fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5928 ]

[ SECRET POST #5928 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5928 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Far Cry]

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[Starry Love]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 11 secrets from Secret Submission Post #848.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thanks for making the secret, Secret Maker!

I've read the comments and in general, I want to say, I didn't mean to imply or state that I think having kinks is bad or that anyone needs to stop liking their kinks.

I think...what I was trying to get at is that, I WANT to talk to people in my fandom about kinks that I like and go into why. But often I see signs of people not wanting to so I feel like I have no one to talk to.

But reading the comments I think I understand better why in general people don't want to. It seems like the judgment (whether given or recieved) is just too hot of a feeling and nothing substantial would be gained.

And this is why I made the secret. I really don't have places or people I can talk to about kinks and why I like what I like and does/how it affect other parts of my life/personality.
It's been a lot of internal work. Didn't even start out with me exploring deeper into my kinks, I watched some essays that unleashed a curiosity and I found myself unpacking some deep shit and maybe that's why I want to explore this in my fandom??
Either way, I don't think anyone is wrong or damaged for their kinks. I don't think anyone should give up their kinks. I just wish I could talk with people about the kinks I like and be really thorough and honest about why, and hopefully find others who can relate. But I'm too scared to ask others because I can see and feel the defensiveness. And that frustrates me! But I don't mean it's anyone's fault, just that I have my wishful thoughts and they are what they are.

The biggest problem with the way your secret was phrased is that it's very patronizing and paternalistic. The person who commented sarcastically, "I'm not like the other girls, I can think critically" encapsulated your tone in a nutshell perfectly.

If you'd said flat out that you like the same things and were wondering about it, there might have been a very different response. But you came off like a judgmental outsider looking down on "young women" as if they're all naive blank slate sponges (remember, we have no idea of any poster's age or gender if they don't say so) who are incapable of thinking critically - and assuming they don't.

OP
I see that now, and I do apologize for that. I'm not the best at dissecting my thoughts. I can project and go off on my thoughts without realizing that I'm doing it. And I do apologize that I do that, really trying to work on it.

NA - I just want to say I think it's very cool of you to have taken such a weight of negative responses and listened to them and allowed them to have an impact, and not just gotten defensive and doubled down hard and dug your heels in.

"Double down and dig my heels in" is absolutely my instinctive response to large volumes of criticism being directed my way, and it ends up taking me way longer to figure out where I actually want to plant my feet because of it.

So honestly, good for you anon. I respect your genuine desire to discuss these things, and you seem like someone I would probably enjoy discussing them with, if I met you in the wild. :P

Hi OP, I'll try to respond to the clearer version of what you said here.

I totally get the desire to want to psychoanalyze your kinks especially in a fandom setting. I have spent much time and digital ink on analyzing my kinks and that of fandom at large. I guess here is some scattered advice and thoughts on how to go about doing that in a way that might get you more response:

1) You are more likely to get open/less-defensive responses if you bring a sex-positive (or I guess more accurately, sex-neutral) and non-judgmental and curious attitude toward the conversation, rather than making people feel attacked or unsafe to express their sexuality around you. Obviously, if you're still unpacking shit yourself (see point (4) below), you are unlikely to be able to bring the best sex-positive attitude to a conversation, so it's possible you need to unpack a few more things with a close friend, a partner, a therapist, etc. before you can start up a conversation on the internet about kink that won't have people's alarm bells ringing because of (e.g.) sex-negative or kink-negative rhetoric that sneaks into your writing. (I speak from experience -- even though I have since I was ~19 or so been very sex positive and non-judgmental and able to regularly point out when sex negative attitudes have snuck into people's rhetoric and writing, even at age ~28 there were still a lot of ways I thought *I* was broken because of the kinds of fantasies I had, and while I THINK I was pretty successful at keeping those insecurities out of my public musings from age 19-28, who knows??)

Specifically, one thing that is a bit of a pet peeve of mine is when people will confidently say that it's worrying that a majority of women have X or Y kink, and they are largely basing this fact on macrofandom behavior, but then they don't seem to have any awareness of what kind of sexuality do you see outside of fandom or among men, for example. For example, if you find it disturbing how much young women seem to fantasize about being forced to have sex, please go look up statistics broken down by gender that will tell you what percentage of men answered that they fantasize about being forced to have sex and compare it to the percentage of women. Please look at cross-cultural studies of kink and popular porn tropes. Talk to old women about their sexual fantasies. Read porn written by men and read people's thoughts about what they notice about fic that tends to make it more appealing to men vs. women. If you think it's sexism that women like slash and ignore female characters, please go look up statistics on the prevalence of F/F porn on male-dominated sites, and also write some F/F porn and see how very likely it is that an account that you're 99% sure is a cishet dude with dudeporn tastes that lean heavily F/F will show up to read it canon-blind, even on a site overwhelmingly dominated by women and M/M slash. Talk to people you know in real life (men and women, elderly and young adults) about their kinks and recurring fantasies. I understand why fannish people who are women tend to focus on the sexuality of women as expressed through fandom trends. However, if you express this interest in a naive "Aren't women weird! Let's talk about it!" way that doesn't recognize that men are 100% weird too, it comes off as sexist and judgmental and I don't particularly feel like having a conversation about kink where it's framed like "kink is something that only 'affects' [said in a way that implies negatively so] women."

2) Even if you can't find anyone to talk to about these topics, you can still find plenty of stuff to READ on your own. I would need some time to find them again, but I've read some fascinating meta written by other people discussing the connection between gender dysphoria and a preference for M/M or non-human biology in porn. Or people talking about how audience identification of characters on the basis of gender (or biology) tends to make certain kinds of stories (e.g. ones involving rape or age/power differentials) easier to read or intensely uncomfortable. There's studies/interviews that people have done classifying the different reasons why people are drawn to underage and incest content. There's plenty of musings on the experience of being both asexual and a voracious reader of porn. On

fail_fandomanon, people will often post threads asking people to explain the appeal of [x] kink, and the answers you get are fascinating and not something I would have known anything about on my own. There's a LOT of fascinating research that has been done that is some good food for thought if you're interested in the connection between sexuality and real life/psychology. If you're interested, I can point you to some links if you're interested although it will take me a while to do that.

3) Also, sometimes writing even without an audience is helpful for figuring out stuff too on your own. I participate in Dreamwidth-based exchanges, including ones called freeform exchanges that are very narrowly-themed and where you get to pick from a huge list of tag prompts what you would like to receive. Picking through those tagsets and finding patterns in what I liked and didn't helped me understand quite deeply my fictional tastes and from there I can figure out where those fictional tastes stem from. Same thing with writing down my common fantasies and picking through them for patterns.

4) Keep in mind that not everyone is in the same place on their kink exploration journey as you. As people mentioned, sometimes the reason why people aren't willing to unpack their kinks is because they've already DONE that. Extensively. At length. They've already finished unpacking the deep psychological shit that got them their kinks and now they just enjoy them on the internet shame-free having a very deep understanding of what they mean. Accusing those people of being unwilling to examine their own fictional tastes and where they come from is incredibly presumptuous because you don't actually know where they are on their journey. And obviously someone who has already figured out their sexual psychology to a detailed degree is going to be less willing and less patient to walk someone who is clearly still on the early stages of that journey through all the mistaken assumptions and fucked up opinions that people who are still unpacking shit (including deeply-ingrained sex-negative attitudes) tend to have.

So yeah, I guess just have reasonable expectations about what people are willing to talk about with you and what they will find boring or tedious or way too personal/TMI to do, and respect their decision to not engage -- that's going to be the normal/typical case, even before you get to issues like defensiveness. Don't jump to the conclusion that if someone doesn't want to unpack where their kinks come from with you that they are simply being thoughtless or too thin-skinned/defensive.

(Sorry I wrote an essay. I feel like I basically need to put this as a standard apology on all of my F!S comments.)

This is a fantastic essay and I want to marry it. Bookmarking!

If you want to talk about kinks I'd recommend going to a kink focused space. Somewhere the folks have self-selected for wanting to think/talk/listen about the subject instead of simply enjoying it.

No matter how neutral you think you're being going up to a stranger and saying "Explain yourself!" is going to be taken poorly. But if you catch people mid-stream talking about their thoughts and experiences you can probably ask specific questions and it's felt as engagement instead of judgement.

This. Check out fetlife and look for local events. If you live in a rural area, it's going to be a lot harder than if you live in a metro area. There are creepers, sure, but there are some awesome kinksters out there who have already done this kind of work and wouldn't mind discussing in depth with someone who is just starting to understand their own kink needs.

Kink in real life, btw, is a lot different than kink in fanfiction. I think fanfic can help jumpstart a deeper kink interest, but most people are not going to do that work in front of strangers online, especially when doxxing comes into the picture. I don't mind my family and friends knowing what I write about if I were to be doxxed, but in-depth breakdowns of the psychological work in my actual kink journey that happens in my bedroom, behind closed doors? No.

I'm an older adult who has discussed kink with real life friends, too, but even those convos didn't delve into the mental work I've done or the deeper reasons why I like what I like... and there are some things that I like simply because they're hot to fantasize and play out, but not in reality.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #5928 ]

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