I imagine him all frustrated trying so hard, regurgitating theory quotes with glassy eyes and everyone going "OK, CIA brat" under their breath
Really sex pest behaviour.
I imagine him all frustrated trying so hard, regurgitating theory quotes with glassy eyes and everyone going "OK, CIA brat" under their breath
Really sex pest behaviour.
This has nothing to do with religion. I just don’t trust myself to have physical attractions
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Physical attraction, in me, has lead to minor sexual harassment in which my body unconsciously looks at someone in an impolite manner
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I’ve been trying my fucking hardest over the past year and a quarter, because I had a really awful flight where I had to spend 5 hours staring at the seat in front of me, cursing at myself in my head because if I hadn’t overheard something, I would have spent the entire flight leering at the woman sitting next to me like a fucking pervert
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Do you mind if I explain the whole scenario?
Go for it, comrade. There's no better way to address these issues than talking about them.
Are you sure you can handle the emotional labor?
I'm not the person you were originally talking to just FYI, but I'm happy to listen and offer my thoughts! If it does end up being too much to handle right now, I'll get to it after work.
I told BMO this over private chat.
So, I was getting on a flight back from a vacation a year and a bit back. And due to seating bullshit, I don’t get to sit with my family members. I get to sit next to strangers. I’ve had bad experiences sitting next to people I don’t know on flights. However, my teenage brain was kinda fine with it, because the woman sitting directly next to me was hot. And so I sit there during boarding, and occasionally, I look at her legs. However, a few minutes later, the woman is conversing with her friend, and talks about a creepy dude who was leering at her. I end up having a near heart attack before she clarifies that it was some old dude at check in. But my nerves don’t calm. I begin to consider what I was doing. I was subconsciously viewing her in a sexual manner without her consent. Same as the old dude, but the difference was I wasn’t caught. My mind ended up listing all the times I had viewed women in a sexual manner without their consent. Guess what? It was a lot. I’m no better than that creep.
First of all, you are clearly better than that creep because you had the common decency to avoid making this woman feel uncomfortable. We all - men, women and non-binary people alike - have intrusive thoughts that we would be mortified to acknowledge in public, but the important thing is how you respond to these. Feeling sexually attracted to someone is perfectly normal and doesn't impact that person in any way so long as your words and actions don't cause them discomfort.
Second, I really do think this is somewhat related to your religious upbringing. I know you said that wasn't the case, but hear me out because I experienced the same sort of shame over my sexuality for far too long. The puritanical views on sexuality and the idea that simply thinking of a sin was the same as committing it certainly played their roles, but I think the biggest issue was growing up with the belief that my thoughts weren't private - the belief that there was a watchful observer constantly monitoring me for impure thoughts. Although I didn't realize it at the time, this feeling stayed with me long after I'd given up on religion.
Remember that your thoughts can't hurt anyone but yourself until they turn into actions. I'd also suggest some CBT - for me, a lot of this ties into my OCD and the skills that I learned in therapy have been a huge help. Learning how to observe and accept your thoughts will make a difference!
I hope this is helpful advice. My lunch break is just about over, but I'm happy to talk about this later if you'd like. Feel free to message me anytime.
You probably are right on the religious angle. I’m a bit worried about the whole seeing a doctor thing because I don’t want to tell my parents about this. However, I’ll try to be brave and ask them for help. Thanks a lot.
By the way, do remember that some people are immature teenagers and meme saturated (me) so CBT , to me, doesn’t automatically click as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Thanks for that reminder! For any other teens reading this: no I am not suggesting cock and ball torture as a solution to feelings of shame over your sexuality.
Oh, and you know your parents better than I do, but I don't think your parents need the details if it makes you uncomfortable. Just tell them that you've been dealing with intrusive thoughts and anxiety, and that you'd love to share more but you need to work these things out with a therapist first.
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You didn’t have like a magazine to look at or something?
I spent the whole flight in thought and desperately wondering if I had upset people before with my behavior and if it was too late to apologize.
Besides, the magazines suck on planes. The crossword and Sudoku is already filled in.
I read your other comment and you said you were a teen and the woman you “leered” was an adult. Most adult women get teenaged boys are horny balls of hormones who don’t have the best self control and probably aren’t gonna assume you’re some disgusting perv just for letting your eyes linger a bit too long. You may at worst made her mildly uncomfortable but the fact you recognized you were being kinda creepy and stopped probably was more than enough of an “apology” and she probably didn’t care pass that.
Plus I think the idea that “viewing someone sexually attractive without there consent” isn’t really a violation. People don’t have 100% control of their thoughts and other people can’t read your thoughts, the contents of your mind are your own, as long as they don’t lead to fucked but behavior you shouldn’t really feel guilty for them. Also a world where you couldn’t even feel attracted to someone without their prior consent would... well I don’t understand how dating would even work in that world. Pretty sure all non-asexual people wouldn’t want that.
Well, to be fair, I context also context tended context to context leer context at context peers context. I’ve been correcting that as well. (Sorry about the context thing it’s to make OOC editing harder) But relationships, as I view them, tend to grow from friendships. My only ever date came as a result of this.
I mean yeah but unless you’re an asexual person who wants a non-physical romance, physical attraction is usually gonna be a factor in that. It’s usually the evolution of two friends realizing they have a mutual physical attraction to each other and then deciding to explore that. You can be friends with someone but also think they’re kinda cute and maybe would be DTF if they were but if they’re not whatever. That’s like, most of my friends.
The most important thing is the emotional bond. The date didn’t really go well and we decided to just be friends but she’s a good friend and I’m happy to know her. It’s always good to have a friendship to fall back on.
That is important but, again unless you want a non-physical relationship, which is fine, physical attraction is important too. Idk some people here seem really off out but that assertion but yeah if you want to have sexual relationship with someone finding them sexually attractive is a part of that, doesn’t mean you’re some gross shallow pervert. And “attracted to someone physically” doesn’t mean “person who is conventionally attractive”.
It really does feel like you've taken Christian hangups about sexuality and just substituted Satan for Capitalism
Well, we know that beauty is subjective. Is sex subjective as well?
I don't know what you mean by subjective in this context
What is objective beauty?
No, I understand what you mean by objective and subjective beauty. I don't know what objective and subjective sex would be
I should have said Sexual attractiveness
Of course sexual attractiveness is subjective, though there are some elements of it that have cultural and biological bases (which is also true of beauty more generally).
I don't really understand what all this has to do with the original topic
what is objective sex?
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What will, objectively, make a penis erect?
you're confusing sex with attraction and attraction with paraphilia...
regardless, my point was that these are weird terms to use in this discussion and queer theory has a lot more to offer on this topic than basic philosophy. we can go a lot further than saying attraction is subjective. the idea you're trying to get at is that attraction is complex and most of the things we're attracted to come from society and what we're taught (paraphilias being the usual example - there's no natural equivalent for lingerie).
however, that's not the same thing as saying attraction isn't real. it absolutely is - however you developed the particular attractions that you did, you are still in fact attracted to them and have to deal with the positive and negative consequences of those attractions.
so, so much has been written on this topic over the years by queer people trying to prove that they have a right to exist.
On that subject, I will always remember how one of my old teachers explained the way that something being a social construct doesn't mean it's "fake" or lacks power (my teacher did this in the context of race, but I feel it applies here as well).
Basically, she said "money is also a social construct", took out a $5 bill, and started burning it. She then pointed out that several students had physically recoiled when she did that, and said that we all have some understanding already of how one social construct has power, and we should abstract that out to understand how that dynamic applies to other constructs.
yup, the other tangent here is to fetishization - both of the sexual and non-sexual variety. when we objectify our attraction, we create fetishes. in a broader sense, fetishes are objects and ideas we grant power over us - the power to move us and compel us into action or to root us in place in fear.
I’m really sorry for my insensitivity
you haven't been insensitive - see my other reply
Does something being subjective make it bad?
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Because I can’t fucking stop them I’m not strong enough
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Lmao tfw handholding caused ww1 (specifically the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire double suiciding with his lover)
this is why handholding before marriage is strictly verboten 😤
Let us learn the lesson that love is so powerful it can cause world wars. Therefore we must uphold the volcel vanguard party line no matter what.
Lest we bathe this world in BLOOOKOOLAID
That’s called emotional attraction
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I can’t do a chemical castration because I’m a minor, and it’s an irreversible process that could lead to really nasty side effects coming from testosterone loss
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It sounds pretty bad
seconding @ScreamoBMO's point about counseling... this also all sounds like The Queer Experiencetm and repression is a hell of a hole to dig yourself back out of - this from personal experience. I'm a trans woman and while I've never had an experience anywhere near as strong as what you're describing, I do know what it's like to repress a bunch of shit and develop nasty feelings around yourself and the people you're attracted to... in my case, I wasn't even attracted to women - I was jealous of them and confused the hell out of those two emotions and I'm only now, twenty years later, working out my attraction to men, something that was buried so deeply because it was overwhelmed by my jealousy (plus a whole host of other shit).
this stuff can be seriously traumatizing even with nothing else going on (there's always other stuff going on) so get help working through it. :cat-trans:
I totally understand that jealousy. For me it often took the form of codependency, but realizing how much of my attraction was based on wanting to become more like the person I was attracted to made me really reevaluate the way I related to the concept of gender in general.
I came at it the other way around because I knew I was trans the second it was described to me... it just took me a while to work out this, including the codependency, were part and parcel of my gender issues because of how hard I was fighting to repress that.
I don’t know. I do feel like a guy, and I do feel much more attracted to women than men... I don’t want to talk to my parents about this, I don’t want to go to a shrink
It sound to me you’re just anxious about sex and sexuality. Which is fine, sex is weird and scary, if anything being a little anxious over it is a healthy thing.
But I would suggest you talk to someone about this. If you decide you want to be celibate that’s fine, but if doing so is this much of a struggle for you I don’t think it’ll make you happy. You probably need to talk to someone and figure out why you feel so anxious about it.
I was talking about me, I'm not saying you have the same thing going on. tell your parents you have depression and want to see a therapist for it. it's a good catch all, will almost certainly be true in any case, and is sufficiently common that they won't suspect anything.
but you really should talk to someone. I promise, you don't want the consequences of this kind of repression weighing on you decades later. I can explain what that's like if you want but otherwise I'll spare you the gorey details.