sexuality and lack thereof

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Today’s answer to “am I ovulating, or am I sleep-deprived?” is “both”.

Tags:

#*flop* #*muffled ”ugggghhh”* #I am so fucking tired #in my case I don’t think this is an Amenta-induced problem #(that would be the part of me that cringed when Mom said my hair gets a red tint to it in the summer) #I am fortunate enough to have an incredibly incompetent reproductive drive #like #from what I’ve been able to figure out #this feeling (or the ovulatory component of it rather) was ~supposed~ to be about wanting babies #but that was multiple rounds of intra-brain Telephone ago #and by the time it actually becomes a quale it’s mangled enough to have completely lost sight of its evolutionary purpose #(which suits me just fine thank you) #(at least compared to the alternatives) #(*knocks on wood*) #tag rambles #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw? #oh look an original post

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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If anyone’s wondering who Jesse Bering is and why he’s related to that quote from yesterday:

A few years ago I was listening to Science for the People (as I used to do), and they had an interview with Jesse Bering about his then-recent book Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us. He was going on about how men’s sexualities are narrow and stable while women’s sexualities are broad and fluid, a spectrum with exclusive paraphiles at one end and @sinesalvatorem at the other.

And this felt really familiar, and at first I wasn’t sure why. And then I realised:

This was not the first time that I had been accused of having an extreme male brain.

Tags:

#the ”paraphilia is quintessentially masculine” people and the ”autism is quintessentially masculine” people #should get together and study whether the two things are correlated #or they might have already I don’t know #now I’m curious #oh look an original post #sexuality and lack thereof #gender #autism

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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transgirlkyloren:

brin-bellway:

transgirlkyloren:

I think if you’re writing porn online in this day and age and you have any sort of audience, even if you say “18+ only”, some teenagers are going to read it

(as well as some older people who for whatever reason don’t have much sexual and romantic experience)

and so part of Doing Porn Ethically is trying to make your porn something that you’d be okay with a very inexperienced person reading and drawing conclusions about sex from. and so some of that is trying to be realistic about the emotions involved with sex, about safer sex practices, about sexual ethics, and about the mechanics of sex and then when for whatever reason you don’t want to be realistic signposting ACTUALLY USING CONDOMS IS A VERY GOOD IDEA AND YOU SHOULD NOT RAPE OR ABUSE PEOPLE AND ALSO COME IS GENERALLY PRODUCED IN MUCH SMALLER QUANTITIES THAN THIS STORY CLAIMS

(I have a nagging feeling that I’ve misunderstood something here. I will tentatively post this anyway, but I might have gotten something wrong. (Although it’s also possible that the thing I’m wrong about is the sense that I’ve misunderstood something.))

—

Hmm. I’m so biased in favour of this that I can’t tell whether or not I actually agree with it on its own merits, rather than agreeing on the grounds of “I personally enjoy porn more when it’s about realistic ethical stuff, and I would like to encourage people to write their porn in a way I prefer”.

(Like…judging from context, this post was likely inspired by a post from yournaturalstate. I dislike yournaturalstate’s work primarily because it’s *unpleasant*, before even getting into any ethical considerations.)

—

I’m not sure whether this is a point in favour, or a point against, or a tangent, but it’s something related:

Mind-control porn in particular has problems with people insisting on putting blanket Do Not Try This At Home warnings on *everything*. Even things that are actually perfectly ethical and realistic. Even things that are thinly fictionalised scene logs of sex the author actually had (as an enthusiastically consenting bottom).

Written on the entrance to the largest and most well-known mind-control erotica repository are the words:

“The situations described here are at best impossible or at worst highly immoral in real life. Anyone wishing to try this stuff for real should seek psychological help and/or get a life.” (emphasis original)

(This warning is *not true*. Not in all cases.)

So personally, when I think of porn messing up impressionable teenagers, I think of teenagers being told they have to choose between being ethical (or safe) and satisfying their most deeply held desires. This dilemma is terrible enough when it *actually exists*; we *should not tell people it exists where it does not*, should not inflict that on more people than absolutely necessary.

(I say this as a former impressionable teenager falsely told her sexuality could not be safely fulfilled.)

…now that I’ve written that out, I guess this section is a point in-favour-but-with-reservations, pointing out a possible failure mode of a generally good idea. (And a failure mode the original context in question is particularly prone to, at that.)

(Well, okay, yournaturalstate specifically is not prone to it *enough*. But still, I’ve learned the hard way how easy it is to swing too far the other way.)

I think that noting which things are actually perfectly ethical and realistic is, in fact, part of having your porn be good sex ed. Misinforming people is bad sex ed. 

An excellent point. I agree.

Tags:

#the actual message of this response could probably have been conveyed just as well with a ”like” #I’m reblogging mostly so that people following me but not you can see this bit #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #conversational aglets

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

transgirlkyloren:

I think if you’re writing porn online in this day and age and you have any sort of audience, even if you say “18+ only”, some teenagers are going to read it

(as well as some older people who for whatever reason don’t have much sexual and romantic experience)

and so part of Doing Porn Ethically is trying to make your porn something that you’d be okay with a very inexperienced person reading and drawing conclusions about sex from. and so some of that is trying to be realistic about the emotions involved with sex, about safer sex practices, about sexual ethics, and about the mechanics of sex and then when for whatever reason you don’t want to be realistic signposting ACTUALLY USING CONDOMS IS A VERY GOOD IDEA AND YOU SHOULD NOT RAPE OR ABUSE PEOPLE AND ALSO COME IS GENERALLY PRODUCED IN MUCH SMALLER QUANTITIES THAN THIS STORY CLAIMS

(I have a nagging feeling that I’ve misunderstood something here. I will tentatively post this anyway, but I might have gotten something wrong. (Although it’s also possible that the thing I’m wrong about is the sense that I’ve misunderstood something.))

—

Hmm. I’m so biased in favour of this that I can’t tell whether or not I actually agree with it on its own merits, rather than agreeing on the grounds of “I personally enjoy porn more when it’s about realistic ethical stuff, and I would like to encourage people to write their porn in a way I prefer”.

(Like…judging from context, this post was likely inspired by a post from yournaturalstate. I dislike yournaturalstate’s work primarily because it’s *unpleasant*, before even getting into any ethical considerations.)

—

I’m not sure whether this is a point in favour, or a point against, or a tangent, but it’s something related:

Mind-control porn in particular has problems with people insisting on putting blanket Do Not Try This At Home warnings on *everything*. Even things that are actually perfectly ethical and realistic. Even things that are thinly fictionalised scene logs of sex the author actually had (as an enthusiastically consenting bottom).

Written on the entrance to the largest and most well-known mind-control erotica repository are the words:

“The situations described here are at best impossible or at worst highly immoral in real life. Anyone wishing to try this stuff for real should seek psychological help and/or get a life.” (emphasis original)

(This warning is *not true*. Not in all cases.)

So personally, when I think of porn messing up impressionable teenagers, I think of teenagers being told they have to choose between being ethical (or safe) and satisfying their most deeply held desires. This dilemma is terrible enough when it *actually exists*; we *should not tell people it exists where it does not*, should not inflict that on more people than absolutely necessary.

(I say this as a former impressionable teenager falsely told her sexuality could not be safely fulfilled.)

…now that I’ve written that out, I guess this section is a point in-favour-but-with-reservations, pointing out a possible failure mode of a generally good idea. (And a failure mode the original context in question is particularly prone to, at that.)

(Well, okay, yournaturalstate specifically is not prone to it *enough*. But still, I’ve learned the hard way how easy it is to swing too far the other way.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text

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unknought:

I’m lying in the dark and something like oblivion starts to flood my mind. Am I falling asleep? It occurs to me that I don’t actually know. For all the thousands of times I’ve fallen asleep, I can’t remember a single one. I don’t know what it feels like to stop being conscious. If I am in fact falling asleep right now, I realize, then what I’m experiencing in this moment will be gone from my mind when I wake up.

A tiny part of my mind panics: I don’t want to be erased! I don’t want to die! I’m jolted back to full consciousness. I lie still for a while, my thoughts slow, my mind starts to fill with something thick and sluggish and quiet, a part of me panics again. Not most of me; I know that I need to sleep. But enough of me to manage a veto, or at least a filibuster.

In the morning I wake up. I remember the cycle of drifting off towards probably-sleep and being repeatedly pulled back by a tiny fear of oblivion. I don’t remember how it ended.

Saaaaame.

(My feelings about this are so complicated and connected to so much other stuff in my head that it’s hard to really express them properly/coherently. And it might be TMI anyway.)

(I get the impression from reading about other people’s experiences that there’s quite a range of hypnagogic recall ability, and I’m towards the worse end of the scale. TBH, #1 quality-of-life tweak I would make to the human brain is improved hypnagogic recall. Since there are already people who have it, it’s clearly possible to set up a brain that way.)

Tags:

#obligate dozing fetishism + poor hypnagogic recall + psychological Issues regarding memory and existence = cruel joke of Nature #(of course it’s bedtime now isn’t it) #(I suppose I shall go nobly sacrifice very-near-future!me for a better-rested tomorrow) #(like every goddamn night) #reply via reblog #amnesia cw #death tw #infohazards #(you can really see the mishmash of grandfathered blacklist-tag formats on posts like this) #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me

What’s your favorite type of porn?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

asexualactivities:

Ace/grace/demi respondents only, please!

[Asexual Activities Open Question Weekend! | Audience Participation!]

Written word. Consenting characters. Contains no conventionally sexual content (but can contain some stuff that’s only conventionally sexual when foreplay or aftercare, like cuddling): only recognisable as porn through the right kink goggles.

(Willing to bend on the no-sex criterion, especially since with writing you can skim. These days, mostly unwilling to bend on consensuality: I have no ethical problem with the existence of non-con fiction, but it’s not my thing. I try non-written porn sometimes, but with audio and video the bandwidth is too high and it’s too hard to pause/skim/skip-back. Image stills can be okay, but not as good as text.)

Tags:

#sexuality and lack thereof #reply via reblog #nsfw text

What do you think about arousal?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

asexualactivities:

Ace/grace/demi respondents only, please!

[Asexual Activities Open Question Weekend! | Audience Participation!]

I think it’s neat that I can still cause physical responses by thinking, even in something I don’t have direct motor control over. I think there’s always a certain comfort in doing something you expect to cause X response and having X response happen, the satisfaction of a correct prediction.

I do not think that arousal is inherently pleasant. (It generally doesn’t bother me, but I don’t enjoy it except in the more abstract ways described above.) I find it odd that other people talk about arousal as if it were pleasant in itself.

I note that fantasies and (especially) words can arouse me, but actions don’t. Doing non-verbal sexual things can be sexually satisfying, but it is not arousing. (Probably for the best, as it might get distracting.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text

Are you missing out?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

asexualactivities:

Ace/grace/demi respondents only, please!

[Asexual Activities Open Question Weekend! | Audience Participation!]

I’m missing out on everyone else’s experiences of sexuality, but everyone else is missing out on mine.

Tags:

#the reasoning behind naming the kink tag #sexuality and lack thereof #(and now for some other category tags:) #reply via reblog #the wondrous variety of sapient life #asexuality #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

justice-turtle:

so has anybody got podcast recs? i’m up to date on kuec (twice), x-plain the x-men is on a three month hiatus, hidden almanac is… short. ^_^

the problem is, of course, i get hypersensitive about any little hint of -ism or – really anything at all upsetting, in my podcasts? cos i don’t have auditory filtering, so it’s like… the point of podcasts for me is to feel like i’m chilling with friends and listening to them chatter while i do whatever i’m doing.

so frex – podcasts i’ve tried that haven’t worked for me. “the thrilling adventure hour”, i think i mentioned that i just didn’t really click with the particular form of humor, but also i think scripted podcasts just don’t work as well for me as ones where it’s friends kidding around with the potential to go totally off the rails.

“journey into misery”, a dude explaining comics continuity to his girlfriend, WAY less mansplainy than that sounds – the podcast was her idea. loved it except that lbr comics are ALL FUCKSHITE and i can’t handle sentences like “they gang-raped plastic man’s wife and she died” no matter how much the podcasters agree that it was fuckery.

(note for some other post: despite never having been sexually assaulted, i get full-on triggered by sexual assault stuff? idek why)

“into it”, elle collins. a trans lady (i think? not 100% sure if binary or nonbinary) interviews people about various shit they’re interested in. excellent show, just a tiny bit too structured for me.

“the film reroll”, movies played as rpgs. mostly enjoyable, but in 12 episodes there’s been like… three really awkward jokes that weren’t called out? one super transphobic throwaway line – not even a line, a *phrase* – near the beginning of their epic wizard of oz four-parter, two ableist aspie/autism jokes. so i’m like “ehhhhh”, not quiiiite as comfortable as i like to be with my podcasts? :S also there’s only like 24 episodes so i’m already a good halfway through that one

“comicsverse”, too structured AND way too many people. i do best with two-person podcasts where the voices are pitched well apart, due to my auditory processing troubles. i can handle up to about four people if i don’t actually need to tell any of them apart. ;-)

*******

so. anyway. if you’ve recced me something and it’s not listed here i probably forgot to check it out. y’all know a bunch of my many and varied interests; i’d especially enjoy rpg-type podcasts, the summer specials on x-plain the x-men are some of my favorite comfort relistens, but you understand why i’m hesitant to just go guddling around in gamer nerd territory. ;P

Podcasts I listen to:

The Red Panda Adventures: I want you to like this one, because I love it and I would love to geek out with you about it, but I’m not sure you would like it. It’s scripted and has a largish cast*, so there’s those issues. (AFAIK, there are no public transcripts for you to check if you heard something right**.) It is reassuringly liberal, toning down 1930′s-era bigotry about as much as it can get away with, but “as much as it can get away with” isn’t “everything”. And one of the conventions of the particular superhero sub-genre they’re working in (which they explicitly embrace) is that the heroes never dwell on their own moral ambiguity. I mean, it’s good that they’re avoiding gritty grimdark stuff, but that does mean the occasional moment of being horrified by what the protagonists are doing while knowing it will never come back to bite them.

Talk the Talk: Linguistics podcast out of Australia. I’m still way back in the archives on this one. I think it’s only partially scripted: it definitely doesn’t feel all that scripted. Two hosts, plus sometimes a guest. They occasionally get a bit Discourse-y for my liking, but I think they’ve always been on the liberal side of the argument.

99% Invisible: About infrastructure and suchlike. I’m even further back in the archives on this one, only a couple dozen episodes or so in. One host, with one or two guests. Feels somewhat more scripted.

Science for the People (formerly Skeptically Speaking, but they changed it after realising their podcast hadn’t really been about skepticism for a while): Interviews on neat science things. Audio isn’t really a good format for me for this subject (I prefer to get my neat science things through text, and sometimes video), so eventually I got bored and stopped listening. (The number of trying-to-be-inclusive-and-failing episodes about sexuality was also a factor. I know my standards are too high, but it still bothers me.)

Speaking of, I also dabble in a few kink podcasts. TBH, though, I’m never even sure whether *I* like any of them, let alone whether they’re worth reccing to anyone else.

—

*Although, because each side actor plays several side characters, between episodes you are generally not expected to know who a side character is without context. (Within an episode you’re supposed to keep up, though.)

**Brain: “Yet!”

Me: “We have more than enough other things to do and are not taking on ~60 hours of volunteer transcription.”

Tags:

#I stopped listening to Welcome to Night Vale because I got tired of the horror elements #reply via reblog #recs

Video ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

somnilogical:

sigmaleph:

somnilogical:

I’m into furry things and vore things and tentacle things and so on. But I feel like I’m almost cheating because these all flow from having my preference for morphological freedom set really high. It seems rather *unremarkable* given that.

I guess there *must* be some transhumanist people who aren’t into generalized furry and bdsm things. Robin Hanson didn’t know what futa were until a few months ago.

It just seems that given you indicate a preference for full morphological freedom for yourself and given that you don’t want to *stop* having sex… it seems like either you would be into this range of things or you would anticipate your future self being into it.

——

[ Linked from @mitoticcephalopod ’s vore discord. Here: https://discord.gg/JH8jH66 ]

Hm. I also have a really strong preference for morphological freedom, yet vore doesn’t do anything for me? Nor does it seem obvious that my Shiny Morphological Freedom Future self would be into it. She might indulge a partner, but.

I don’t think these things are unlinked, but the link is not as strong as you imply, imo.

Ah, there was a misparsing. It isn’t specifically vore that I would expect but the cluster of sex things which aren’t currently physically feasible for most people. Like being a futa whose hand gets cut off or being eaten alive or being able to restrain your catgirl clone.

If someone imagines being in the Shiny Morphological Freedom Future and changing forms a lot and still planned on having sex, it would surprise me if they weren’t into [current projection of sex that is infeasible now but would be feasible with uploads] and did anticipate their future selves liking it.

I think I can imagine what they may be imagining, but the exercise is a little weird. I can imagine people imagining spending long milliseconds as 11-dimensional squid and spongy manifolds. Softly brushing against an object of their desire a sense of ~pleasure rising. Their body feeling ~warm and ~glowing. Them morphing the system of them and the Object into human forms and having kinky earthling sex.

I mean, I guess??

I think that if the people who plan to [change their form a lot come {simspace, nanomachine swarms, full-body transplants}] and [have sex in the Future] thought about Future sex for five minutes I think they would find some of the scenarios which aren’t currently physically possible quite appealing. I would be surprised to find all of their desires funneled into a narrow region of what sex is reachable by humans of the early 21st century.

I think it depends on how sexually adventurous you are to begin with. Given that as it stands, my desires are funneled into a narrow region even compared to the narrow region of what’s currently possible, I suspect the sex life of Morphological-Freedom-Utopia!me would look like a somewhat-enhanced-but-the-same-basic-idea version of mine.

(Some forms of future-sex might very well be interesting experiences to me, but not necessarily sexual ones.)

Tags:

#and there are definitely erotic acts that would be easier with gills #(or just not needing to breathe at all) #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #transhumanism