sinesalvatorem:

thatismyright:

sinesalvatorem:

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?

Tags:

#probability that the reason I value the capacity for independent opinions in the first place is because I was told to: high #irony levels: staggering #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #occasionally I come across people casually stating that children don’t have a sense of privacy about sex until taught to #*bullshit* #(well) #(bullshit as a rule for *everyone*) #(I have noticed that whenever I hear other stories) #(of young children who don’t know they’re kinky and unknowingly erotic games) #(the storyteller’s younger self is always the one *instigating* the games) #(not the one freaking out at them)

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