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Mar. 31st, 2020 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: nsfw text, gender dysphoria]
[epistemic status: too asexual to actually grok what I'm talking about; slightly oversimplified]
I often see gay people talk about how confusing it is when they're not sure whether they want to *fuck* someone or *be* them.
That doesn't sound confusing to me at all, quite the opposite. What's confusing about your preferences being *congruent*? If your gender desires and sexual desires are in agreement, everything works out neatly: some bodies are simply Preferable to others.
But there are people in this world--a great many people, apparently, so many that they claim the term "normal" for themselves--whose gender desires and sexual desires point in *opposing directions*. The body shapes they want to have sex with are shapes they actively *don't* want to possess. Now *that* sounds confusing, to find a body attractive and repulsive all at once.
(Since I am not sexually attracted to people but *am* fairly strongly cis, the *only* aspect that comes into play for me is habitability. If someone has hair in too many places, or not enough breast, or *especially* if they have those horrible tumourous things that men seem to think are suitable genitalia, I get an Uncanny Valley feeling.
(I came across a thread once--Reddit, I think?--where a man admitted to having a parallel response to vulvas: on a visceral level, he parsed them as looking necrotic. Everyone dogpiled on him for his ~misogyny~. It was long after the fact and I might not have had the guts even if it had been ongoing, but I was tempted to say "guys, he's just cisgender, I feel the same way about *him*, there's a big difference between someone's body setting off your brain's quarantine alarms and hating them as a person, knock it off".))
---
(This thought process has been percolating ever since I read an autobiographical poem about a woman trying out sex with women, hating it, and going back to sex with men: in particular, the parts about how turned off she was by her sex partner's vulva. It's been a while and I'm not sure now where it was, though.)
[epistemic status: too asexual to actually grok what I'm talking about; slightly oversimplified]
I often see gay people talk about how confusing it is when they're not sure whether they want to *fuck* someone or *be* them.
That doesn't sound confusing to me at all, quite the opposite. What's confusing about your preferences being *congruent*? If your gender desires and sexual desires are in agreement, everything works out neatly: some bodies are simply Preferable to others.
But there are people in this world--a great many people, apparently, so many that they claim the term "normal" for themselves--whose gender desires and sexual desires point in *opposing directions*. The body shapes they want to have sex with are shapes they actively *don't* want to possess. Now *that* sounds confusing, to find a body attractive and repulsive all at once.
(Since I am not sexually attracted to people but *am* fairly strongly cis, the *only* aspect that comes into play for me is habitability. If someone has hair in too many places, or not enough breast, or *especially* if they have those horrible tumourous things that men seem to think are suitable genitalia, I get an Uncanny Valley feeling.
(I came across a thread once--Reddit, I think?--where a man admitted to having a parallel response to vulvas: on a visceral level, he parsed them as looking necrotic. Everyone dogpiled on him for his ~misogyny~. It was long after the fact and I might not have had the guts even if it had been ongoing, but I was tempted to say "guys, he's just cisgender, I feel the same way about *him*, there's a big difference between someone's body setting off your brain's quarantine alarms and hating them as a person, knock it off".))
---
(This thought process has been percolating ever since I read an autobiographical poem about a woman trying out sex with women, hating it, and going back to sex with men: in particular, the parts about how turned off she was by her sex partner's vulva. It's been a while and I'm not sure now where it was, though.)
