyse the feeling until you can prove that it was “only aesthetic,” “only noticing a feature,” or “definitely not sexual attraction.” That's where OCD can grab hold of something ordinary and demand an impossible level of certainty: “But exactly what kind of attraction was it? How strong was it? Did I like the feeling? How long did I look? What if it was sexual for half a second?” You don't need to solve those questions. Maybe you noticed an attractive feature. Maybe there was a fleeting feeling of attraction. Maybe you're remembering the feeling accurately and maybe OCD is magnifying it now. You can leave that uncertainty unanswered. An automatic thought, sensation or momentary reaction isn't a decision about what you want, and you don't need to use it as evidence for or against your character. What you can control is what you actually choose to do and the boundaries you choose to keep.