Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2023-03-30 05:53 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2023-03-30 05:53 pm
[ 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.
Re: OP
(Anonymous) 2023-03-31 11:49 am (UTC)(link)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
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.)
Re: OP
(Anonymous) 2023-03-31 11:40 pm (UTC)(link)