#this is a beautiful fucking take
while I’m at it, i may as well post my “how kinky people look at sex reveals how autistic people experience the world better than anything else I have seen” post.
A majority of people in the world appear to view sensation like this: there are some feelings that are Good, and some that are Bad. Pain, of course, is Bad, fundamentally Worse than other sensations, like pressure or touch.
Some people are autistic. They spend their entire lives comparing being touched in ways they hate to being in pain, because people refuse to understand any other way. The world is hard to live in for them, because the feelings that hurt them are not categorized as Bad, and therefore what is torturous is not understood as torture.
Kink really unnerves a lot of people because it upends a lot of assumptions about how brains feel things. How can you want to experience something in the Bad category?
But I think kink better understands and allows for the actual complexity and reality of how brains feel things.
It’s actually more like this: There are very few, if any, actually inherently Bad stimuli. Instead, everything has a threshold at which it is unpleasant, even unbearable, and a threshold at which it is neutral or even good. Those are not necessarily opposite ends of the spectrum and can in fact overlap in weird ways. The intensity of a stimulus, or how much it pushes the limits of your processing, is not necessarily the same as “how much” stimulus, either.
Everyone is different in where their thresholds lie. There is a ton of diversity. This is…okay.
Furthermore, your thresholds are not fixed. You can adjust them a lot based on circumstances, such as how predictable the stimulus is, how much control you have over it, how much control you have over the rest of your environment, the amount of things you’re simultaneously processing, and so on.
In other words, if you experience something in an environment that is controlled, planned, and has low levels of unpredictability and extraneous stimuli, in a way that is curated to your ability to process it, that can cause a dramatic shift in whether you experience that thing as pleasurable or horrible.
Sometimes, people engage in otherwise unpleasant things in a controlled and agreed-to manner so those unpleasant things can become…good. Autistic people try to make their worlds as predictable, controlled and planned as possible so they can process “everyday” things with less pain. (And sometimes they do the first thing too.)
Honestly? I think what has convinced me most of this idea is seeing things people who are “anti-kink” say.
I see posts written by people who believe that doing a thing categorized as Bad in a sexual context is inherently going to cause harm, regardless of consent. The implication,though, in singling out “kink,” is that there is a “normal, natural” form of sex that is not “inherently harmful,” that lacks the characteristics that make pain, for example, harmful.
These people are regarding “normal” sexual activities, certain forms of touch or stimulation, to be inherently “safer” and less hurtful.
But to an autistic person, a touch may feel much worse than pain, no matter how gentle it appears to be. To an autistic person, many “vanilla” and innocuous acts might feel unbearable. But they don’t get treated with suspicion, because the people for whom they are Bad are not Normal.
When you are autistic, agency over your own perception is one of the biggest things you have to fight for in order to heal and be healthy. “This hurts me because *i* say it hurts me” is…basic. Because people don’t believe you when your hurts are non-normative.
“This feels good because *I* say it feels good” seems like it’s just the other side of the coin.
Also. The argument that sex that requires “aftercare” is bad, because if it is good, why would you need to recover from it or be in a fragile state after it?
Imagine living a life where you didn’t have to care for yourself and take time for recovery after 90% of the fun things you have left your house to experience.
Imagine having a brain where the lines between good and bad and manageable and overwhelming are far apart enough that Feelings and Emotions can be enjoyed without any “Ouch” or “AAAA” or “???????” being there a little bit, where you can do the Good feelings in a way that is A Lot without turning into Oops, A Little Too Much “AAAA”
I take issue in particular with the recurring idea that vanilla sex is inherently Safe, nonviolent, easy to process, and should require no Extra Care.
Don’t even get me started on “sex that requires safewords is bad.”
Scripted words are easier to access when you’re feeling Many Things, they’re right there at the front of your brain, so to speak. The fact that they’re connected purely by association with a certain thing and not by their actual meaning means you don’t have to retrieve their meaning first to “get to” them.
“Why isn’t your safe word ‘no?’” Um?? Is “please stop immediately” the only thing you can imagine someone urgently needing to communicate to their lover? That doesn’t even directly communicate “please stop immediately” with no context?
But seriously, if I get too distressed and overwhelmed, my words will fall out unless I have pre-loaded ones.
