On the rare occasions that I get dumbass anons, I just delete their messages, IP block them, and go about my day… but I got one the other day that’s been on my mind and I want to address it.
(FYI, I did immediately delete their message and IP block them, so this is recalled from memory.)
So, it said something like “why do you post pictures? Are you a grown ass man or a little bitch who’s thirsty for validation?” I just need you to know, anon (if you’re still out there), that you’re a fucking clown for believing and perpetuating that bullshit false dichotomy that it’s somehow less-than-masculine for a man to 1) want to feel handsome and 2) have that feeling validated by an outside source.
Fuck you, and I’m happy to never hear from you again.
As if the only possible motivation women might have is being “thirsty for validation!”
There are about a million reasons someone might post a naked selfie, and yeah (cough*dickpics*cough) some of them aren’t very healthy. But it’s just dire, misogynists bullshit to believe (not claim, believe) that the only two possible reasons a woman might do it are for “validation” or, my other favorite, “daddy issues.”
Not to be too fussy but, you know, exhibitionism is it’s own autonomous, independent kink. Some people just get off on showing people their naughty bits. To the best of my knowledge, none of the sexes nor any genders, orientations, or identities have a monopoly on that particular kink.
Don’t know what to tell you, but calling someone “a little bitch who’s thirsty for validation” says waaaaayyyy more about the accuser than it does about the accused.
If I wanted to be mean I’d probably say something like “It’s not the size of the meathead, it’s the motion.”
But mostly any kind of body shaming is counterproductive.
So instead I’m going to say good for him for posing for a cute, silly photo on a nude beach.
(I won’t say the shadow looks doctored, and the image has been modified too often to do good ELA or other forensics but unless that’s a very flat hat and he’s holding it further from his body than one ordinarily would the angles don’t seem right.)
Until you’ve taken your own naked selfies you might have no idea how much work goes into taking them… or how many butterflies (good kind and bad!) go into posting them.
By Thomas Oldenough | July 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Do you have any tips or tricks for getting over severe body dysmorphia? As much as I want to feel comfortable in my own skin, I can’t get over how much I don’t like the way I look. I want to explore my sexuality, but I’m scared that once someone sees me completely nude, they aren’t going to be attracted to me no matter how close we’ve gotten :(
Body dysmorphia is a terrible thing. Although I wouldn’t call it severe I still struggle with it constantly. My strong feeling is if you feel you’ve got a severe case that you speak with a psychologist who’s had training and experience for helping in that specific area. I suggest this not to brush you off but because for all the negative stereotypes about (especially) academic psychology they’re often able to help when the issue is targeted and specific. And unless it’s associated with something deeper like eating disorders then dysmorphia can be fairly specific. The good thing about advice is one should never expect it shouhld be taken. But I at least recommend trying the idea out enough to see if there’s someone in easy travelling distance who seems confident they can help.
With that heartfelt disclaimer out of the way I can at least say a few of the things that I’ve used to cope and that others I’ve spoken to have said helped them.
#1: In opinion polls we get only one vote:
The first is big and difficult: while we have and should have 100% immutable authority and autonomy over what is done to our bodies, such that if 100 people vote for us to jump off a cliff and we vote no then the motion fails by 1/100. We have absolute veto over what’s done.
So it might be surprising that we have exactly one vote over whether or not we’re attractive. And so if 100 people vote that we’re attractive and we say nope, then instead of winning 1 to 100 we lose 100 to 1! Conversely (though far less commonly) if we vote that we’re “the healthiest, sexiest, fittest ever” and 65 million vote that ahahah, no, you’re a carrot-top, out-of-shape troll… well 🤷♂️
So here’s a tricky thing though. If 99 people vote that we’re attractive and one single asshole says you’re not the… we have a hellish tendency to disrespect everyone else’s opinion because we agree with the one asshole.
We may not be able to do anything about our own self-image, but we have to take responsibility for rigging those votes when others say we’re actually ok.
#2: Familiarity breeds contempt:
You ever done that party trick where you pick some perfectly ordinary word – “agree” for instance” or “scissors” – and you say it over and over and over again? And you know how after just a minute or two the word stops having meaning and stops sounding familiar and just starts sounding weird and alien and even repulsive?
Guess who’s been looking at you every day since you were born?
Guess what can happen when you see the same thing every day, year after year after year?
After a while you stop seeing the person and start seeing only the flaws.
After a while you only see the flaws!
You ever seen someone else post a selfie and they’re ridiculously attractive to you but they have a weird caption like “sorry the specks on the carpet” or “please ignore the creases from my jeans?” Or, what’s even tougher, something like “don’t mind my uneven eyebrows” or “my hair’s a mess?” And they’re posing there in all their radiant glory and you’re going “wait, what, there’s carpet behind them?”
That’s because they (just like you) have filtered out their all their own fabulousness and all they see are the flaws.
So here’s a tip that’s extremely hard to relate to… until you put someone else in your shoes: bona fide eye-tracking research shows that when someone is presented with a photo their eyes immediately track to the most interesting (cough, attractive) parts of the person in the photo. Chances are you do exactly the same thing.
That’s because to every other human being on the planet you’re unique and new. And every one of them is scanning you for the features that will turn them on. Meanwhile every person on the planet sees themselves as a zit, a stretch mark, a flabby bicep, or some other thing that they’re sure everyone else will zero in on.
See, above: scan for reasons to be attracted to prospective partners, not to be repulsed.
The converse can be true – I can’t remember the comedy but there was some character who was not only a slob but a jerk but they’d go on and on about how awesome their calves were. (Their calves were never visible, as part of the joke, but the point of the joke there was that they were fooling themselves looking at one possibly attractive feature instead of lifting a finger to bathe, dress, exercise, or, you know, be even marginally courteous.)
But the point here is sort of related to the first thing: when we’ve got body dysmorphia we’re the only ones who’ve got it!
In my case I think I have a really gross body because I expect it to look like Toby Maguire (the first Spiderman movie) or Daniel Ratcliff (Harry Potter.) Compact, muscular, round faces, big eyes – just the classic mesopmorphic body type:
Instead I’m much more of a classic ectomorph – tall, slender, lanky, and stretched.
Never mind, at all, that quite a few people think tall drinks of water are awesome. My mind’s eye says “stork” and I don’t think storks are attractive so I don’t think I’m attractive. My little walnut-sized brain wants to outvote you in the worst possible way ever.
The trick is learn to listen to others! You wouldn’t date you? Welcome to the club, I wouldn’t date me, even if we swing that way most of us would date ourselves!
Oh which raises another point: I’m straight and according to people who are attracted to men I have approximately zero taste in men. Which means, among other things, that if I did look the way I wanted to there’s a very real chance that nobody else would think I looked all that great.
And not to put to fine a point an extremely sensitive issue that can go beyond simply dysmorphia, but the body we want can be a big issue for folks who get intense about body modification, whether by jacking themselves into incredible-hulk imitators at the gym, or starving themselves to skeletons, or getting so many surgeries the tips of their noses begin to debride: often the shape we desire to be is less attractive to others. (Again, I’m talking about body image, not the very serious and extremely sensitive issues that drive people to body modification.
Ok, back to my main point: the trick is still to learn to listen to others. And that means most others. (Because there are toxic fetishists and codependents out there with Munchausen-by-Proxy fetishes who’ll get off on driving you to modify yourself literally to death.)
Ugh. Listen to others.
Take that leap of faith.
And one last thing: you know that old (heteronormative) line about how “for every jack there’s a jill?” Which, if you apply it extremely negatively, implies that “even the ugliest” person is going to be attractive to somebody. But turn that around because it’s just as true for the most fabulously desirable person on the planet Earth: no matter how many people are attracted to you pretty much all of us really only need one! (Pity the poor sex symbol who gets deluged with offers and only wants one person to love him or her or them.)
This morning I ended a piece saying if you want to find meaning in your life look for the two people who love you so much they’d give their life for you even though you don’t even know them. I’ll end this one the same way: whether or not you’re one of the people who thinks your attractive (and, really, for all the reasons listed above we’re probably not one of those) look for the people who love you. Period. Looks come and go. Love lasts longer.
Shorter version of my answer: If your dysmorphia gets in the way of you actually living your life do talk to someone who’s trained to help. And if not then learn to hear how others feel about you, not your own jaded, lying, sick-of-looking-at-me eyes.
Awesome question and I worry I haven’t answered at all. Thanks for asking though.
—
Update: There’s a reason I tried to focus on internalizing the appreciation of others instead of the perfectly legitimate, reasonable point that one’s lover will see you as more than skin-deep beautiful.
The problem being that your man or woman can be ass over teakettle for you, yes, and also your hot and sexy body, but! But dysmorphia means you think they’re lying or “just being nice.” So in a way it’s *not* whether they love you “no matter how you look.” If they say you’re beautiful you gotta accept that you’re beautiful even if you can’t see it in yourself.
Comments Off on Do you have any tips or tricks for getting over severe body dysmorphia? As much as I want to feel comfortable in my own skin, I can’t get over how much I don’t like the way I look. I want to explore my sexuality, but I’m scared that once someone sees me completely nude, they aren’t going to be attracted to me no matter how close we’ve gotten :(
One doesn’t often see links to academic linguists ang grammarians in the context of kink blogs. But trolls have been perennial problems since literally the earliest days of networked compiliters. A surprising number of people managed to get banned from my college computer lab where no
More than fifteen users (plus one sysadmin) could be logged in at the same time… where all 16 workstations were in the same room!
So they’re an issue. The post has a list of proposed characteristics of trolling personalities. Since this is a sex and kink blog and most of my readers are similarly inclined let me propose an additional definition that might help you understand why it’s actively counterproductive to engage them.
13: They get sexual gratification from their victims anguished, reasoned, outraged, or persistent reactions.
Engaging in any way with a troll is the equivalent of sending nudes to demanding assholes. It’s like giving blowjobs in response to dick pics. It’s like sexting with spammers.
They jack off to your anguish and annoyance. They share their best text streams with other trolls the way pedophiles, necrophiliacs, stalkers, and “pickup artists” do.
The common line since at least the late 1970’s has always been “don’t feed the trolls.” Let’s take it a step further and say “don’t give the trolls handjobs.”
Responding doesn’t just make them happy, it literally makes them come.
Just calmly (cock) block them or report them to @staff. You’ll be doing everyone (but trolls) a favor.
By Thomas Oldenough | June 27, 2019 | Comments Off on What do you think of showing ones picture on tumblr? Is it wise to show your face? It’s strange, this online world. We all kinda hide but show the deepest parts of our desires. What’s a girl to do?
The very good news is that very few people have suffered consequences of being outed for showing their faces since the 1980s when a Miss American winner was robbed of her position when a “highbrow” porn mag published mildly erotic photos she’d modeled for in college. Even the moralizing scold Laura Schlessinger didn’t lose a penny when frankly sexual photos of her came to light in the 1998. She’s still blasting her right-wing extremist racism all over the place. There seem to be no consequences for rumors of photos of the de facto leader of “Christian” conservatives Franklin Graham in sexual situations with his wife and a pool boy!
It almost certainly won’t harm your career choices any more than it harmed Slessinger or Grahams, or Paris Hiltons or Kim fucking Kardashian, it’s not impossible but very unlikely it’ll cause greater problems with stalkers than if you posted no photos at all, and to be honest there are so many people taking, sending, and posting naked selfies online for free that chances are approximately zero that a family member or friends will happen across yours. (And chances are if they do, mentioning it raises the point that they look at naked selfies.)
That said, I’m not really sure that Tumblr’s the place to show your face, especially if you also post nude selfies. It’s not bad or wrong to do so, but it doesn’t really seem to fit the “grammar” of the medium.
And that said, plenty of people still do. And for the most part they don’t really seem to suffer or benefit from doing so.
So! The best answer is to assess your particular circumstances, decide whether possible consequences would ever outweigh possible benefits for you, and make your own decision.
Excellent question. I’m not sure my answer was equally excellent. Thanks for asking.
Comments Off on What do you think of showing ones picture on tumblr? Is it wise to show your face? It’s strange, this online world. We all kinda hide but show the deepest parts of our desires. What’s a girl to do?
@dadaslilmewmew’s caption is a perfect expression of the blogger’s dilemma, isn’t it? When you share that you want Daddy’s cock (for instance) with the anonymous universe you don’t necessarily mean you want everyone else’s in the whole goddamn universe’s cock instead. But it’s so frustrating, and sometimes lonely, not to be able to say it at all.
An older, experienced gentleman understands, kittymittens. And won’t peek in your diary. He knows if you really want him you’ll let him know in other ways, won’t you?
For me I think it was clown porn. The coolest I think I ever saw was a porn site for and by deaf people.
Back in the “back in the day” when XKCD’s Rule 34 literally ruled (”Huh! Thomas the Tank Engine slash fiction?” “It’s rule 34 of the internet: if you can imagine it there’s porn of it”) you really could find paid porn sites of damn near anything! The lovely thing from my political, sex-positive perspective is that so many people are willing to post their booties… and kinks… for free the generally pretty yukky porn industry has gone by the wayside.
Never gonna forget that clown porn though. I’m not 100% sure it was hot but it was a lovely mix of very edgy and very sweet and the actors and actresses seemed to genuinely be having the times of their lives.
Bro she can post porn all day, but that dont mean she want your dick.
True story. If I want your dick, you KNOW it. 🥰
Exhibitionism is it’s own, autonomous kink. The Urban Dictionary defines it as “Exhibitionism is the term most commonly used for the action of being nude and/or engaged in a sexual act for others to witness visually.” Taking and posting naked selfies, with or without an expectation of comments and other feedback, may be all the gratification a blogger seeks, needs, or wants.
Just putting it out there.
And yeah, if someone wants to see your dick (because, yeah, men are as likely to be exhibitionists as women) then the goddamn ethical thing to do is
a) Wait for someone to ask to see your dick, or
b) Do what so many exhibitionist women do and post your selfies on a well-identified blog or, say, the dozen or so Reddit subreddits where people who love looking at dicks can actively search for them.
If you really do have a nice dick you’ll get plenty of followers and positive feedback… because the people who find you will be specifically looking for them where and when they want to see them.
