sexuality and lack thereof

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

so like I have no idea where I’m going with this but

people whose lived experience is close enough to harmful tropes that they feel uncomfortable talking about it

like “you’re not asexual you’re just repressed” well as it happened I was not asexual and I was repressed as hell (I was/am aromantic and had it super thoroughly drilled into me that sexual attraction without romantic attraction… wasn’t really attraction or something? idk every time I try to figure out my upbringing it gets weirder)

or like I have an oc who’s demi (or in one ‘verse he’s demi, AUs man) but he IDed as ace for like twenty years before the “I am now sexually attracted to my life partner” kicked in and so I feel reeeeeally awkward about writing that ‘verse because I have no idea how I’d keep it from being “you just haven’t met the right person yet” without, like, actively stopping the story to write a screed about it ;P

but like does anyone else have this problem? what (if anything) do you do about it? commiserate with me! ;S

Ah, that old double-bind. The one where, for instance, some people don’t have a right person to find, and also who cares if there is a right person they’re still ace for intents and purposes now, but you only have the chance to say one of those things and whichever wrong you correct you’re implicitly condoning the other. It is especially difficult when you personally do happen to fit the narrative.

I look kind of like I fit the first one, since I did formerly ID as repressed, but I don’t think I actually do fit it. Nevertheless, when I encounter that one (which I almost never do directly; I hang out in pretty ace-friendly spaces) I always tackle the “so what if I am?” aspect over the “I’m not” aspect. I figure I’m more believable on that one, plus the “I’m not” aspect is generally tackled more often.

I do have a narrative that I both disagree with and fit, and that’s “rape fetishism isn’t an inherent/valid* part of a fetishist’s sexuality; they’re just into it because Society doesn’t give them any better options. If they were in a culture where consent was an established Thing, the fetish would fall away.”

This is bullshit on multiple levels. It also happened to me. I was rather annoyed when I realised, partly because do you know how hard it is to find consensual hypnosis porn (well, obviously it would have to be difficult or this wouldn’t have happened in the first place) and partly because I resented supporting the pro-narrative argument by existing.

I haven’t tried to respond to that narrative since it happened. Any one thing I say would be undermining the others, and–unlike the repression one–I have no clue where to place my focus.

*In a culture with heavy reliance on “born this way” messages, these two words are treated as interchangeable, which is a big chunk (but not the entirety) of the problem.

Tags:

#(June 2015) #I ran into a harmful trope today and I am feeling this feel again so much #the [models in my head of various assholes I have known] are being *so smug* and I *hate* it #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #asexuality #sexuality and lack thereof #venting #rape tw?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

asexualactivities:

If you’re an ace who masturbates regularly, what happens if you don’t?

In the short term, I’ll be very tired all the time [link]. I’ll sleep an extra hour a day and still be exhausted. (Since masturbating takes me *less* than an hour a day†, this makes it strictly superior in terms of time, in *addition* to being more effective and more pleasant.)

In the medium term, nothing. I have a menstrual-phase-linked libido, so in general any given level of sex drive will go away if I wait a few days.

In the long term, it’s hard to distinguish the effect of not masturbating *per se* from the effect of whatever’s preventing me from masturbating. Being overwhelmingly busy is unpleasant, of course. So is ignorance of the outlets available to you: *believing* that there’s nothing you can do about sexual frustration, or that what you can do isn’t much [link].

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†It’s important that I not feel rushed, so I give myself as long as I want and don’t check the time until afterward. However, “as long as I want” invariably turns out to be between 25 and 40 minutes.

Tags:

#nsfw text #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

Anonymous asked; I’m ace (and libido-less) but the whole aces with kinks/fetishes thing has always been hard for me to wrap my brain around. Is it just a sex drive/libido thing? Is it more of a fascination/appreciation? I’d enjoy a topic on that so I could learn and better support my fellow aces!

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

asexualactivities:

One way I’ve heard it explained is that it’s not necessarily about sex at all. It’s often more about the power dynamics, the role play, things like that.

However, I personally have no experience with any of that, so would anyone who is more involved care to field this one?

*

I had an anon ask me a very similar question a few years back. Here’s what I told them.

Tags:

#asexuality #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text? #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

So for the past two years or so I’ve been slowly working my way through the Red Panda Adventures. Recently I reached episode 100. Towards the end, our heroes are surrounded by a group of hostile sapient zombies (long story). There are too many to take them all out in combat, so the Red Panda uses his mind-control powers to put them to sleep. This being a Christmas special, he begins this process by calming them through evoking the joy and contentment of Christmas.

“You idiot!” I yelled. “You’re begging for an abreaction!”

(I managed not to actually yell this out loud. I was out for a walk, as is my custom when listening to the Red Panda Adventures, and I didn’t want the neighbours to get weirded out.)

For those of you who don’t speak hypnosis jargon, basically an “abreaction” is when a hypnotised person responds to a suggestion in an unexpected manner, generally because they interpreted it in a way the hypnotist didn’t intend, or something about the phrasing reminded them of something and sent their mind off on a different track, stuff like that. It doesn’t necessarily go badly 100% of the time, but–like all forms of miscommunication–it’s usually best avoided when possible, and this one definitely would go badly if it happened.

The trouble is, not everyone associates Christmas with joy and contentment. All it takes is one bitter Jewish kid (*ahem*) or something, one person whose associations with Christmas are negative, and the thing’s going to blow up in his face.

Now, hypnosis as practised in the Red-Panda-verse is very different from the real thing, so in the abstract it’s not inherently a bad thing to have this in-universe expert hypnotist doing things that even I, a person with no training who simply travels in the right circles to overhear hypnotists talking shop with each other, recognise as mistakes. But in this case, the differences between our universe and his make this worse. In the real world, if your induction backfires because it turns out your subject hates Christmas, you just feel kind of awkward and embarrassed and have hopefully learned a valuable lesson about not assuming everyone likes Christmas. But because he’s weaponising his psychic powers, his suggestions have to work, first try, without a hitch, without discussing it with the subject in advance, or he might die. It is, literally, vitally important for him to keep his inductions as generic and universal as possible, and not pull risky, your-mileage-may-vary shit like the spirit of fucking Christmas.

(For the record, he got lucky and it didn’t backfire on anyone. Still a stupid risk.)

To be fair, it’s easier for me to spot this because, as a bitter Jewish kid myself, I didn’t have to put myself in anyone else’s place to see why this was risky. I can tell you right now, anyone tries an induction on me based on the feeling of Christmas (foreignness and resentment and the particular type of loneliness one feels when surrounded by a crowd of happy people whose joy one will never share*), it ain’t gonna go well.

*You know what, Christmas could actually make a decent metaphor for being undead, or vice versa.

amango-tea said: Christmas for me was anxiety attacks and spending extra time with my abusive father because he was off work and you’re SUPPOSED to spend time with your family. If someone tried that trick on me, I hope they would be willing to deal with me being triggered as fuck! :Db

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(There was also another reply, but I posted it at the time [link].)

Tags:

#(October 2016) #conversational aglets #replies #abuse cw #Red Panda Adventures #reactionblogging #sexuality and lack thereof #rants

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

I was wondering today, how come I’ve never seen mind-control fetishists talking about BBC Merlin? And only seen one piece of erotic fanfiction set in that universe?

That show had such ridiculous quantities of mind control. When it wasn’t plain mind-control magic, it was zombification (in both the “resurrection” and “enthrallment” senses simultaneously, though–at least in the case I’m thinking of–not in the “non-sapient” sense). Or love spells. Or possession. Or mind-altering parasites. Or getting their wills broken the mundane way, with torture.

One time, in series 4 IIRC, there was a five-episode streak in which somebody got mind-controlled in every episode. Not a five-episode arc involving mind control: five individual plots. It was almost half the season.

(I started laughing at episode 4 of the streak, when they said the Lamia could control men’s minds. Mom asked what was funny, and I had to take a moment to try to see it from the outside, how suspicious it would seem that I was the first one to notice despite not really paying that much attention. *I* knew it was because my salience mechanisms were attuned differently than hers, but would she be able to work that out? I don’t want my mom knowing my kinks.

After a moment, I decided I could pass it off as coincidence that I just happened to be paying attention at the right times, and told her about the streak. When the “next time on” showed the abovementioned zombification, she was laughing too.)

Was I just in the wrong places at the wrong times? Is that why I never saw anyone discussing this?

navelgazed said: Tbh that episode where merlin had to make Arthur as buffoonish as possible (no clue when that was) was like…whoa.

Tags:

#(September 2016) #conversational aglets #replies #sexuality and lack thereof #BBC Merlin

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

asexualactivities:

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

—

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.

—

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 ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

There are a lot of classic horror films where the defining experience of viewership is going “okay, this is definitely the director’s fetish… and shit, I think it’s mine now, too”.

(And yes, I’m aware this happens in other genres, but I wouldn’t say it’s the defining experience of most other genres. When I watch an action movie, I’m rarely seized by the creeping certainty that the director is sexually gratified by men in dark glasses walking away from explosions. I mean, I’m not ruling out the possibility, but in most cases the explosion love seems reasonably platonic!)

@effulgentinara replied:

I am willing to believe that Michael Bay is sexually attracted to explosions.

Michael Bay wants giant robots to pee on him.

Tags:

#sexuality and lack thereof #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #nsfw text? #unsanitary cw #there is probably some other warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what

skeletontemple asked: I tried to read that nrx blog and it turns out that I literally cannot take this style of misogyny seriously anymore, it pattern-matches almost exactly to the smut I read, my brain just interprets it as fetish fuel. Which if you think about it is a reasonable argument in favor of BDSM fantasies

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

vassraptor:

bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190:

it’s really a beautiful moment when it clicks and you suddenly realize you know what like half the members of the alt-right shamefully jerk off to

“free use… cuckold porn… noncon… racist cuckold porn… ooh, that’s a forced fem type, haven’t seen one of those in a while”

friends, romans, countrymen, embrace your fucked-up sexual fantasies and stop sublimating it into questionable political ideologies

take: okay, but now i want to know what questionable political ideologists the looners and foot fetishists and inflat

double-take: oh. never mind, on second thoughts i believe that with the help of some background reading on economic policy, i can figure out for myself what political ideology repressed inflation kinksters sublimate their thing into

third thoughts: now i’m sorting through every australian poltician by inferred kink, and i do not know how to handle this new insight (apart from “using appropriate sanitary methods”)

Tags:

#sexuality and lack thereof #politics cw #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #I *would* say ”ask game: infer my kinks from my politics” #but if anything I’m more open about my kinks here than I am my politics

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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archonofquandaries:

kitswulf:

brin-bellway:

michaelblume:

feotakahari:

People complain a lot about the “hot political takes interspersed with anime girls” Tumblrs, but I find them less jarring than the “hot political takes interspersed with GIFs of ejaculating penises” Tumblrs.

I am once again reminded that other peoples’ experiences of the internet can be very different from mine.

Now I’m wondering how many people reading this fall into the “this is a reminder of how different other people’s experiences can be” camp and how many into the “god, do I know that feel” camp.

(Personally, I’m in know-that-feel.)

I am also in know-that-feel territory.

I have literally never encountered pornography during my use of tumblr as a content aggregation/blogging site. 

Oh, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the *pornography* that was the unwanted interruption.

Possibly I should have put the rest of my original reply in the main text body rather than the tags:

#there is a time and a place for reading hot political takes and it is *not* while looking for porn #look I get that you want to demonstrate your SJ-ness in order to reassure people that #just because you write *fiction* about women getting brainwashed doesn’t mean you support The Patriarchy in actuality #but you could just *link* to your politics blog from your porn blog

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(I mean, the penis GIFs *per se* are also annoying, but I accept that a search for porn will involve wading through some of those. Plenty of people *are* in fact into that sort of thing, even if I’m not.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #nsfw text

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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kitswulf:

brin-bellway:

michaelblume:

feotakahari:

People complain a lot about the “hot political takes interspersed with anime girls” Tumblrs, but I find them less jarring than the “hot political takes interspersed with GIFs of ejaculating penises” Tumblrs.

I am once again reminded that other peoples’ experiences of the internet can be very different from mine.

Now I’m wondering how many people reading this fall into the “this is a reminder of how different other people’s experiences can be” camp and how many into the “god, do I know that feel” camp.

(Personally, I’m in know-that-feel.)

I am also in know-that-feel territory.

Tags:

#(November 2018) #conversational aglets #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #sexuality and lack thereof #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #nsfw text?

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