At Long Lust, er Last: Day 7: Seven love secets.

[alexandraerin]

Yeah, so, even with the softening of "lust" to "love" in the meme format, this one gets into territory that not everyone's going to be comfortable with... and that includes me, given that I know that my immediate family is reading this blog.

I could friend-lock and filter this post, but I've done the rest of the meme out in the open and so I'd rather not have it go through days 1 and 6 and then have it just sort of hang there without any resolution (any more than I've already done by leaving number 7 off for a week). So I'm posting this in public, under an LJ cut, with the following caveats attached:

If you don't want to know anything about the love life of your Livejournal friend/weblit author/family member/whatever I am to you, don't click to read on and then complain about what you find here. I'm mostly staying away from the TMI stuff anyway, but the point is, if you click to read this then there is no such thing as TMI.

Also, if you are related to me and you choose to read this anyway, please let me go on thinking that you didn't.


1. I almost much hooked up with Jack in the backseat of my parents' car.

No, really.

Okay, only I was in the backseat of the car. Jack was somewhere else. I was on my phone (my beloved Treo 700p), stating (i.e., participating in the Livejournal community statements, of which we are both members) about things that were passing through my mind, and Jack was responding to them. This happened a lot, in the days before we actually got together, since we were quietly and desperately interested in the other one.

We had a lot of "near misses", and some of the nearest ones happened during the road trip I took with my folks back from Disney World to Omaha in September of 2009, not even a week before we finally made the connection.

2. I don't even know why I'm with this guy.

Oh, I could list many reasons why I like being with Jack, why it's fun, why it's good for me, why I stay with him... but what got me interested in the first place? That I don't know. My brain's not good with remembering things about real people, so when I found out that a paid LJ account had a "notes" feature I started using it to keep better track of who I knew on Livejournal. There were a lot of names in the communities I haunted back then that I sort of recognized, but mostly people just ran together.

Jack's notes was one of the first ones that I made, and it simply said "Oddly fascinating." Because he kept posting things and I kept finding them oddly fascinating. Sometimes I couldn't even say why. I don't remember what prompted me to leave that note, though. I don't remember what first fascinated me, what first prompted me to watch for him and read and respond to the things he posted.

3. I went through an obnoxious phase where I believed everyone's bisexual and everybody's a switch.

From like maybe 16 to 20 or 21. The first other queer folk I connected with online were pretty much of the "Everyone is secretly bi." camp, though really we were all pretty much the same age so I don't blame them in retrospect. That's one of those follies of youth things. My introduction to BDSM as something that people actually do that is sane and not evil and sinful and creepy and wrong was similarly pretty fluffy, and fit in nicely with the "everyone is bi" ethos.

This idea that everyone (myself included) is or should be so utterly flexible in the areas of sexual orientation and expression kind of fucked up some of my earliest relationships, and was one contributing factor (among many) in the fucking-up of the longest relationship of my adult life so far.

Seriously, folks, if you're a kid or an adult who believes these things: no. Not every sub is actually a skilled dom or vice-versa.Not everyone is bi. Not even everyone who's bi is bi, the way you're probably thinking of it if you believe everyone is. I mean, I have been open to sex with both men and women but I'm not sure I'd describe myself as bisexual (and no, I don't mean I'm pansexual). "Everyone is bi" is a simplistic view, and life's just more complicated than that.

And not everyone is a switch. You don't have to understand how to be dominant in order to truly submit, or anything like that. Some people come to a better understanding of one through the other. These people are often switches. But it doesn't work like that for everyone. It doesn't work like that for me. The relationship I got into when I was just entering my twenties, I tried to approach with the idea that everyone had a near-to-equal mix of dominant and submissive in them and... well, this is sort of symptomatic of the relationship's other failings but I ended up being pushed into the dominant/active role in sex all the time because my partner wasn't interested in making any effort after I showed that I was willing to do so. That wouldn't have been a good situation even if I were dominant and she had been submissive, but if I would have been more in touch with my actual needs/nature it wouldn't have happened because I wouldn't have been trying to stretch myself to cover that role.

4. I'm sexually attracted to men but receptive to sex with other genders.

I'm putting this as number 4 because I'm sure it's something that people would wonder about after the last item. This, I think, is the best way to express it: attracted to men, receptive to women and other genders. If someone is non-binary but identifies/presents with male elements, I'm going to feel attraction for those elements.

And no, whoever's about to jump in with a Kinsey number: no. The Kinsey scale is another example of a thing that's too simplistic to be really useful in talking about these things. It's not that I'm mostly attracted to men and somewhat attracted to women. I experience sexual attraction to men. I am open to sex with people who aren't men. Somebody who reads this will be burning to ask what the difference is. All I'm going to say is: read the words I wrote, because I selected them with care.

Obviously I can enjoy sex with non-men or I wouldn't be open to it, but mechanical pleasure can be had regardless of attraction. This isn't to say that another woman can't turn me on, but it has to be an active thing... a person who does the sorts of things that turn me on can turn me on. Men just have a leg up (hurr hurr) because the attraction is also there.

And yes, for the purposes of this item I've divided the world into men and non-men, because that's how the world is divided for me, when it comes to sexual attraction.

5. Pictures of naked people or images of people having sex don't really do anything for me.

This gets into a couple of different things.

One is that I am very distinctly a non-visual person. When I discovered the world of erotica/written porn as a teenager, it was a big deal to me. Before that, I'd failed to "repsond" to porn featuring any combination of men and women and had no idea what that signified because I'd been aroused by imagining scenarios involving both. Of course, when I say "imagine"... the root there is "image", the same as in "envision", "picture", or any number of other words meaning to "conceive of using the brain's capacity to think about things that aren't real". But I don't think in pictures, I think in words.

Tell me to picture a box that's black and three feet wide on each side, and I will think "a box that's black and three feet wide on each side". With some effort and focus I can sort of form a mental image, but it doesn't come naturally and as soon as you ask me to start imagining anything more complicated I'll revert back to words.

So visual stimulation doesn't do much for me. It doesn't do nothing for me... I can use it as a jumping-off point, for instance. If I think about what I'm looking at, I get into the neighborhood of words. For this reason I find that I prefer still images to video... a snapshot of what could be a larger story, which I can then fill in, is more interesting to me than watching the mechanics of a sexual encounter unfolding in front of me.

The other reason that looking at images of people naked and/or having sex doesn't do much for me is that I'm not, strictly speaking, interested in sex. As a fetishist in the classic sense of the word, sex in and of itself isn't sexy to me. It can be made sexy when it shades into the areas that touch on my fetish... which fortunately for me can be interpreted fairly broadly... but, well, to use a sexual metaphor: it's like the difference between someone who just sort of hammers away and maybe occasionally hits a sensitive pleasure spot through sheer coincidence and a partner who's actively attuned to your pleasure and looking for ways to increase it.

6. Yes, I do have a fetish.

This is very central to my sexual being, to the point where once again I could have taken this single topic and made all seven items on this list some how relate to it, but I wanted to use this meme to give some new insights into who I am and this is old news to people who've been paying attention. Still, it is central enough... and there are some new developments in this area... that I don't think I could finish this list off with any sense of completeness or honesty if I didn't cover it.

Any time I talk about being interested in sex or wanting to have sex, you should pretty much always mentally insert an asterisk or a parenthetical notation saying "For a certain value of sex.", because I have a fetish in the strictest sense of the word. I can have and enjoy conventional sex only to the extent that it ties in somehow with the fetish.

Trying to have or enjoy sex that doesn't involve my fetish in any way or while denying the fetish is a frustrating and unpleasureable experience, which has caused me quite a bit of inconvenience and emotional distress as it's been hard to reconcile my fetish with both reality and what I believe is right and what is socially acceptable.

While it could broadly be classed as "vore", I prefer the more specific term "gynophagia" to describe my fetish: woman eating. It's the idea of women as meat--myself as meat--that drives me sexually. The analogy isn't to sexual penetration, as is often the case in the more swallowing/engulfing-oriented vore... it's to sex as an act of consumption, with overtones of commodification and objectification. This is where the emotional conflict comes in: my fantasy life is pretty blatantly misogynistic. I offer no excuses for that because I have none and require none.

Some women... even rape survivors and activists... have rape fantasies. Some of this can perhaps be traced back to growing up in a patriarchal society and being bombarded with the messages of rape culture, but it is my belief that these fantasies would exist even in a society where rape culture was non-existent or greatly diminished. They are a part of human sexuality. The impulses and needs satisfied by a rape fantasy exist independently of rape culture. The same is true of my fantasies.

I'm not specifically interested in rape fantasies or snuff fantasies, but non-consensual sexual scenarios will do more for me than consensual sexual because it's closer to what I am interested in, and any story involving someone being butchered and/or cooked and/or eaten is likely to be non-consensual but needs a very high fantasy element to not involve snuffing as well.

While I'm not really specifically interested in what's usually filed under "vore", looking at a picture of something like a furry fox swallowing a furry rabbit whole will do more for me than watching a man and a woman fucking because it touches more closely on what I'm interested in, but it's not something I find nearly as stimulating as the thought of the fox preparing the rabbit as food in a kitchen, or purchasing her in a store as an ingredient or restaurant as a meal, or cooking her, or laying her out on a plate with a knife, fork, and all the normal trappings of eating dinner. Nor is it important to me that the characters in the scenario be animals... in fact, that could be a distraction since I don't see myself as a rabbit or mouse.

Vore is most often and most openly expressed in the furry community, but to me the whole thing is irrelevant. If the figures are sufficiently anthropomorphic for me to identify with, then it doesn't matter if they're furry. I may be the only person on the internet who thinks a given image/scenario/whatever is equally hot or not whether or not there are cat ears and tails involved... I've had people I've tried to explain this to come away thinking I'm either really into furry porn or really put off by it, usually whichever one they're not, but I really can't make it matter in my head. In the cartoons and stories I grew up with, whether the characters were humans or animal-like people (as in Disney's Robin Hood) was often completely incidental to the story.

I'm starting to see the appeal of animal characters in a consumption scenario because there's a pleasing predator/prey dynamic already in play, and it also helps reinforce the fantasy aspect, which both aids the suspension of disbelief and quiets the mutterings of conscience that I do occasionally have based on the fact that my sexuality revolves around things that would be horrific if they actually happened. But my conscience is mostly pretty quiet about it these days, as I've always had a firm grip on the difference between fantasy and reality, not just in the sense of knowing which is which but in knowing that the distinction is more than "this one over here is reality and that one over there is fantasy".

The reality is that the human body does not make for an ideal meat animal in any sense, that the sorts of scenarios I imagine are impossible on a physical, biological, and often economical/logistical level, and that any attempt to approximate them in real life would not only be illegal and immoral but would also result in something that bears no resemblance to the fantasy.

It's not a case of wanting something to happen but not doing it for fear of consequences and thus contenting oneself with the fantasy, in other words. It's more a matter of knowing that it's flat out impossible. It's the difference between pursuing an unattainable fantasy in reality and recognizing that it's the fantasy itself that one wants and fantasies are always attainable.

Being a writer, of course, one of the major ways I express my fantasies are through my writing. In the past I've written gynophagia fiction and then either deleted it, or posted it on websites I do little to publicize, or shared it under a variety of pseudonyms. I'm starting to experiment with posting it under my own name, because I can't lead an emotionally or sexually healthy life when I'm approaching my sexuality from a place of shame. If I weren't working through guilt to begin with I could probably use another nom des tubes for those works without it meaning anything, but as it is I've found that trying to use a mask just reinforces the old feelings of guilt.

Also, while I recognize that not everybody who would be interested in reading a story about sexualized lady-eating would want to read Tales of MU or vice versa, there is an overlap there.

(NB: This doesn't mean I'm going to be releasing the "lost" chapter of Tales of MU. It doesn't exist for story purposes that aren't going to change.)

7. This item is only here because everybody involved knows it and I won't live it down if I don't put it in.

There is a guy... a mutual friend of Jack and I who we also met through statements... who I have rather anomalous feelings for, that kind of prove an exception to some of the items above. I don't specifically fantasize about him eating me (though typing those words does give me a bit of a thrill, and now I can't stop thinking about that... ever-present fetish is ever present). Basically, I want to fuck him. I don't want him to fuck me, I want to fuck him. This is not just rare; it is unique and unparalleled in my sexual history. I've never wanted to fuck (in the active/takes a direct object sense of the word) a guy. I've never even aspired to a terribly active/dominant roll in fucking with another woman.

But this guy... I would fuck him so hard. It's like I hear his voice or read his posts and whatever small amount of dominant sexual feelings I do have all come rushing to the surface. It's kind of discomfiting for me, because it doesn't at all fit in with my normal means of sexual expression. Even typing the words "fuck him so hard", applied to me and not some character, makes me blush madly and my stomach do all sorts of interesting things. That's not how it works.

Jack finds this whole thing terribly amusing. I'm sure the guy in question is tired of me drunk-texting him, though I don't do that very often because I don't get drunk very often. If he were actually interested and we were ever geographically convenient to one another, I'm pretty sure my head would explode a la a bad sci-fi robot posed with the sort of thing that William Shatner considers to be a real puzzler.

I don't know. I really don't know.

Comments

[ionicaq.livejournal.com]

I may be the only person on the internet who thinks a given image/scenario/whatever is equally hot or not whether or not there are cat ears and tails involved...

No, no you are definitely not the only person.

Seconded

[shadow-slayer74.livejournal.com]

You are definitely not alone there.

[moofable.livejournal.com]

I approve of this.

[andy9306.livejournal.com]

I suspect the number of people for whom animal traits are irrelevant given a sufficient level of anthropomorphization is quite a bit higher than it looks to be. But that might just be personal bias/hope.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Probably... I suppose it's the people who do care strongly who are most apt to say something about it.