(no subject)

[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.)

Comments

[sigmaleph]

Hm.

I am a primarily-gynephillic trans woman; the idea of the kind of bodies I'm attracted to being the bodies I'd like to inhabit makes perfect sense to me.

But, like, that "primarily" is an important caveat. I still find some men attractive, including, like, their genitals. Which I find actively upsetting on myself!

I can talk about ways that distinction makes sense from the inside but that might be going too far in the TMI direction.

[brin_bellway]

>>I can talk about ways that distinction makes sense from the inside but that might be going too far in the TMI direction.<<

I think this post is a suitable venue for that. I'm fine with talking about it if you are.

[sigmaleph]

Well, the thing that is appealing about penises is, like, interacting with them. This is also true of vulvas and breasts and so on, but that is a subset of their appeal; they are also aesthetically attractive in a way penises aren't (obviously talking from my own perspective). I'm not gonna say there can't be such a thing as a good-looking penis, but... ime they are just somewhere in the range between "eh, it exists" and "actively weird-looking". But they allow you to do things that are enjoyable, and so my mind focuses less on the aesthetic aspects of the thing-in-itself and more on the experience they enable. In that sense I can have positive associations with other people's genitals I just can't with my own.

(I can have positive experiences involving my own genitals, but dysphoria outweighs this)