my genuine advice to younger-than-me wlw & questioning women about sex: it’s supposed to feel good. if it doesn’t, you shouldn’t have to do it. if you don’t enjoy something, you’re allowed to not like it. no matter what it is. even stuff that our culture says is essential to sex. you’re allowed to not like pain or crude language when you have sex, you are allowed to not like penetration, you’re allowed to not like oral or anal, you’re allowed to straight up not like being touched (being a stone top is okay!!!), you’re allowed to like things that most straight people don’t even consider sex but feel good, you’re allowed to like things that most cis people don’t even consider sex but feel good, you’re allowed to have preferences and enjoy sex and decide against sex that doesn’t feel safe and good. there is so much pressure to feel like you should like certain things, and I want you to know that it’s important to find out what you actually do like, not just what you feel like you’re supposed to like. you’re the one living in your body, and you get to decide what feels pleasurable

“Contrary to the Biological Facts” – a nerdy Cophine fanfic by YesBothWays

yesbothways:

“The emergent analogy for gender and sexuality, “ Cosima said, “Instead of a spectrum is that of the cosmos. The reason to me is that life, by definition, wants to self-replicate but it also wants to diversify. It wants to reach out and expand into new possibilities and new realities. So like rather than imagining two static poles with people grouped around them and a handful of expressions falling in between, folks try to imagine a living, opening, continuing variation on life, right, and within life on expression of gender and sexuality. And that, that really makes sense to me.

“Maybe it jives with my experience more ‘cause I get to witness all these other people living my same biological experience. Yet we’re all so different. Like, maybe if we had tools good enough, those variations in all of us could be tracked back to unseen variations in our genes. But the whole point to me is that we were made as a patented product – made to be the same. But life, it has a way of tending towards self-expression – not of sameness, but of variance.

“It’s really not hard for me to see easily how something like sexual anatomy gets managed by medical science for the benefit of someone or even something other than the people who are being ‘treated,’ even though that’s how it’s always framed. Technically, even though it doesn’t show in like social markings for gender expression, I have different sexual anatomy than most females as a direct result of intentional manipulations meant to keep me from being able to procreate, because my body was all intended to be a patented. Many of my sisters died because of that genetic intervention, and I got sick and nearly died. But what’s most fascinating to me is that it didn’t work. I mean. we actively intervened to wrest control back from the corporate entity that wanted to decide our biology. It’s hard to study that. But also, my sisters Sarah and Helena, who are identical twins, their biology essentially overwrote a synthetic sequence designed to make us all infertile to express a wild type of our genetics. That’s just miraculous basically. That’s science against the direct actions of scientists, which was them attempting to make copies of the same. You can’t override the innate qualities of biological life.” (x)

Excellent ‘nerdiness’ here. Enjoyed reading. 🙂

FYI

Trans men are men. Trans women are women.

There are bisexual women that love men. There are bisexual men that love women.

There are lesbians with penises. There are gay men with vaginas.

The gender binary is a social construct and a lie.

There are people who never have sex and feel no sexual attraction to others.

There are people who identify as having no gender. There are people who identify with having no sexual orientation.

Queer is a long-reclaimed term of power and one you can use proudly.

You decide who you are and no one else does. Do not let fascism, politics, cowardly anons and all otherwise ignorant, phobic people tell you who you are or tell you who you are is wrong in anyway, shape or form. Everything about you is valid and important. Everything about you is necessary.

We must work, constantly toward the emancipation of human beings from bigoted social constructs and ideas that do not fully recognise the width, depth and breadth of what human beings are and can be.

Three kinds of attraction and why it’s important to know the difference

fuckyeahbiguys:

livebloggingmydescentintomadness:

Aesthetic attraction: “I want to look at you.” You think someone is beautiful, very pleasing to the eye, but you feel no desire to touch them.

Sensual attraction: “I want to cuddle you.” You feel a great deal of affection towards someone and you want to hug them, hold them, perhaps kiss them, but with your hands never straying below the belt.

Sexual attraction: “I want to fuck you.” You want to do things of an explicitly sexual nature with someone.

Why is this distinction important? Because I didn’t realize I was demisexual until the age of 27 because all my life I thought that aesthetic + sensual attraction was the same thing as sexual attraction. I always thought that finding someone beautiful and wanting to touch or kiss them was sexual attraction, but realizing that it’s not, that sexual attraction means actually desiring sexual acts with a person, has changed my life and explained so many things. When I was figuring this out, a number of other people commented that they felt the exact same as me, so I think this is some pretty important stuff to spread around.

Click here if you think might be asexual, or here if you think you might be demisexual.

It’s important to know that there are many different types of attraction we can experience as humans. It’s part of what makes our sexual/romantic identities so rich and varied.

its really disturbing and borders on triggering-ya know what it is fucking triggering okay-that member of what is supposed to be OUR OWN COMMUNITY want to scream about how your identity is offensive. YOUR identity. something that is entirely your own and not for anyone else. as if all of us haven’t experienced the rest of the world telling us our identities were offensive enough. im just sick over it, and im so so sorry you have to deal with that

laynemorgan:

Yeah I mean I saw someone say that if I identify as bisexual and homoromantic it’s either because I’m gay and haven’t figured it out yet or because I’m bi and using the wrong language or something like that and I’m just so perplexed by that because one would think, in our own community, where people in this community are constantly told what to feel and why and how by people who don’t understand, that we wouldn’t tell people things like “you’re just confused” or “you aren’t properly understanding yourself” or “you haven’t figured it out yet.” One would think that telling one another that we know better tahn them about their own experience is something we wouldn’t do and that negating the very real experiences and feelings of people is something we would never let happen, given how often it’s done to us by people outside the comunity. I have to tell you, hearing that I was “gay but just didn’t figure it out yet” today was one of the most harmful things I’ve heard in a while and actually really bothered me today, mentally and left me feeling pretty stressed out and confused. So moral of the story, we are never allowed to tell other people in our community that what they’re currently feeling or choose to identify as is not acceptable.

As someone who spent nearly 30 years trying to figure out her sexuality and now have a term I feel comfortable with – asexual homoromantic – all this discourse has been intriguing, depressing and eye-opening. I do, however, think much of the bias thrown at LM probably has nothing to do with it. I think there are other agendas out there and nothing positive. It’s just an excuse to try and belittle her further.

Basically, though, what Layne said.

What is a homoromantic asexual to you? You refer to yourself as lesbian sometimes and sometimes just queer. What do you prefer?

Here is AVEN’s definition.

When I first came out, or, at least began to realise I was not in any way straight, my inclination was that I preferred women, therefore I must be lesbian. I’m comfortable with this and do use it from time to time as most people have never heard the term ‘homoromantic asexual.’

I identify as queer because I’ve always found the word to be a bit rebellious and taking back as many pejoratives in our culture is something important to me.

In my early 30s, after a series of unsuccessful relationships, I realised I’d been ‘borrowing’ sexual desire from my partners without ever experiencing this attraction myself. I felt an emotional and intellectual pull towards women, but sexual interest was not part of it.

While organisations like AVEN try to battle stigma for those of us outside the usual spectrum, it still exists. Because of this stigma and the lack of representation, the vast majority of potential partners for someone like me is limited to pretty much zero.

And if you were wondering, being asexual in any definition does not mean you wish to be without a partner.