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"I was straight because I’d rather be destroyed by a man than hurt my friends." There is truth here, I say as a straight woman who has sexual desire. Sex is entwined with death for women, and the perversity is your mind and body willing it/socialization/acceptance and dissociation, whichever it may be. The last several years of world events leaves me with a less-utopian mindset, maybe some calm understanding, but still a massive part of me wonders why human lives are ordered this way throughout history.

What you lose in stigma, you gain in clarity, it seems to me as I read your thoughts. Maybe the influence of sex over a lifetime, is sort of like a lifetime on a psychedelic; I would not call life with sexual drive clear-minded at all, even if not acted upon. Multiple this by the billions, and it is quite a shared "hallucination."

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No matter which way I look at it, the impact of sexual desire seems to be that of insanity. But because everyone experiences it, it instead gets elevated to this humanity defining phenomenon. I'm not sure there is anything to be done about it. Even for those who do look at this kind of thing critically, their behavior does not change. Even if they know this thing they are pursuing is harmful to them, they keep going. Which is why I call it insanity rather than stupidity which implies that they aren't fully aware/are incapable of being aware of what is happening.

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I don't know how you are so calm about it. Normies consistently treating you like a defected weirdo because *they* successfully lied to themselves, compartmentalized, dissociated and put up to "understand", and you didn't, is infuriating. I'm still not over having this happened to me.

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I don't think being calm about something necessarily means you're over it. I'm unsure if this has only happened to you once or not, but for me it has happened dozens of times with everyone I care about, everyone who seems the most intelligent and level headed in all other areas of life, and everyone I respect. So it's less an isolated incident and more like a fact of life. I could be angry constantly and blow up all of my relationships. Or I could keep my behaviors and priorities consistent and slowly try to change minds by example along the way. The breakthroughs so far are rare and usually temporary though which is its own brand of exhausting.

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It did happen everywhere and still does. I guess what gets me most is not just women telling you that you don't understand, but acting superior. Unconsciously, they know how much they had to lie to themselves and break themselves to get to that point. They hate you because they see in you their unbroken past, because you allow yourself the freedom they thought they had to reject to get approval and normalcy. Feeling good about "being normal" and putting you down for "not being normal" is their only consolation. They do not want to believe that someone faced the same challenges as them but did not submit and did not break, so they tell themselves, and you, that you're naive, infantile and immature.

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Yeah. It's definitely not great. But also, there's not much to be done about it but keep on keeping on. Surprisingly I heard a similar sentiment come up in a radfem podcast. Unsure when non-compliance became equated to some kind of strange self-infantilization.

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