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
I can’t remember now who it was (I know @sinesalvatorem has been talking about school lately, but I think it was before that) who was talking about the overly large grip the school system has on society, and gave the example of how “what grade are you in?” is often used instead of “how old are you?”. I was thinking this morning* about that, about my own attempts to navigate the dreaded “what grade are you in” question as a homeschooled child.
At first, when I was very young, I would just freeze in confusion. I had no idea what they wanted from me.
Eventually I learned it was a weirdly convoluted way of asking for my age. I didn’t think in grades, I thought in years. Sometimes, if I could remember the age–>grade translation algorithm well enough (it was hard to keep straight even at the best of times), I would translate for them. Other times I would try to cut to the point and give them my age in years. (Occasionally I’d get persistent people who would keep asking for a grade after being told an age. Usually I tried to explain that that’s not generally a meaningful question when you’re homeschooled**, either in that abstract way or–if I could remember the grade levels involved–saying things like “well, my math and history textbooks are designed for Xth grade, my spelling workbook for Zth grade, my writing textbook for Wth grade…”)
This all got worse after I moved to Canada, because it turns out that by Canadian standards I was born on a different side of the school birthday cutoff. While homeschooled grade levels are, as I said earlier, generally flexible, my parents had taken the lead of the American school system and started me on a kindergarten program at the same time I would have started public kindergarten, shortly before I turned six. While the grade levels of my textbooks soon diversified according to my abilities, there was a rough trajectory based on this starting point. In Canada, the birthday cutoff is in December instead of September, and a Canadian kindergarten would have wanted me shortly before I turned five.
There was no simple translation anymore, not even at the best of times. If I told them my grade, they would think of me as younger than I was. If I told them my age, they would think of me as older than I was. If I told them both, they would think to themselves “ah, she was held back a grade”, lower their estimation of my intelligence, and view me through that lens.
In an attempt to avoid all of these outcomes, I started to use longer explanations more often. For a couple of years in my mid-teens, the explanations began with “I lost count at 9th grade”, because frankly I had. I didn’t bother trying to get a grip on it again; what would it help if I were going to have to do the whole explanation anyway?
When I joined Girl Guides, soon after moving, I was placed by grade. I was placed according to the grade I was “actually in”, not the grade I “would have been in” if I’d been raised in Canada. I was a year older than people expected of me, and it tripped them up, especially in my last year after I reached age of majority.
(”You forgot the ‘parent or guardian signature’ bit on this form.”
“I’m eighteen. I am my guardian.”
“Oh, right.”)
—
This sort of thing seems to be a common problem across a lot of people whose lives are weird in some way. Somebody asks you what they think is a simple question, expecting a simple answer, and you’re like “oh god, do I lie? do I say something technically true but highly misleading? do I dodge the question? do I give a short answer with lots of implied weirdness*** that raises more questions than it solves? do I launch into an explanation of why [it’s not a meaningful question]/[it’s more complicated than that]?”
—
*An hour before waking-up time, goddammit brain.
**Sometimes you get homeschoolers who try to be very rigid and follow a strict grade system, but most of them loosen up before long and the ones who don’t are considered kind of weird.
***Example: “I’m on vacation between Xth and Yth grades,” says a child in October.
Tags:
#oh look an original post #our home and cherished land #I should probably get a homeschooling tag #I’ll go for something obvious #homeschool
Does anyone else have, like, a detached anthropological interest in blogs full of very niche erotica that has no appeal for you?
Seeing what the most vital components are, seeing how it’s cross-pollinated with other fetishes, Discourse about it- it’s all such a blast.
I thought I was the only one!
I love reading about niche fetishes and kinks and sexual orientations. I’m fascinated by looners, sneeze fetishists, bug-chaser fantasies, even things that I personally find unpleasant like emetophilia, because I love seeing how the minds of other people work.
And especially the Discourse. I love the Discourse.
Oddly enough, even as a religious person myself, I enjoy examining cults and niche religions in a very similar way.
I don’t think “detached” is quite the right word in my case, but yeah. It’s fascinating, and getting a glimpse of that vast diversity often makes me feel better about things.
(What are looners? “Sneeze fetish” and “emetophilia” are both self-explanatory (and I’ve heard of them before anyway), “bugchasing” refers to STD fetishists if I recall correctly, but I don’t think I’ve encountered the term “looner” before.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #(<– you might find some interesting anthropological material in that kink tag) #the wondrous variety of sapient life
Whenever you ask yourself the question: “Does anyone else ever do this weird thing // think these weird thoughts // feel this weird way?”
The answer is almost guaranteed to be yes.
There are a lot of people in the world. They all do and feel things every single day. Every minute for you is 7.1 billion minutes for other people. The collective human experience is vast, and even though we’ll never know about most of it, it still exists.
The odds are very good that someone in the world, if you were to explain your circumstances, would gasp in recognition and explain that they, too, have exactly the same bad habit or strange fear or bizarre fantasy.
So: Whatever you’re feeling right now – whatever it is you’ve done – you have company. And even if you can’t see them, trust that they would like you if they were lucky enough to meet you.
#endorsed
Tags:
#I do take some comfort in this thought #when I am feeling that type of loneliness #but I would like to *actually* meet some rather than merely knowing the generalised likelihood of their existence #sexuality and lack thereof #(is where the loneliness currently tends to hit me hardest) #the wondrous variety of sapient life
I’ve been thinking about awe lately. I’m wondering if maybe it’s not that I can’t feel it, but that I don’t feel it in response to the standard stars and sunsets and religious rituals.
(Probably the thing that got me thinking this was telling @justice-turtle about how I can’t feel emotions that I’m under too much pressure to feel. Rituals and sunsets and fucking stars have so much baggage regarding how one ought to feel about them.)
Maybe awe is the feeling I get sometimes reading about mental experiences that are foreign to me, neither good nor bad but different. Maybe awe is in headspaces and phantom wings, the feeling like seeing the multiverse spread out before you and you’ll never leave your own little patch of it but it’s enough, it’s enough to see it and to know that there are people walking the paths you’ll never take.
Maybe awe is the feeling of reading really well-done porn for a kink that you’re completely not into. The words are filled with some foreign kind of power, power you can’t quite directly perceive but you can hear the whoosh as it flies over your head. You’ll never feel it yourself but it’s enough to know it’s there and to know that there are people who can, who can feel the power in those words and take it into themselves until their bones hum with it and their nervous system sparks.
Sometimes it’s enough, and maybe that’s what it means.
Tags:
#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #the wondrous variety of sapient life #which may have been a literal tag all along #oh look an original post
I’m not sure how broadly-useful this is, but I’ve found a useful way to ‘hack’ acceptance of strange traits/behaviors/identities in other people:
Just think, “There are seven billion of us, I would be much more surprised if nobody was like this.”
Tags:
#the wondrous variety of sapient life #yes this
{{Title link: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ }}
Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.
And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.
I thought about this recently during a conversation with Ozy:
Ozy: I am currently eating chickpeas and rice and I am _delighted_ by the fact that I can eat this _whenever I want_ The nice thing about DISCOVERING YOUR FOOD PREFERENCES is that suddenly all the food in my cupboards is food I like and am looking forward to eating. and usually I get food I like by, like, luck? So this is excitement.
Scott: I don’t understand, why didn’t you buy things like that before?
Ozy: It took me a while to have enough of a sense of the food I like for “make a list of the food I like” to be a viable grocery-list-making strategy.
Scott: I’ve got to admit I’m confused and intrigued by your “don’t know my own preferences” thing.
Ozy: Hrm. Well, it’s sort of like… you know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you _actually believe_ you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention _all_ my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”
Scott: How does that apply to food?
Ozy: Well, sometimes people will tell you a certain food is high-status or healthy or a thing that everyone enjoys, and then I would like it. And a lot of times I just ate whatever was in front of me or ordered whatever the cheapest vegetarian thing on the menu was. And I… sort of vaguely had a sense that some things were more pleasurable to eat than other things but I didn’t like _keep track_ of what they were or anything. Because if I knew I might like the _wrong things_. And also because I didn’t intuitively grasp that the “liking” thing everyone was talking about was related to pleasure and not to like popularity/status.
So the fact that people talk about what foods they like about a zillion times a day isn’t enough to make everyone realize liking foods is a thing.
But it gets worse. A high school friend posted on Facebook a link to a really interesting answer on Quora. It makes you log on, so I’ll copy the relevant part below:
I have anosmia, which means I lack smell the way a blind person lacks sight. What’s surprising about this is that I didn’t even know it for the first half of my life.
Each night I would tell my mom, “Dinner smells great!” I teased my sister about her stinky feet. I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses. I yelled “gross” when someone farted. I never thought twice about any of it for fourteen years.
Then, in freshman English class, I had an assignment to write about the Garden of Eden using details from all five senses. Working on this one night, I sat in my room imagining a peach. I watched the juice ooze out as I squeezed at the soft fuzz. I felt the wet, sappy liquid drip from my fingers down onto my palm. As the mushy heart of the fruit compressed, I could hear it squishing, and when I took that first bite I could taste the little bit of tartness that followed the incredible sweet sensation flooding my mouth.
But I had to write about smell, too, and I was stopped dead by the question of what a peach smelled like. Good. That was all I could come up with. I tried to think of other things. Garbage smelled bad. Perfume smelled good. Popcorn good. Poop bad. But how so? What was the difference? What were the nuances? In just a few minutes’ reflection I realized that, despite years of believing the contrary, I never had and never would smell a peach.
All my behavior to that point indicated that I had smell. No one suspected I didn’t. For years I simply hadn’t known what it was that was supposed to be there. I just thought the way it was for me was how it was for everyone. It took the right stimulus before I finally discovered the gap.
So I guess you can just not be able to smell and not know it.
This makes me wonder what universal human experiences I and my friends are missing out on without realizing it.
I know one friend’s answer. He discovered he was color-blind sometime in his teens. This still surprises me. People are always taking Ishihara tests (those colorful dotted circles with numbers inside of them) and discovering they’re color blind. Going through life with everyone else saying “The light was red, but now it’s green” and thinking it was weird that they were making such a big deal about subtle variations in shades of brownish-gray, but it was probably one of those metaphors.
As for me? I took a surprisingly long time to realize I was asexual. When I was a virgin, I figured sex was one of those things that seemed gross before you did it, and then you realized how great it was. Afterwards, I figured it was something that didn’t get good until you were skilled at it and had been in a relationship long enough to truly appreciate the other person. In retrospect, pretty much every aspect of male sexual culture is a counterargument to that theory, but I guess it’s just really hard for my brain to generate “you are a mental mutant” as a hypothesis.
But even bigger than that, I think I might not have had emotions, at least not fully, for about five years as a teenager when I was on SSRIs. I even sort of noticed myself not having emotions, but dismissed that as an odd thing to happen and probably other people were just being really overexuberant about things. Later I learned emotional blunting is a commonly reported side effect of SSRIs and I was probably just really not experiencing emotions. When I came off them it took me several years to get used to having normal-intensity feelings again, but it wasn’t a sudden revelation, like “Wow, I was missing a fundamental human experience for the past several years!” Just a sense of things being different which was hard to cash out.
As always, I wonder if a lot of what other people interpret through vague social things might be biological, or at least more complicatedly social. I can’t enjoy jazz music even a little – the best I can do is pick up something sort of like a beat and half-heartedly feel like maybe I could snap my fingers to it if I could build up the energy. My brother fell in love with jazz as soon as he heard it and is now a professional jazz musician who has dedicated his life to it. Are we listening to the same thing when we hear a jazz tune? Or am I like a guy who can’t smell trying to appreciate perfume?
It took me approximately forever to find out I was faceblind.
In retrospect, the incident with telling someone she looked like Evil Galadriel from the FotR movie and having everyone including her deny it…makes a lot more sense.#prosopagnosia #that is such a boring tag; does anyone have more interesting suggestions?
“You humans all look alike to me”?
(I was thirteen myself. Since autism and prosopagnosia are often found together, when I started reading autism neurodiversity blogs it came up early and often. I was occasionally confused as a kid when others could not only tell people with the same hair colour and style apart, but expected me to do the same.)
As for the article, I do wonder what experiences I might be missing. I have gradually figured out over the course of my life that my emotional range is non-standard: I appear to be missing awe entirely, I don’t feel limerence but I do feel perseveration* (which I’m told is both a similar feeling and one that most people lack), I have most** of the sex-related emotions but in such a way as to make them nearly unrecognisable (so I’m missing out on other people’s experiences of them, but everyone else is missing out on mine), my mother says that she experiences frustration as an emotion all its own rather than a sub-type of anger so apparently that’s a thing. (There might still be other emotional divergences I don’t know about yet.) I don’t know what thorns sound like (though I do know what eths sound like). I’m not entirely convinced that sour and bitter are actually separate flavours to me; I’ve been meaning to investigate that further. There’s probably others I don’t even suspect.
*Well, I did, and I still could if I allowed myself. The beginning stages are so unpleasant that once I figured out how to nip it in the bud (also age thirteen, as it happens), the temptation to do so was overwhelming.
**I don’t seem to have anything even resembling “looking at someone and wanting to fuck them”, not counting extenuating circumstances like the person being in a sexually suggestive pose.
Tags:
#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #’I’m missing out on everyone else’s experiences of sexuality but everyone else is missing out on mine’ #is why my kink tag is ‘sexuality and lack thereof’ #which (tying in with Nate’s tag) is one of my few tags that isn’t completely obvious #I think that and the country tags for my countries of citizenship #(‘our home and cherished land’ and ‘home of the brave’) #are pretty much it #the wondrous variety of sapient life #(well maybe that’s also non-obvious but it’s actually *supposed* to be vague) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #reply via reblog
No that’s not a silly question it’s really cool and now I want all my followers to reblog with internet community journeys.
I hung out on Yahoo! Answers for a couple years (12-14), lurked various advice columns because I find them fascinating, got into Harry Potter fanfiction on fanfiction.net, found Methods of Rationality and through that LessWrong, where there are embarrassing posts as a record of my age-17 Eliezer-fangirl stage, got into the tumblr Silmarillion fandom, burned out of the tumblr Silmarillion fandom, got into tumblr SJ, and wound up here. The only sites I read reliably now are tumblr, slatestarcodex, and aforementioned advice columns.
This tracks only slightly with my special interests during the relevant time periods, which from high school forward were the TV show 24 , Crichton/King/Grisham generic adult thrillers, Christian apocalyptic fiction, LessWrong, the Silmarillion, the manosphere and neoreaction, Clara, the Silmarillion again, social justice, and Current Special Interest which is a secret for obvious reasons.
(This ended up much longer and more detailed than the other responses I’ve seen. I hope it’s long and detailed in a good way.)
When I was young, the primary places I went on the Internet were Nethack fansites (though I only lurked), the official Chalkzone discussion board on the Nickelodeon forums (my first fandom (and first perseveration that I can recall*), age eight), and–slightly later–Neopets. These aren’t connected to later events, though.
The continuous journey, the one that led me to where I am today, started when I was thirteen, and I saw that under the “other” section of the Girl Scout day-trip medical form Mom had written that I was autistic. (Her point being that if the supervisors saw me sneaking off to find a quiet spot to recover from all the noise and activity, they should let me.)
She later insisted that she’d already told me a few years previously, but either she misremembered, or she’d told me but not explained and I’d registered it as a meaningless, forgettable word (like I had “Presbyterian”), because it was news to me.
Of course, I had to learn more about this. Some news article led me to The Autism Crisis, which despite the name is a neurodiversity-based autism blog. This led me to other neurodiversity-based autism websites (at one point around this time I read the entire autistics.org library), and from there other neurodiversity sites. (This is why part of me always feels surprised when people who have been hanging out on the Internet for a while don’t have at least a basic working knowledge of multiplicity. Within a month or two of venturing out into the big wide Internet, I knew how to parse a caret in someone’s name.)
(During this time, the summer of 2007, I also read through the entire mental health section of when was then my local library. (It was a pretty big library.) The juxtaposition of these books with the blogs I was reading was an interesting experience.)
Stuff about snake-oil autism treatments led me to the skeptical blogosphere. One of the more religion-focused ones had a link to the Left Behind tag on Slacktivist, which I have updated here to reflect his move from Typepad to Patheos. (If there’s a way to make that show in chronological order, I don’t know it. I’ve linked to what is currently the last page.) I read the posts and left. I didn’t read the comments. Not yet.
When I was bored, I spent a lot of time reading TV Tropes. This gave me a lot of cultural osmosis that still serves me well today, as well as an epiphany about my sexuality. (No, really. It had never occurred to me that “fetish” was a framework that could apply to my particular fascination, but once they pointed out that was a possibility, I realised it made so much sense.)
It was probably from TV Tropes that I found the Protectors of the Plot Continuum. (Their sporkings are a little mean for my tastes these days, and I haven’t read any new ones recently, but I still like their characters and worldbuilding.) Back in the day, I even posted on their forums for a while, under a name I never used elsewhere.
Since I was in the general realm of sporking, there were more links to the Left Behind posts. I went through the “oh, right, that exists. *catches up on posts* *leaves*” cycle a couple more times. At one point, sometime around the autumn of 2010, I decided to stay. I read the non-Left-Behind posts. I read the comments.
In the comments, I discovered a thriving (if sometimes flame-y**) community of people. They used the comment threads like a forum, discussing not only the original post, not only tangents that could diverge quite widely from the source, but new topics that they brought to the table themselves. They also had the Greater Slackti-sphere, the blogs written by people who commented there, most of whom also commented on each other’s blogs.
On Christmas Day, 2010, I got up the nerve to join them. I took on a new name. I became Brin.
(I kept reading Slacktivist long after I should have stopped, after I began to realise that social justice was literally driving me insane, because of this importance to my history and development. I do still read and comment on some of the less sanity-draining Greater Slackti-sphere blogs.)
In May of 2011, we were having a conversation in a Slacktivist thread about Star Trek: DS9. Lonespark, a fellow Slacktivite, told us about this place called DS9 Rewatch, where people gathered in a chatroom to watch DS9 together and talk about the episode as it was happening. Like watching TV with your friends, only text-based and with people scattered across the world.
If you followed that link, you’ll have seen that I now run the Rewatch. The thing about “like watching TV with your friends, but with people scattered across the world” is that said scattered people pretty quickly become your friends. Not including me, only one of the people who was there when I joined is still there now, but I maintained friendships with some of the 2011 rewatchers even long after they left. (*waves at justice-turtle*) (And of course, I also made new friendships with the relatively new rewatchers.)
It was probably also from the Slackti-sphere that I learned of Ozy, who at the time was a co-blogger at “No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?”. I liked them–in hindsight because they were the least sanity-draining feminist activist I had ever met–and followed them through a couple of blogs before losing track of them for a while.
I don’t remember whether it was through them that I heard of Less Wrong, but it was sometime around then. I read a couple of posts, a few comments, felt extremely intimidated, and left. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake.
(I liked the idea of HPMOR, but didn’t hear of it until after I reached the “perpetually buried in reading material” stage of Internet usage, and have never gotten around to it. I did read Luminosity, and greatly enjoyed it. The protagonist’s clever exploitation of the local laws of nature reminded me of the books of Jewish folktales I loved as a child***, and I found it very refreshing that said protagonist was allowed to not only want, but seek out immortality, without the desire being seen as a character flaw. (I’ve had transhumanist sympathies probably since reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as a pre-teen.))
One of those Greater Slackti-sphere blogs was (and is) Mock Ramblings. I not only read it, but kept an eye on his blogroll, reading any posts that looked interesting and occasionally following a blog if it was interesting consistently enough. Michael Mock reads Comparatively Superlative, and as it was consistently interesting, so did I. At one point, shortly after I commented there using a profile containing a link to my Tumblr, I received a “comparativelysuperlative is now following you” notification. I read his Tumblr archive, found he was consistently interesting there too, and followed him back.
A few months back, he reblogged a post from you. I don’t remember which one it was, but it was interesting enough that I looked into the rest of your blog.
It was…I’m not quite sure how to put it. It was like seeing a braver version of myself, saying publicly the things I had hardly dared even to think. I…may have read your entire archive, and been disappointed when I found you had only been blogging there for eight months. I spread my net, reading other rationalist Tumblrs you linked to. I found that when I had encountered some particularly unhealthy piece of social-justice writing and it was getting me down, reading them helped me feel better. I realised that this was where I needed to be.
*It was also the first that I could recall at the time; I remember being surprised when it shifted.
**The thing that we now call “callout culture” tends to get treated as a Tumblr-specific or at least Tumblr-induced problem. It’s not. I experienced it in the comments of a Typepad blog, before Tumblr took off. Back then it was called “nuking”, and we lived in fear of the nukers then just as we do now. (Sure, one’s posts didn’t gain as wide a reach there, but it was a lot harder to block the nukers it did reach.)
***Possible factor in the disproportionate Jewish-ness of rationalists?
Tags:
#long post #Brin talks about herself for a *reason* this time #the story of my Internet life #overly enthusiastic parenthetical use #the standard tag for this sort of thing is #my issues with sj let me show you them #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
There is a common criticism of people (okay, of Tumblr denizens) for being special snowflakes. They make up an absurd number of labels! Why would you want to identify as a requiessexual heteropoetisexual squidgender moongender aroflux lesbian when you could identify as, well, normal?
But, in fact, as absurd as the subsubsubsubsubclassifications get sometimes, Tumblr’s attitude towards sexual…
Tags:
#language #the wondrous variety of sapient life #yes this
Today is Autism Acceptance Day, and April is Autism Acceptance month. It’s also an annual reminder that we are strong, we are still here, and that attempts to eliminate us are failing. When they light it up blue, they’re admitting that they’re weak and they’re failing.
Autism Speaks and others who wish that autistic people didn’t exist think that it’s Autism Awareness Day. They’re calling us a public health crisis, and they’re trying to get others to agree with them and give them money. They want to get rid of us. They try to pretend they have any chance of succeeding.
I realized today that April 2nd is actually an annual reminder that, no matter how hard they try, they can’t actually get rid of us. When Autism Speaks supporters are turning on blue lights, what they’re really saying is that they have just spent another year wasting a lot of money in a completely futile attempt to get rid of us. They are acknowledging with those blue lights that we are still here, and that we’re not going anywhere.
We are more powerful than they want us to believe. We have persisted in existing despite their pervasive attempt to eliminate us. We are succeeding in spreading love and supporting one another in power and pride.
We are speaking up. We are being heard. People who care about autism, autistic people, education, and communication are listening. The tide is turning.
Their hate symbols are a sign that, even though we have far less money and far fewer resources, we are more powerful than their ineffectual attempts to make us go away. We are right, and we are strong, and we will be here long after Autism Speaks is gone. We ought to keep that in mind when we see the pathetic hate symbols they’re displaying today.
Tags:
#Autism Acceptance Day #the wondrous variety of sapient life
Brinens and Things 