![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(TMI IN REPLY)
Aug. 31st, 2016 02:23 amvia http://ift.tt/2c3iAUv:
ineptshieldmaid:
bomberqueen17
replied to your
post
:
Here’s a discomforting thought
oh wow i have like, the Same Exact Story, almost. And I’m currently struggling, at 37 years of age, with feeling like I’m Doing Demisexuality Wrong, so. Only my upbringing wasn’t *terribly* religious, and I had an Okay Girlfriend and then a Terrible Boyfriend, but the timeline’s about the same. I did not figure out actual effective masturbation until way into my twenties, and had similarly awful Feelings about it too. So. Anyway. You’re not alone, FWIW? IDK!
*fistbump* I don’t know if I should thank you or blame you or both for being a major reason I’ve been having an epistemological meltdown about //What Is Demisexuality Anyway// lately. B’s experience sounds just like me! Other friend’s experience sounds a lot different! (No shit, Inept, you’re bisexual, you have no reason to suppose that people with the same sexual identity descriptor will have the same experience of it, especially if they differ on other axes! CHILL.)
Mostly I blame Australian politics for my current crisis. The looming plebiscite means I’m having to think about my experience as a Yoof, and about explaining Teh Queer Existence, and apparently the way I’d account for both of these has changed with time. Blech.
Welp. Life is real confusing. I don’t mean to contribute to confusion, but I will fistbump you back in solidarity. Much sympathy on the Dealing With Politics. I haven’t been following Australian politics very much, so I hope that your election is not basically a referendum on whether to usher in the apocalypse and hand control of your nation over to Russia, or, you know, not. If it is, you have my condolences.
(And like. For the record. Okay Girlfriend meant well but did the thing literally every lesbian does, where they instantly label other women as Straight Girls. And Terrible Boyfriend was not the current dude, he was a really stuck-up narcissistic dude with a tiny dick and a really good education in how to get a girl off [from his previous girlfriend, who was extremely hot and who i later made out with, thank you, she and I are still friends on facebook at least] so all in all, I mean, net positive experience, but I prefer not to think about him much if I don’t have to, his stated goal after college was to move to Japan because “there’s no legal age of consent there” so like uh gross and also yeah that kind of sums him up. Sooooo. Emphatically not the current Dude.)
I feel like I have waaayyy too much sex to be on the Ace Spectrum, so I’m worried I’m like, appropriating that. But then, a lot of my life has been spent convinced that humans are not a species that I actually am, because what you want me to put my what where now??? No no i mean, I get it on principle, but– mine? are you sure? uhh I’ll just be– over here.
And everyone else talks about bi/pansexuality as being like, Attracted To Everyone All The Time, and uh no. noo, not so much. I’m definitely attracted to fewer people than either the straights or the gays that I know. And I mean, like, in total.
But how much of that is actual sexuality/identity, and how much of it is the fact that I’m extremely poorly-connected to reality at the best of times and may just be too ADHD to function. I mean, how much of that can really be untangled?
If I were not in a long-term relationship I would not be nearly so sanguine about this, I am aware. More TMI kind of stuff under the cut, I suppose– just about physical vs. more abstract sexuality, I guess, but also more detail than anyone strictly needs probably–
I am also aware that I was not all that physically/sexually attracted to my dude, or anyone, at the beginning, but I am only really realizing that looking backward, because on my personal scale of up to that point, my pants were basically on fire, but compared to the feelings I’m capable of now, I was barely even awake– so, another argument for demisexuality, I think! My standards of attraction are just fundamentally different than they were. And it took me literally years to be able to reliably physically respond. I wanted to have sex all the time, but it was largely academic, and I just didn’t know any differently.
I actually did learn to masturbate really young– I wasn’t even really aware of what I was doing, just sort of absent-minded self-stimulation as a prelude to falling asleep– but I didn’t learn to masturbate reliably *to orgasm* until well after I’d begun having partnered sex. It’s only within the last decade that I’ve been able to reliably and predictably achieve climax. I’m not trying to be gross or TMI, I’m just saying, it’s a separate kind of thing. In my early days (i.e. like, my first decade) of partnered sex, it was absolutely all academic in a way it isn’t now– I wanted sex because it filled emotional and social needs, not necessarily sexual ones, and I just plain didn’t know the difference. [And when you add in that my partner has a pretty modest sexual appetite, that made for some awkward times, because the cultural narrative is of course that a man always wants it and a woman has to be talked into it, and so as a woman, being turned down for sex is a profound blow to the ego, but I actually think he was probably going through a similar process to me in terms of sex vs socialization vs real appetite vs expectations, but since he’s a straight dude he’s never really done any deep self-examination about His Identity because if you’re “the default” you don’t really tend to examine it that closely? So I don’t know! If I ask, he doesn’t understand the question.]
I went from rarely achieving orgasm from either solo or partnered sex to being easily and powerfully multiorgasmic in my late twenties, I think I may have even been 30. (Before that, it would happen sometimes, only on my own and only very occasionally and not according to any criteria I knew how to measure, and I couldn’t duplicate it, and it would absolutely not happen with someone observing or participating, nope no way.) It was definitely a physical/hormonal change, it was gradual but not that gradual, and my behavior didn’t significantly change in the meantime. And a lot of it was probably that I had the same partner, with whom I was increasingly comfortable, and who was both intelligent and observational and definitely did some studying on his own. (We never discussed it really, but. I know he’s pretty smart and he was definitely doing research of some kind.)
So. It’s fluid, it changes over time, it changes depending how you look at it and think about it, it changes depending who you’re doing it with but also independently of that.
And it seems to change depending on what kind of story you use to frame it, after the manner of a lot of observed phenomena! So. There’s that. Valid point about the narrative etc., that’s an important component of formulating any kind of Identity etcetera.
I still sometimes want sex because of emotional or social reasons– regardless of my body’s state, I want sex on Date Nite just because that’s a properly self- and partner-indulgent thing to do, and so on– but my body has caught up and now I’m much more likely to initiate or turn down sex based on actual sexual desires, rather than these other reasons.
There’s no such thing as “normal”, so I wouldn’t say I have a “normal” sex life now, but I do have a good and fulfilling one. And I don’t think my old ways of doing things were dysfunctional or unhealthy. Having sex because one thinks one ought to is actually not a terrible way to live at all, provided there are good healthy boundaries underlying it. Just– from where I am now, I’d rather be here than there.
Getting old sucks, but the old wives’ tale about a woman’s sexual peak being in her thirties is probably true on some level. IDK, whatever the fuck happened, it was pretty great, I’m not complaining.
ineptshieldmaid:
bomberqueen17
replied to your
post
:
Here’s a discomforting thought
oh wow i have like, the Same Exact Story, almost. And I’m currently struggling, at 37 years of age, with feeling like I’m Doing Demisexuality Wrong, so. Only my upbringing wasn’t *terribly* religious, and I had an Okay Girlfriend and then a Terrible Boyfriend, but the timeline’s about the same. I did not figure out actual effective masturbation until way into my twenties, and had similarly awful Feelings about it too. So. Anyway. You’re not alone, FWIW? IDK!
*fistbump* I don’t know if I should thank you or blame you or both for being a major reason I’ve been having an epistemological meltdown about //What Is Demisexuality Anyway// lately. B’s experience sounds just like me! Other friend’s experience sounds a lot different! (No shit, Inept, you’re bisexual, you have no reason to suppose that people with the same sexual identity descriptor will have the same experience of it, especially if they differ on other axes! CHILL.)
Mostly I blame Australian politics for my current crisis. The looming plebiscite means I’m having to think about my experience as a Yoof, and about explaining Teh Queer Existence, and apparently the way I’d account for both of these has changed with time. Blech.
Welp. Life is real confusing. I don’t mean to contribute to confusion, but I will fistbump you back in solidarity. Much sympathy on the Dealing With Politics. I haven’t been following Australian politics very much, so I hope that your election is not basically a referendum on whether to usher in the apocalypse and hand control of your nation over to Russia, or, you know, not. If it is, you have my condolences.
(And like. For the record. Okay Girlfriend meant well but did the thing literally every lesbian does, where they instantly label other women as Straight Girls. And Terrible Boyfriend was not the current dude, he was a really stuck-up narcissistic dude with a tiny dick and a really good education in how to get a girl off [from his previous girlfriend, who was extremely hot and who i later made out with, thank you, she and I are still friends on facebook at least] so all in all, I mean, net positive experience, but I prefer not to think about him much if I don’t have to, his stated goal after college was to move to Japan because “there’s no legal age of consent there” so like uh gross and also yeah that kind of sums him up. Sooooo. Emphatically not the current Dude.)
I feel like I have waaayyy too much sex to be on the Ace Spectrum, so I’m worried I’m like, appropriating that. But then, a lot of my life has been spent convinced that humans are not a species that I actually am, because what you want me to put my what where now??? No no i mean, I get it on principle, but– mine? are you sure? uhh I’ll just be– over here.
And everyone else talks about bi/pansexuality as being like, Attracted To Everyone All The Time, and uh no. noo, not so much. I’m definitely attracted to fewer people than either the straights or the gays that I know. And I mean, like, in total.
But how much of that is actual sexuality/identity, and how much of it is the fact that I’m extremely poorly-connected to reality at the best of times and may just be too ADHD to function. I mean, how much of that can really be untangled?
If I were not in a long-term relationship I would not be nearly so sanguine about this, I am aware. More TMI kind of stuff under the cut, I suppose– just about physical vs. more abstract sexuality, I guess, but also more detail than anyone strictly needs probably–
I am also aware that I was not all that physically/sexually attracted to my dude, or anyone, at the beginning, but I am only really realizing that looking backward, because on my personal scale of up to that point, my pants were basically on fire, but compared to the feelings I’m capable of now, I was barely even awake– so, another argument for demisexuality, I think! My standards of attraction are just fundamentally different than they were. And it took me literally years to be able to reliably physically respond. I wanted to have sex all the time, but it was largely academic, and I just didn’t know any differently.
I actually did learn to masturbate really young– I wasn’t even really aware of what I was doing, just sort of absent-minded self-stimulation as a prelude to falling asleep– but I didn’t learn to masturbate reliably *to orgasm* until well after I’d begun having partnered sex. It’s only within the last decade that I’ve been able to reliably and predictably achieve climax. I’m not trying to be gross or TMI, I’m just saying, it’s a separate kind of thing. In my early days (i.e. like, my first decade) of partnered sex, it was absolutely all academic in a way it isn’t now– I wanted sex because it filled emotional and social needs, not necessarily sexual ones, and I just plain didn’t know the difference. [And when you add in that my partner has a pretty modest sexual appetite, that made for some awkward times, because the cultural narrative is of course that a man always wants it and a woman has to be talked into it, and so as a woman, being turned down for sex is a profound blow to the ego, but I actually think he was probably going through a similar process to me in terms of sex vs socialization vs real appetite vs expectations, but since he’s a straight dude he’s never really done any deep self-examination about His Identity because if you’re “the default” you don’t really tend to examine it that closely? So I don’t know! If I ask, he doesn’t understand the question.]
I went from rarely achieving orgasm from either solo or partnered sex to being easily and powerfully multiorgasmic in my late twenties, I think I may have even been 30. (Before that, it would happen sometimes, only on my own and only very occasionally and not according to any criteria I knew how to measure, and I couldn’t duplicate it, and it would absolutely not happen with someone observing or participating, nope no way.) It was definitely a physical/hormonal change, it was gradual but not that gradual, and my behavior didn’t significantly change in the meantime. And a lot of it was probably that I had the same partner, with whom I was increasingly comfortable, and who was both intelligent and observational and definitely did some studying on his own. (We never discussed it really, but. I know he’s pretty smart and he was definitely doing research of some kind.)
So. It’s fluid, it changes over time, it changes depending how you look at it and think about it, it changes depending who you’re doing it with but also independently of that.
And it seems to change depending on what kind of story you use to frame it, after the manner of a lot of observed phenomena! So. There’s that. Valid point about the narrative etc., that’s an important component of formulating any kind of Identity etcetera.
I still sometimes want sex because of emotional or social reasons– regardless of my body’s state, I want sex on Date Nite just because that’s a properly self- and partner-indulgent thing to do, and so on– but my body has caught up and now I’m much more likely to initiate or turn down sex based on actual sexual desires, rather than these other reasons.
There’s no such thing as “normal”, so I wouldn’t say I have a “normal” sex life now, but I do have a good and fulfilling one. And I don’t think my old ways of doing things were dysfunctional or unhealthy. Having sex because one thinks one ought to is actually not a terrible way to live at all, provided there are good healthy boundaries underlying it. Just– from where I am now, I’d rather be here than there.
Getting old sucks, but the old wives’ tale about a woman’s sexual peak being in her thirties is probably true on some level. IDK, whatever the fuck happened, it was pretty great, I’m not complaining.
