I am feeling low-key suicidal (In the sense of “I would like to die” rather than “I expect to kill myself”. I have high self-control.) and need to distract myself from how awful being alive is. The best distraction that was recommended to me was passionately arguing about something.
As such, I am appealing to Tumblr to send me asks, or reblog this post, with questions about controversial subjects, unpopular opinions, blatant edge-lordery, links to terrible (but reasonably short) Tumblr posts, or anything else that could put me in a fiery state of “someone is Wrong on the Internet”.
I may not be able to reply to All The Things, because bad brains, and my responses may be poor-quality or not endorsed by sane!Alison, but I will feel better while writing what I can.
If you can’t think of anything (you don’t need to reply with anything good, but if you still can’t) but would like to help, reblogging this post at all increases the likelihood that someone will want to edge-lord in my direction.
(Oh, and sending my complimentary asks (even without anything to argue about) helps a lot.)
Claims that public (non-nude) kink is unethical or immoral are stupid purity instincts and have no connection to real consequences. I don’t care if you think that “you’re part of my scene and don’t consent to it”; that’s a fact about your state of mind, not about a state of reality, and my and my sub’s right to do what we want trumps your desire not to be uncomfortable.
…I think I agree with this, actually? IDK if it’s just the fact that I lack purity instincts and can’t properly understand the people who have them, but this seems really reasonable to me and always has.
If something seemed perfectly OK (if quaint) to you when you didn’t know the motivation for it was sexual, it does not become bad upon you learning that it is, in fact, sexual. The goodness or badness of an action is separate from it’s intentions and motivation. It’s about consequences. If wearing a collar as a fashion statement is OK (because it harms no one), then doing so because it turns you on is no better or worse.
Why do people oppose this, anyway? Followers with purity instincts? Followers who agree regardless of squick reactions? Followers who disagree but know how to steelman it? What exactly is going on here?
This is going to sound weird, please bear with me, but the main reason I value my discomfort around public sexual acts (for broad definitions of such) is precisely because I don’t have an explanation behind it.
Okay, look. I often worry that I don’t have any moral sense of my own, that I only do what I do and think what I think because I have been told to do and think these things. I mean, how could I tell whether a belief in something’s wrongness is really mine or just someone else’s? I can trace nearly everything back to people telling me what to think; maybe I would have thought that way anyway, maybe I wouldn’t. Who can say?
Note that word. Nearly everything.
Because then I look back, and I see a girl, perhaps nine or ten years old. Her Girl Scout meeting has just ended, and the kids are passing the time while they wait for their parents to come pick them up. One of the others pulls a yo-yo out of her bag and swings it in front of another kid’s face. She intones “You are getting veeery sleeepyyy…”
Our protagonist yells at them. “Don’t do that! It’s wrong!”
Kid 3 (the one watching the yo-yo): “Why?”
Kid 2 (the one holding it): “It’s not like I’m really hypnotizing her. It’s just a game.”
She can’t explain why it’s wrong. She doesn’t know. There’s just something in her, bone-deep, visceral, screaming protest at this situation. Can’t they hear the alarm bells going off in their heads?
(Maybe they can’t. The other children’s thought processes are often alien. Perhaps this is just another instance.)
—
Nobody told that girl to believe that it was wrong. Nobody had even given her enough information to extrapolate that it was wrong. (It will be several more years before she learns about hypnosis fetishism, before she learns that the word she was looking for here was “indecent”.) But she thought it was wrong anyway.
That girl is still part of me. She was clearly not entirely lacking in innate moral sense, and by extension neither am I.
Now, I’m not saying that we as a society should all abide by my moral sense. I mean, if nothing else I can’t think of a way of making it practical. It’s all very well for me to avoid doing erotic things in public and avoid spectating when other people do unintentionally erotic things in public (and I do try to), but what about…if I understood correctly, you yourself recently said you tend to pick up any kink you learn about. How are people like that supposed to get by in the world? The set of things they’re allowed to do would be ever more limited.
So, I agree to let people do public sexual acts, but I do it grudgingly. I don’t really want to be okay with it. Not being okay with it is something I can point to as unambiguously myself, and I do not have enough of those to spare.
P.S. I’m curious, on what grounds do you carve out an exception for nudity-involving things in the “public kink is okay” view? What makes nudity less okay than anything else?
This is very fascinating and cool. Thank you.
In terms of the things related to me:
I do, in fact, pick up pretty much any kink I have sufficient exposure to. This does not at all make it harder to get by. My natural state (sans- brain mods) is asexual, and sufficiently so that I have no visceral reactions or associations with sex. System one believes sexual activity is just the sum of its parts, with no particular significance for being sex.
Also, when I started modifying in the direction of allosexuality, being-disgusted-by-indecency seemed like a wholly sub-optimal trait to have. So I never added it to myself. As such, I will never understand what other people find so weird about a public D/s scene.
I personally wouldn’t make an exception for nudity. I would prefer to live in a world where public nudity was OK; just on the basis that I might, at some point, not want to bother with clothing; while there’s zero downside to me if other people do the same. I used to argue about this as basic liberty thing. However, at this point, I have accepted that every other human being is sufficiently insane that this would probably not be feasible.
I think it is wrong to do public sex acts that other people will perceive as being sex acts. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with subtle public D/s, fucking in public places you’re unlikely to get caught in, or wearing lingerie under your clothes because it turns you on to do so. But there is something wrong with slapping your partner’s face, fucking on the train, or similar.
Imagine Alice, who loves public sex, and Bob, who is disgusted by seeing closed-mouth kissing. In a lot of circumstances, they can just go to different places– if Bob goes to the kink event, it is kind of his own fault. But there are other spaces, like the train, where people with a wide variety of preferences meet. The obvious way to do this rule is “Alice and Bob can both do whatever they like on the train”. The problem with that is that every public space now follows Alice’s preferences and none of them follow Bob’s, which is tremendously unfair to Bob, because now he can’t use the train without being upset. So instead we come up with compromise rules: Alice can mostly only do things that don’t upset Bob, and Bob has to avert his eyes when people are doing closed-mouth kissing.
But why draw the line there? Why not be more permissive or more restrictive? Or is it just “the current set of values we have is a Schelling point and we shouldn’t try to mess with it too much”?
I mean, AFAIK very few people want to have public sex and cannot have their desires fulfilled by fucking in the bathroom or in a sex party, and most people do not wish to see others having public sex, so that’s a rule I’m p comfortable with. Similarly, it seems like a bad precedent to require people to not do behaviors no one can tell they’re doing, so I’m p comfortable with subtle public D/s.
I can see reasonable disagreement around the acceptability of PDAs in general (I’m pro-PDA but willing to be convinced) and around the acceptability of kinky PDAs (for the same reason that I can hold hands with two partners in public, a woman should be allowed to call her partner “mistress” in public).
The appeal of public sexual acts is their transgressiveness and the outrage they evoke in the mundanes. After all, if you’re not breaking boundaries, you’re not pushing limits, so what’s the point?
Your thrill depends in large part on imagining my shock/horror/disgust and the patting yourself on the back over how much more liberated and free and natural and open to pleasure you are than repressed prudes like me.
(You have no idea what kind of filthy kink is in my head, you’re going by your idea of what I’m like by my external appearance).
That means that, without my consent, I am being made part of your game. And if I don’t want to play, I don’t get a choice or the chance to refuse. And you’re not playing in private, because you need to evoke a reaction from me so you have to show as much as you can get away with, without being arrested.
Even if I’m not morally opposed, or I am morally opposed but agree you’re entitled to go to hell in your own way, or I am not shocked/horrified/disgusted but simply bored or eye-rolling about “Dammit, all I wanted was to get home and decompress on the bus journey or walk home after my crappy day”, I still get your idea of fun shoved in my face.
Just as a bunch of drunken guys may be having a great time yelling and shouting and messing about, but it’s less fun for the sober people around them, then you and your partner may be having a fine time fucking like dogs in public or showing off your D/s credentials or whatever, but that does not mean I get the same enjoyment.
And since this is a public space, so nobody has a greater entitlement to it than another, the rule is compromise: the least annoying thing for the greatest number.
So you turn down your music if it’s leaking through your headphones on public transport rather than swearing at and threatening violence to the person who asks you to turn it down.
And you don’t fuck where people are watching, unless they’re all there by invitation and/or have consented beforehand or at the very least know what’s going to be going on.
It’s common courtesy, consideration, politeness, civilisation.
People who likes to make sex in public spaces are thrilled by the chances of being caught, but not always by the actual fact of being caught. Most of them freak out if they actually are. They like the idea, but not the fact. You know, it’s like BDSM. It is a performance. There are very few people who love to perform as a sex slave that would like the idea of being an actual sex slave. So if you see people having sex in a public place it’s not that they like to shock you, they don’t mind you, they’re too focused on themselves to actually know about you. That’s why drunken sex on the beach is so profitable to thieves. The witness is not part of the pleasure. The witness is totally out of the picture. If they were so turned on by the idea of people looking at them, they will pay attention and realize that the peeping-tom is not just looking, but fucking stealing they i-phones.
So it’s not about kinks, it’s about lack of good manners and/or intoxication. Like urinating in front of people. It’s not that they love to do it, they do it because they’re too wasted and don’t fucking care.
But what was the main post about? I remember something about “don’t do unrelated things that I find alluring in front of me because it’s obscene”. Well, no. You find it obscene, it’s your problem. If you’re turned on by feet, don’t tell me not to show my toes, my toes are mine and it’s not me who has the problem. Learn how to control yourself. It’s like that tale about Muhammad talking to a girl and the disciple looking at her tits like a pervert. He pushed the disciple’s face aside: it was his fault, not hers. And we’re talking about tits, body parts that most people will find alluring, not kinky stuff. So, if even a religious major figure from the sixth century agree with the “if you’re horny it’s you who’s got the problem, not us” thing, maybe it’s not as progressive as it seems. It’s common sense.
‘But what was the main post about? I remember something about “don’t do unrelated things that I find alluring in front of me because it’s
obscene”.’Really? The main post certainly doesn’t say that (the OP doesn’t mention sex at all), and the only thing like that I see anywhere in this reblog-chain is me describing the thought processes of a freaked-out ten-year-old running on instinct. @sinesalvatorem asked her followers what it’s like having a purity instinct, so I told her. As far as I can tell, nobody actually endorsed making people stop doing unrelated things that someone around them happens to find alluring.
I must confess I didn’t go back to the start and re-read it, I just kept on writing. I didn’t thought someone would actually read my input. But you’re right.
Thank you. I’m glad we understand each other.
(I saw your reblog because I was looking at the notes of the thread to see what else people had added.)
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#reply via reblog #:)
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