enscenic replied to your post “Once Upon a Time (cont.)…”This is, of course, the pay off on following you – the commentary and evaluation is delightful. Especially in the tags.
:)
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I’m realising that it’s really hard to model my ten-year-old self’s sexuality, because there was so much she didn’t know. Nowadays it’s hard to grok what it’s like to know that little, and to not even be aware that you might be missing information in this area.
(Apart from the lack of practical demonstrations (no condom-on-a-banana or anything; it was all book-learning), my sex education was about as good as it could reasonably have been, which is to say it was absolutely terrible for me except for teaching me how my reproductive system worked on a purely anatomical level.)
Like, how high was my pre-pubescent libido? In early puberty, when my body was still sorting out what hormonal profile to have, what effect did that have on it? I don’t know, because at the time I didn’t have a concept of “libido” in a way that was relevant to my life, and so it never occurred to me at ten to ask questions like “how often do I think about hypnosis?” or me at thirteen to ask “that time when I spent two (nonconsecutive) weeks out of a four-week period (so to speak) menstruating* because my body was still a noob at having a menstrual cycle, did I feel really tired a lot no matter how well I slept**?”. I didn’t know that these things were all connected until several years after the fact, so I didn’t keep track.
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It occurred to me this morning: while I loved A Wrinkle in Time (and thought the sequels were reasonably enjoyable in themselves but failed to live up to the first one), and I loved the Children of the Red King series, my main reaction to Molly Moon was “more boring than it had any right to be”.
I mean, it was okay, and I read a couple of the sequels, but like, how bad does your book about hypnosis have to be to get merely an “okay” rating from a porn-starved hypno-fetishist?
A model of my childhood sexuality would need to account for that, and I’m not sure what it was that made it different. (“Told almost entirely from a top’s perspective”? “Being ‘a book about hypnosis’ is actually a problem, because it causes too-high expectations”? Both? Something else?)
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*And so possibly two weeks ovulating as well.
**For a moment there, my brain tried to combine the stereotype of “teenagers are constantly horny” with that hypothesis of “our society has been chronically-sleep-depriving the vast majority of its teenagers for so long that we think symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation are ‘just part of what being a teenager is like’”, and then I remembered that for normal people, “constantly horny” is not a symptom of chronic sleep deprivation. (Note that I personally was not chronically sleep-deprived as a teenager: I was homeschooled and allowed to set my own sleep schedule.)
Tags:
#enscenic #replies #(the chronic-sleep-deprivation hypothesis would certainly explain why everyone was always so impressed with my maturity as a teenager) #(perhaps I was the only well-rested teen they’d ever met) #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #my childhood #nsfw?
Brinens and Things 
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