crossposts

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asexualactivities:

Catching up on the prompts from this week. Kind of long.

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I have sex dreams, or at least, I have kink dreams. I tried to write an explanation, but I kept feeling like I was just recreating a bit from an email I wrote in August 2015. I might as well copy that here instead.

“My erotic dreams are about hive minds, mind-control magic, the occasional sedative, and, increasingly, mundane hypnosis (sometimes partnered, sometimes not). Genitals are rarely involved, and when they are they aren’t really the point. The dreams’ consent status tracks the stories I’ve been exposed to in waking life. When I was young and had only ever encountered non-con stories, I only ever had non-con dreams. Age 18 – 20, when I had a little bit of consensual stuff but mostly still had to resort to non-con, I had the occasional consensual dream but still mostly non-con. The past year, I’ve consumed mostly consensual stories, and had mostly consensual dreams. Some people are fundamentally disturbed by having rape dreams and worry what it says about them, but I’m not one of them. (Well, okay, I was at the *very* beginning, but I got over it quickly.) I prefer the consensual dreams for purely practical reasons: all else being equal, it is better to feel happy anticipation than terror at any given moment (even when I’ll be completely over the terror in twenty minutes), and when my response to figuring out what’s going to happen is to run away, about half the time I *succeed* in escaping. Wasted opportunities, those.

A few months back, I was curious how often I had erotic dreams, so I went through and counted how many were in my dream journal. I then divided this number by the number of days since I started keeping the dream journal, and came up with one day in 70. That’s the average over about 4.5 years.”

Since my libido varies with menstrual phase, I started wondering whether the frequency of erotic dreams also correlated with menstrual phase, and cross-referenced my dream journal with the menstruation marks on my calendar. Oddly, the main result was that I have erotic dreams during periods ~50% more often than I would if they were evenly distributed. (Menstruation is a “wildcard” time for me: my libido’s all over the place from period to period. I was expecting more dreams during ovulation, the consistently high-libido time, but it was only slightly higher than chance.)

Despite not “blooming”–my sexuality doesn’t seem to have changed all that much since my earliest memories, though I do understand it better now–I didn’t have my first erotic dream until I was 15. (It was about being assimilated by the Borg.)

When there are other people involved, they’re usually random NPCs, occasionally established fictional characters. (I don’t see their faces, but–being faceblind–there aren’t normally faces in my dreams anyway.) I don’t think I’ve ever had an erotic dream about real people. Sometimes I play myself, sometimes someone else.

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I can enjoy porn, but damn is it hard to find good porn when you’re turned off by intercourse. (For extra “fun”, I’ve found myself being turned off by non-con these days too. There is consensual hypnosis porn out there, but most of it is still non-con.) I usually have to skim bits even at the best of times.

Once in a blue moon I’ll enjoy a still image, but I almost always use text-based porn. This is probably an extension of preferring text-based media in general (even non-sexual videos get overstimulating, and audios to a lesser extent), plus it’s easier to skim the squicky bits with text, or pause, or go back and savour a particularly good bit.

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In subject matter, my fantasies are much like my dreams. I’d say their frequency and intensity varies with libido, but I pretty much *define* libido as the frequency and intensity of sexual fantasies, so that’s tautological. If I’m idly daydreaming in the background while I do other things, I won’t get turned on, but if I focus on it I usually will.

(Re: this post, I usually deal with the problem of getting bogged down in negotiation by having most or all of it happen offscreen. A lot of the problems you describe kind of sound like a mixture of not skipping over enough stuff and trying to have very visually detailed fantasies without having a detailed enough visual imagination to run them on. My visual imagination is towards the low-detail end, and I deal with this by just not having a lot of visual detail in my fantasies. There’s some visual aspects, but mostly I focus on verbal and touch/kinesthetic stuff.)

Okay, so the reason I couldn’t find that last paragraph for a context-link is because it was never on my blog at all. Fixing that.

(you’ve probably figured it out by the time you read this far, but I wrote the OP)

Tags:

#(October 2016) #conversational aglets #oh look an original post #sexuality and lack thereof #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #dreams #nsfw text

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

asexualactivities:

[This post is a submission.]

So I’ve been (very slowly, I know) thinking over the post asking for recommendations to share. Yesterday it occurred to me how many trials and tribulations I had in learning to masturbate, and I wondered if maybe I could help people in my past selves’ situations skip over some of that shit.

But honestly, the main takeaway I got from the learning process (other than the outcome) was that the whole thing is a complete mess and it’s a goddamn miracle anyone ever manages to find a technique that works for them.

I used to resent Scarleteen for telling me “masturbation usually doesn’t work the first few times you try it; keep trying, it gets better with practice” and sending me off on a wild goose chase for a while in my late teens. But it turns out that, in a way, they weren’t wrong: while the genital-focused methods they recommended have never done much for me, the method that *is* right for me *also* didn’t work at first and got better with practice.

(Trouble was, I had so much learned helplessness built up around masturbation from previous wild goose chases that for a long while I hardly ever practised. You know how long it took me to reach a skill level where I could reliably achieve effects that were, not just “neat” or “better than nothing”, but actually *satisfying*? *Three years*! And almost all of that time was in making “you know, I *could* masturbate, *that* might help with the sexual frustration” an available thought (instead of reverting to my old habits of distraction and waiting it out); if I hadn’t had to deal with that, I suspect I could have reached a sufficient skill level in a month or three.)

I guess the best I have for actionable advice is to focus your practice on methods with a high prior probability of working (things that are a good fit with what you already know about your sexuality, things that have worked for a lot of other people, or ideally both), and on things that are at least *somewhat* enjoyable even when they don’t satisfy your libido. That second part helps with cultivating a lower-pressure mindset: it’s easier to get the motivation to practice if there’s something pleasant to it (rather than just a gamble at it becoming pleasant *eventually*), and that also makes it easier not to get frustrated and give up too soon. (Although, unfortunately, I still have no idea how to tell how soon is too soon to give up. Hell, for all I know, there’s some trick to making genital-based masturbation work for me that I just never worked out, or never practised that particular trick long enough.)

I wish I could tell you that it gets better, but I know there’s no guarantee that a given person will have *any* method that works for them. Maybe try to make your peace with that idea in addition to the above practising; no individual is capable of the full range of possible pleasures, we’re all missing some stuff. Don’t get me wrong, masturbation *is* a very useful tool to have, and it’s worth trying to obtain that tool, but stressing out about whether you’re ever going to find something won’t help anything and might very well make it more difficult (by loading practice with negative associations).

(this is all assuming you even *have* a libido; I’m not sure which parts are different if you don’t, but I’m guessing it’s probably easier for you to be lower-pressure about it)

I don’t know if it gets better for you; all I can say for sure is, it got better for me. Lately I kind of want to go back, give my twenty-year-old self a hug, tell her it’s gonna be okay, and hand her a guide to self-hypnosis.

Tags:

#crosspost #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #asexuality #oh look an original post #(I wrote it so it counts)

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

openamenta:

checked the label on my breakfast four times today before I could bring myself to eat it

reciting each bit carefully in my head, reassuring myself

I knew, I knew there was no Voan stuff in it

but there’s always that little voice going “are you sure”

Tags:

#Amenta RP #Amenta #this contribution is mine #normally roleplaying’s not really my thing except as a lurker #but tbh this barely qualifies as roleplaying I basically wrote it straight from RL experience #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #(it isn’t always this bad but sometimes it is)

We have a Tumblr now!

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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ds9rewatch:

This is the Tumblr mirror (not the goatee’d or pleather’d kind) of the ds9-rewatch Livejournal community. You might have seen our post last month. If not, here’s the basics: each week, we gather in our chatroom to watch an episode of DS9 together. It’s all the fun of hanging out watching TV with your friends, but with more typing and less having to be on the same continent as each other.

We hold three rewatches each week (schedule here), so if you miss one you still have a chance to join in for that episode. The next rewatch time coming up is the third one for “Emissary”, so if you act fast you can still get in at the very beginning of this cycle! (If you do miss this one, don’t let that stop you from joining in later. I didn’t learn about DS9 Rewatch until the first cycle’s “Duet”, and I did fine.)

As I mentioned above, this blog is going to mirror the LJ, so that those of you who check your dashboard a lot more often than your friends page can still keep an eye on what’s going on with us. Reminder posts, links to discussion posts (please leave your discussion comments on the LJ post, not on Tumblr), and notices of special extra rewatches are just some of the things you’ll be able to find here!

Please spread the word about our community! The more people who join in, the livelier our conversations will be!

Tags:

#Star Trek #DS9 #signal boost #oh look an original post #(more or less) #ds9rewatch