is there anything more awkward than looking back at your childhood at innocent interactions you had with other kids and thinking “oh…. wow. that was uhhh definitely their early exploration of a fetish, wasn’t it?”
I’m also remembering a lot of games with one particular friend who always found reasons why her character should be tied up. I didn’t mind, because it meant I got to play the Noble Knight Who Rescues The Princess™️ AND the mustache-twirling villain, but it always pissed me off when we paused the game and she would still pretend that she was actually stuck and would fake-struggle for like ten minutes against the most half-hearted jump rope tied in a bow around her arms. Please, knock it off, I just want to go to lunch.
Villain: “Can you PLEASE just ride off into the sunset together already?”
Knight: “You’re just letting us go? What’s the catch, blackguard?”
Villain: “No catch. Kidnapping the princess was just supposed to be a distraction while I executed my REAL plan. I did not expect this to take so long and now the window of opportunity has closed… a whole day, wasted.”
Hero: “Look. I am TRYING to rescue her. She just… well.”
Princess: “Ha ha oh nooo it looks like these ropes just wrapped around me somehow… I’m hopelessly trapped…”
Villain: “Ma’am. Your Highness. That’s the power cord to my Xbox.”
Princess: “And it’s getting tighter! Oh no!”
Knight: “I’m sort of uncomfortable. Are you uncomfortable?”
Villain: “Yeah… I know I technically initiated this entire scenario but I’m starting to feel… used, somehow. Like. It doesn’t feel professional.”
Princess: [sarcastically] “Is someone baking a cake?”
Knight: “No?”
Princess: “Huh. Weird. ‘Cause I could swear I smell the overpowering aroma of vanillain this room.”
The games themselves (probably? hopefully?) weren’t recognizably sexual—just early fixations upon things or ideas that seemed maybe a little weird or exasperating at the time if you didn’t share that fascination, but which in retrospect were almost certainly the unrealized roots of your playmate’s later sexual preferences.
It is a bit disturbing to realize that you had some kind of role in developing their, uh, proclivities, but it’s not like Little Jimmy could have meaningfully articulated why he always insisted on the rule that everyone had to take off their shoes to play tag, or known that it would creep his friends out ten years later once he realized he had a foot fetish. It’s awkward but—so long as the games didn’t result in something traumatic—ultimately sort of an unavoidable embarrassment of youth to look back and go, “Oh, that’s what that was…. 😬”
I was reading Perv by Jesse Bering (which in general is only so-so; not enough discussion of the research IMO), and he points out that, where kinks can be traced to a formative experience in childhood, this formative experience often comes well before puberty, like anywhere from five to ten–which is super awkward, because for many reasons our culture likes to draw a bright, clear dividing line between childhood and adulthood, and where that’s not possible, at least between childhood and adolescence. But that’s not always possible! And given how much of human psychology is dominated by romance and physical attraction, it would be weird if that system of the brain didn’t exist some unformed, incipient manner, but sprang into existence suddenly on our 13th birthday or w/e.
I have spoken to a lot of kinky people about this. In my experience, about 50% are like “yeah, in retrospect I was an extremely kinky eight-year-old, not that I had any understanding of any of this at the time.” In other words, I am the playmate here and I apologize to my cub scout troop.
Did the many kinky people you’ve talked to fall into distinct camps of “yeah, in retrospect my insistence on getting my acquaintances to play with me in certain very particular ways was Meaningful” vs “yeah, in retrospect my insistence on *freaking the fuck out* at acquaintances who happened to play in certain very particular ways in my presence was Meaningful”? If so, are there other clear distinctions between said camps?
Whenever I hear stories about childhood selves who don’t know they’re kinky and unwittingly erotic games, the young kinksters are always the ones *instigating* the games. But I was the exact opposite of this! Long before I had any idea why, I knew down in my bones that this was something *important* and *profound* and *private*, and I couldn’t stand to see people taking it lightly and without regard for whether anyone was watching.
(“It’s just a game,” said the girls confused about why I was upset by one of them pretending to hypnotise the other, and they were more confused when that only upset me further. It isn’t *just* anything.)
Don’t get me wrong, I played plenty of in-hindsight-sexual games as a child. But they were always, *always* alone and in private (to the extent that a child can arrange for privacy). (…and would you look at that, I grew up into an asexual adult who finds casual sex extremely unappealing. I feel like these facts might be related, but I have so little data.)
—
(I worry about the people who think that the senses of importance and privacy people have around sex are invariably *learned*, that they are a collective trauma that we as a society should work to grow past.
I know some people actually do feel deep down like it’s not a big deal, even in spite of having been taught otherwise. And I know vanilla people can’t control for knowledge, can’t see into what “a version of themselves who hadn’t been taught anything at all about how to interpret their desires” would be like. But I can, and I know that I could never have been good enough for them.)
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#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #my childhood #embarrassment squick #rape tw
Brinens and Things 