#oh and i'm applying what i said above to this kind of stuff in general. not specifically the actual situation that happened recently | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bigskydreaming · 3 years

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Continuing on that observation because I forgot to add this part, as a gen z I'm glad you understand that we or young people don't invent new ways to be evil, but it's not completely true. You aren't seeing new forms of online abuse in every platform, I doubt second hand information is going into details as well. Also the fact that you are a white man, there are things being said and done to poc in various online communities that I don't expect you to be privy to. Harassing fans of color and poc media has become a lot more common and normalized which parts of the fandom at large will never see. I don't know if anon did all of the thinking before saying "gen z bad" but they're not completely wrong looking at the kind of mass bullying behavior literal kids are exhibiting. They are learning from or being encouraged by older people but that shouldn't take the focus away from them to blame only the older people.

And my ask regarding Barbara, you assumed I hadn't thought about if my disdain for the character could have come from ableism. I had tho, granted you couldn't have known that and it was surely a possibility, so I'm not saying I'm mad about it, I was at that time a little bit. But you could perhaps give your anons a little more credit sometimes. Sometimes people know what they're talking about, you don't need to explain other possibilities to them each time.

Once again, sorry if this came off as very rude I just needed to share that observation and among many other instances these two were really highlights and kept bothering me. My issue with Barbara goes in a different direction than anything to do with her appearance and I've personally faced online abuse from people younger than me in ways that technologically, even politically, wasn't possible or as easy a few years ago, so you can maybe see why...

Please keep in mind that whatever context you have for yourself or your ask when you come into my inbox on anon......I have none of that. You have an awareness of yourself relative to whatever you asked me. I literally only know an anon by the words they put into my inbox and nothing else.

Also please keep in mind that every anon I answer, I do so in the larger context of my own interactions with tumblr overall. I have a lot of precedent with things I say being taken out of context, misrepresented or even just me not conveying myself as well as I like.

So the combination of those two things is that a) I literally just don't KNOW what any anon does or doesn't know and b) If I'm going to answer an anon, I tend to want to answer as fully and clearly as possible.

I can understand it coming across as being talked down to, so I'll work on that, but I would ask people to remember the above and keep that in context too when weighing my responses.....am I actually being condescending in every case, or does it simply feel that way because I'm including stuff you already know in my response? And if its the latter, is THAT something I COULD know about you without knowing who you are or you as a person and not just a paragraph sent in anonymously?

I'd rather be safe than sorry, and so from my POV since there's no harm in somebody seeing someone cover information they already know as PART of their overall answer or response, like, there's no reason for me not to include whatever I think is relevant and just expect readers to decide for themselves what about my response, if anything, is helpful, and like....just ignore the rest, y'know?

Also, just for the record, I am ADHD and I save my medication for when I'm working or writing or have stuff I absolutely need to get done, which doesn't include my usual blogging. So I'm usually posting while not on my ADHD meds at all, hence the rambling tendencies and the length. Another aspect of ADHD that doesn't get talked about much ime is we tend to over-explain, part out of just excitement/interest in whatever it is that has our attention, and also in part because we're used to people not necessarily following the leaps our minds take when jumping around rather than proceeding in an orderly thought pattern.....so, part of why I break things down so incrementally is I literally just don't know where my way of looking at things diverges from the way neurotypical thinking views things, so I want to draw as detailed a map as possible in order to ensure the most people possible can follow my thought process, just in case.

(And again see, this is something you might already know, and hell, you could have ADHD yourself, I just literally have no way of knowing that so rather than just mention it and be like "oh and also I have ADHD and so that's something to keep in mind" I'd rather explain WHY I feel that's particularly relevant to your question, since I'm kinda like, why not answer as fully as I have the spoons for? People can stop reading at any time if I go on too long. Its fine).

As for the specific asks you're referencing - my response to the gen z anon was not meant to convey that the sort of things you're describing don't occur among gen z, so sorry for giving that impression. Its actually the opposite of my point, which was simply that I don't think its a generational thing, or that anything is gained by treating it as a generational thing. This kind of behavior exists in gen z, yes, but it also existed before gen z. Its not gen z SPECIFIC, or limited to just that generation. That's all.

And the other ask, the one you made about Barbara - to be honest, I don't have anyway of knowing for sure which one you meant, and there are a couple it could have been, but if its the one I THINK you're referencing, I believe you asked how to stop people from assuming you dislike Barbara for reasons rooted in ableism when its because of other things? If that's the one, then I mean, the thing is....I DID answer your question, in as much as anyone could. I addressed the perceptions other people might have of your stance there, but basically - there IS no way to ever ensure people take you at your word or any kind of guarantee you can present your POV in a way that won't be misrepresented or misunderstood. So ultimately, I just had no real useful advice for that?

And so I expanded into the only thing I think anyone CAN control, aka their own thoughts and words, and suggested that you just double check to be sure of your own possible biases that others might read into your words without you being aware you were putting them in there. That wasn't meant as an insult or to suggest you hadn't already examined yourself for possible ableism - it was simply saying it never hurts to check again, y'know? We don't always catch everything every time we do a self-review, and internal biases are inherently tricky to pick up on ourselves. And it just loops back into the fact that I really had no way to know what you had and hadn't already considered, you're essentially a blank cipher to me....and in my experience, a lot of people are a lot more ableist than they realize.

And this isn't an insult either! It applies to me and I'M physically disabled! I'm constantly to this day unpacking new realizations about how I still have more ableist views and opinions than even I realize, even after about five years of living with chronic pain, vertigo, nerve issues and associated problems stemming from only half a working mouth lol. I'm not trying to insult people by asking them to just do what I do every day and just like....make sure I'm not the problem when other people have a problem with me. Because sometimes, even after reflecting as fully and genuinely as I can, I think they're still wrong! I don't have to agree with their conclusions! But that doesn't mean that they're never right.

And for the record, I do think its still worth examining on your end, because I don't love that you said your issues with Barbara have nothing to do with her appearance, when we're talking about ableism specifically. It very well could be just a poor word choice on your part and not a reflection of your actual views, but it could also be a suggestion that you tend to think of physical disability as something that's limited to there being a visual sign of, and there's a lot of invisible symptoms and changes to the ways a disabled person interacts with society and society with them that don't alter a disabled person's appearance in anyway...and many of these things are the exact stuff a lot of unacknowledged ableism revolves around.

So I'd like to give you and other anons more credit and the benefit of the doubt and assume you know what you're talking about and don't need things broken down as much as I tend to break them down to - but keep in mind I don't OWE you that, and its a lot to ask someone to take you on faith when you've already made the conscious choice to present yourself to them anonymously, and deliberately limit how much a person even CAN know about you before answering, when you have an equal opportunity to present yourself by name, allowing someone the full context afforded by your blog, that they can use to familiarize themselves with you and what you likely do or don't know before answering. I don't think its entirely reasonable to anonymize YOURSELF and then expect people to still give you the benefit of the doubt.

Especially when not giving you the benefit of the doubt only really results in me over-explaining something you don't think you need explained in certain ways or in as much depth. Its not hurting anyone, and you're not going to be the only one reading this response and maybe that over-explanation ISN'T something other people know and it could still be of use to someone else, y'know?

But lastly, please keep in mind that you came to me, and I just answered in the way that made the most sense to me. If that didn't work for you or wasn't what you're looking for, that's fine, but like. You knew way more about me going into this interaction than I could possibly know about you, and assuming good faith of you and your interest in my response and giving you as much of a response as I did in the first place, let alone now, IS giving you the benefit of the doubt in the sense that I'm assuming you can find some way in which these responses are of use to you.

And if not, like....just don't send me more asks? LOL. I kinda feel like you just didn't expect the answer you got, and that's sitting weirdly with you. Which I get, to be honest, but I don't particularly think that's a me problem, because that has nothing to do with anything I can control.

I can only give the answer that occurs to me when I read and think about an ask. I can't guarantee it'll ever be the answer the asker actually WANTS.

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aurorawest · 3 years

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"More about his kinks? His rich history of sexual assault and how that messes with him? His hang-ups around physical attraction and emotional attraction? Something else that I’m forgetting to list?" ALL OF THE ABOVE! Seriously, if you wrote an essay on each topic I'd def read it, LOL, I'm so on board 🥳

I’m so sorry for taking forever to answer these. I felt like I wasn’t really giving the topic the due it deserved—I still think I could say more, and say it better, but here’s what I’ve got for now!

TW for talk about general sex stuff and sexual assault.

Section 1: Who is Loki attracted to?

Loki is bi/pan (not a label he would apply to himself, but I’m going to use it as shorthand). This is something he’s known about himself since his early adolescence. He probably was more aware of being attracted to women, just because, you know, heteronormativity. I head canon that queerness wasn’t totally accepted on Asgard when he was young, but there was a wide range of opinion and there were certainly many people that were totally accepting (amongst them, his family). And by the time of the MCU timeline, my hc is that attitudes are largely accepting. So young Loki is aware he’s attracted to men, and he’s willing to pursue that, but he’s still nervous about making it widely known. A lot of that is tied up with not feeling like it’s Asgardian enough, it’s not the kind of masculinity that Asgardians seem to prize.

My personal head canon is that Loki has been attracted to more men than women.

Section 2: When is he attracted to them?

I sometimes think that I sort of head canon Loki as demisexual (again, not a term he’d use). I see Loki’s libido becoming further and further separated from his capacity for emotional intimacy as he gets older. He gets to a point where he almost never feels attracted to someone unless he’s got that emotional connection...but he doesn’t like admitting to an emotional connection. So he’ll be like, ‘Oh, I just think he’s hot, no biggie. He just pops up in my sexual fantasies all the time, exclusively actually, and I regularly get off to the thought of him undressing—but it’s just physical! I don’t actually like him!” Like he’s fully aware that for other people, this is a thing that can be true. But it’s not true for him. In order for him to be really sexually attracted to someone, he has to have that emotional bond. Which again, he’ll deny. It’s a really healthy emotional cycle.

Section 3: Idk if it’s really sexuality but his genderfluidity

So again, I don’t think genderfluid is a term Loki would use to describe himself, and I also don’t think it’s quite the right word to use to describe what he is (just my personal hc, I of course do not have any issue at all with other people using the term to describe him). I definitely have Loki’s shapeshifting as part of his character, though I write him in his male form 95% of the time for a number of reasons, some of them related to canon, some of them more as a personal response to fanon. That’s out of scope for this ask, haha. I write him as identifying as male in his male form and female in her female form.

Section 4: Compartmentalization of sex as separate from emotional intimacy

Loki views sex, and his body, as a commodity. It’s another tool in his arsenal. He sees it as diplomacy, as a way to get what he wants, to save his life, whatever. He can and will use sex as a bargaining chip.

It��s maybe as a result of this, or maybe the other way around, that Loki doesn’t really feel sexual attraction to people unless he’s already got an emotional connection. He’s completely compartmentalized these two aspects of intimacy, to the point where he really fears the emotional intimacy that would lead to him feeling actual sexual attraction. Because he sees sex and sexual attraction as something he can control, it’s the less scary of the two. So sex is preferable to love. With sex, he can be in control (or tell himself he’s in control) of the situation, in the sense that he has consented to it in some way. But love? He didn’t consent to that. He doesn’t want to feel that. He can’t stop himself from feeling it and he can’t control who he feels it for.

Section 5: Sub/Dom?

I covered this in an earlier ask but I might as well talk about it again! My Loki is very very sexually submissive most of the time. Likes being put in his place, controlled, held down, told what to do, etc etc. He can be dominant sometimes, if the mood strikes him, but his preference is to be submissive.

Related to his nervousness around coming out, Loki very much felt like as the prince, as an Asgardian Man, there was like...a right way to have sex. If he was going to have sex with men, he was going to top. Only top. And he was going to be dominant about it. He had to be in charge, even though this really didn’t come naturally to him. So in his early sexual encounters, that’s what he did, even though it wasn’t what he wanted. This led to him having a lot of unsatisfactory sex as a young man, haha.

He also spent a decent portion of his life being ashamed of the kind of things that turn him on, because again, he thinks it’s bad optics for who he is.

Section 6: Kinks

My Loki isn’t Kinky™, he’s actually pretty vanilla. His favorite position is getting it from behind, and his second favorite position is missionary, and if he only did those two things for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t have a problem with it. He does, however, have kinks, and they are: authority and humiliation. This is kind of where the ‘very very’ comes from in ‘very very sexually submissive,’ ha. He likes feeling degraded, he likes being ordered around. Dirty talk is good, and preferably he’s being told about how bad he’s being and how he needs to be punished.

Caveat with this, which leads into my next point: he only really likes it if it’s with someone he loves. Because...

Section 7: Those kinks have fucked him up!

So part of me can’t help but think that the reason I see Loki with an authority kink is because of his daddy issues, haha. He pretty clearly has a deep need to please his father (not sexually, ew), and I think he then ends up being drawn to powerful authority figures. Thanos and the Grandmaster come to mind. I don’t head canon that anything sexual went on with Thanos (though I could be pretty easily persuaded to write some fucked up fic about it happening), but I absolutely head canon that stuff went on with the Grandmaster.

My head canon is that the Grandmaster was trying to get into Loki’s pants pretty much from the moment Loki showed up in front of him—constantly flirting, way too handsy, orgy invitations, parties with drugged drinks, the whole shebang. Loki was able to get away with not actually having sex with him, though, and always holding it out as a possibility in order to stay in the Grandmaster’s good graces. But when Thor and the Hulk fight in the arena, Loki offers sex in exchange for Thor’s life being spared (I have a fic about this, it’s called Lacuna). The sex is...not good for Loki. There’s definitely BDSM involved, and he is not into that. The Grandmaster rapes him. Repeatedly.

And...Loki is into humiliation and authority. So when he’s degraded and humiliated by the Grandmaster, and he gets off, he goes into this shame feedback loop. This is the kind of thing he likes, and if he likes it then there’s nothing wrong with what happened to him, and he put himself in the position anyway, and if he climaxed then it wasn’t assault, etc etc. He gets this way about non-sexual situations as well; like he definitely feels he deserved what he got with Thanos, and that he deserved to die on Svartalfheim because he feels responsible for Frigga’s death. He has this way of pushing blame off himself and never taking responsibility for his actions...until he does, and then he blames himself for everything.

Section 8: Yes I head canon Loki has a rich history of sexual assault

Oof, guys, Loki has been assaulted so many times in my head canon. His first experience was as an adolescent, where he almost gets gang-raped by two security guards. There were definitely other dubious to nonconsensual experiences in pre-Thor 1 times.

There are some traumatic times after his Fall:

He does some time at the Kiln, and he allows a prison guard to pretty much do whatever he wants to Loki. Loki uses this to escape.

Eventually, Loki ends up getting captured and sold into slavery. He ends up in a sex trafficking market, where he’s raped repeatedly, including gang-raped. He’s heavily drugged during this time to keep him from escaping but still has some memories of it. This is where the Black Order picks him up. They repeatedly remind him that they ‘saved’ him.

Then, of course, there’s the aforementioned stuff with the Grandmaster.

Section 9: Not that he'll ever call it that

Oh yeah but Loki will never in a million years call any of this ‘rape.’ In almost every assault, he’ll tell himself that he actually never said no, so actually, he was in control. He could have stopped it, but he just didn’t, because of Reasons. So it’s not rape. He had it under control. He did. Seriously. There’s no trauma.

He just tries not to think about the time in the sex trafficking market because he can’t really contort that into anything but what it was. If he has to think about it, usually he figures he deserved it.

I mentioned this in an ask recently, where I think one of Loki’s deepest fears is losing control. I think he really fears losing control over a situation, but his biggest fear is losing control over himself. In my hc, Loki really feels as though his grasp on his sense of self is tenuous at best; that he isn’t in control of his own mind (hello, Mind Stone, you didn’t help); that he might just do something that he didn’t plan or want to do. You know that feeling you get where you look at a window and think, What if I just jumped out? Loki really, really fears that feeling, because he’s not sure he can stop himself from actually following through. And stripping him of his bodily autonomy with sexual assault is just another way to fuck him up. Having him deny what it is because he’s so terrified of losing control adds a delicious layer of toxicity to the whole brew.

Section 10: But I still think he's capable of finding The One and having a great sex life and an unbreakable emotional bond

Having said that! Loki’s sexual trauma doesn’t actually hamper his ability to have sex. It does hamper his ability to fall in love, because falling in love is another form of losing control. I think that he could definitely get triggered by certain sexual things, but of course, I write him with Stephen, who is basically the kindest, most considerate lover ever, haha. I talked in another ask about how Loki’s humiliation and authority kinks, coupled with his lack of communication skills, lead him to expect Stephen to be a mindreader, and to just kind of...do the stuff that Loki wants him to do. But of course, Stephen isn’t going to do something that could actually cause Loki physical pain without being explicitly told to do so and receiving Loki’s enthusiastic consent. But Loki doesn’t want to communicate! Loki thinks it’s hot to just get ravaged.

My fic is about a lot of this stuff, not necessarily explicitly the sexual stuff, but a lot of the issues that are bound up with it—the control issues, the attraction to authority figures, the difficulty forming emotional bonds. Through the course of my main series, Loki is really picking away at getting better about all of this, and the endgame, of course, is that he’s able to accept being loved, and loving in return.

I feel like I didn’t articulate any of this as well as I wanted to, but I didn’t want to let this ask sit in my inbox forever, and I’ve been picking away at this now for like two weeks. So, I hope that was a satisfying essay! I could probably go on tbh, but I’ll leave it at this.

#loki head canon #loki sexuality #loki meta #loki #Anonymous

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nototherwisespecified · 4 years

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if you have the energy, i would love to hear some detailing on the gender stuff with the faceapp. i'm genderqueer and stil struggling with a lot of gender stuff and i was having a really heartsick instinctive gut reaction to them, but when i started poking at it, i got worried it was just some deep misogynistic stuff? and i would love to hear your thoughts on it. i mean i get the binary-exhasution, obviously, WHOOO BOY do i

1. 💕🌈

2. I’ll admit my first reaction to seeing at least one swap in the most recent wave - this was on twitter this morning - was “oh shit she’s gorgeous” WHICH kind of undermines my own position, here, doesn’t it,

other caveats: I only started thinking carefully about lgbtq+ stuff when I actually. came out. after I graduated. I’m white & western. there’s stuff I’m missing, & I mention concepts I’m not completely familiar with. please correct me or add on

also my own thinking does include reading into casual phrasing, because the ways casual/instinctive wording can reflect deeper societal mindsets grab my writing/editing brain

so, that said, some things that I’ve thought of, not exhaustive (but exhausting), focusing on the m-f swaps, instead of f-m, which I don’t see v much of:

it’s kind of a cheap play right off the bat, like - “what if this hockey player were a GIRL!” ignores the many hockey players who are cis women (not to mention trans players)

it seems like gender swap algorithms mostly apply conventional western feminine beauty standards, which is crap for cis people who fall outside of those standards, including PoC (standards are based on white features) & gender-nonconforming cis people. the algorithms themselves are probably trained on stock photos, so this isn’t necessarily intentional, but most stock photos are of young thin standard-conforming white people

the phrasing “swap” implies only two genders, which (as we demonstrate) is false

the other phrasing that comes up a lot is “what if this person were the opposite gender,” which I personally dislike because it places the concepts “cis woman” & “cis man” explicitly in opposition/conflict (hi patriarchy!)

“opposition” also (to me) implies heteronormative completeness-when-put-together

“opposition” also suggests that there’s like two poles of gender, fem & masc, & everything that isn’t cis is on a line between them, which isn’t right - what about agender people & people who are culturally recognized third genders that aren’t on the line? not to mention fluidity, or people who just know they’re none of the above

that brings up trans exclusion, lgbqpa exclusion, cultural exclusion, & racism in western beauty standards, plus (implied) the misogyny of beauty standards in general, so there’s a lot in faceswaps to react to if you’re viewing as anyone who isn’t cis, straight, & gender-conforming. it could be that some of anyone’s negative reaction is partly engrained and/or internalized misogyny - I can’t completely discount it from mine. if that’s the case, acknowledging it is the first step toward deconstructing it

for inevitable “it’s not that deep,” people have mentioned the instant & sometimes severe discomfort they feel in encountering swaps; if it’s deep enough to hurt, it’s worth looking into

#how tf do i tag//

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anonymousdisaster · 4 years

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Relax

A/N: once again, I wrote this when I was, what, ten? So, like... don't judge. Or do, I don't really care, actually. Gif isn't mine, y'all should know that. Also, this was originally meant to be posted on my other account, @thewalkingimagines , but, you know, cause I'm stupid, I accidentally posted it on here instead, and I'm too lazy to redo all of this stuffs and repost it over there. Anyway.

Genre: general fluff, but it starts out kinda angsty

Pairing: Steve Rogers (Captain America) x non gender specific!reader

Description: Steve comes back from a bad mission, and the reader (with powers similar to Jasper from Twilight) has to help him relax.

1942 words without A/N

He hadn't been able to save all of them. He should have been able to save all of them. There had been children, *babies* even. And he hadn't been able to save them. He hadn't been able to get them all out of the building in time.

It had been a very long, and very hard mission. He had known it would be from the start, but he hadn't realized just how mentally damaging it couldn't been. He could still hear the screams of the victims still trapped inside of the burning building that he should've been able to save.

All he could think about was the people who had lost their lives, and the people who had lost loved ones, as he trudged into the elevator that would take him to his floor of the Avengers Tower. He didn't even bother to go to the debriefing that was held after the mission, he just headed towards his room in some desperate attempt to escape his pain and grief and stress.

As he made his first step off of the elevator on his floor, he vaguely registered someone speaking to him.

"Mistah Rogers? Are you alright? Well, no, uh, of course you're not alright. I can feel what happened. Oh, I'm so sorry, Mistah Rogers."

The sweet, slanted voice of (name) (last name) broke through the somber fog that had seemed to wrap itself around his mind. He usually rather enjoyed the empath's ramblings, but right now their reading his emotions was not good. He had to keep up his hero façade, if he didn't, he might as well be walking away from himself. So in an attempt to get away from them, he just grunted and kept walking.

"Mistah Rogers? Hey, did you hear me?"

'Just go away, kid,' he thought to himself. He felt his emotional support beams snap just a moment before he rounded on the empath.

"You know, for somebody who has the literal ability to read peoples feelings and emotions, you sure can't tell when your presence isn't wanted, can you?!" He growled, his voice dangerously low. He didn't mean that, of course, he just couldn't deal with people right now. He saw a flash of hurt cut across their eyes at his words, but it quickly demolished and reformed into some odd form of understanding.

"Oh I'm... I'm sorry–I'll, uh, I'll just g-go now," they replied in a stuttered mumble, before scurrying towards the elevator. As he watched their heel disappear behind the metal doors, he almost reached out to tell them he didn't mean it; but the door was too fast, and before the words could escape his lips, the (your hair color) haired empath was gone from sight.

He let out an irritated sigh and ran a hand over his face, before about-facing, and continuing the trech to his room.

The second he kicked the door closed behind him, he was taking off his clothing and slipping into a pair of baggy sweat pants, and belly-flopping down onto his too-soft bed.

He just laid there a moment, feeling himself slip into that beautifully fuzzy haze of not-full-consciousness and not full sleep. Focusing on that and not the ache in his shoulders and back or the sound of screaming that still reverberating in his mind was probably why he didn't notice the soft knock that came to his door, or the click of the hinges as it was pushed open slightly to reveal the same (hair color) haired, (eye color) eyed person that he had nearly shouted at in the hallway only a few moments before. He should have been ashamed of his lack of vigilance, but in all honestly, thinking back on it later he would probably be glad he hadn't.

The empath carried a small bag that held several different items in it. Most of which Steve would deny ever using if he was ever asked outright. Everything from essential oils to lavender scented bath soaps were held in that bag.

~~~~~~~

They knew that Stevens previous explosion was not really aimed at them, he was only stressed and in desperate need of some well deserved R&R. They also knew that what they were about to do could get them yelled at by the super soldier, but they couldn't not help him. Part of being an empath was feeling someone else's pain as if it were one's own, and right now, all the pain and anger and grief that he felt was also within them. So their doing this for him was to help them almost as much.

Hesitantly, they reached out a trembling hand and placed it upon his bare sholder. At the initial contact he stiffened and sharply inhaled, but, as they released some of their power, he imediately began to calm down.

Another part of their power was the ability to manipulate other peoples emotions. It may not have been the coolest power, but, in times like this, they found it rather useful.

They removed their hand from his sholder just long enough to rub some essential oils and lotions onto their hands, before replacing them on his sholder and softly beginning to massage away the tension. His muscles were still so wound up from the mission that it took them a few moments to get through to his sore flesh, but the moment they did, he let out a small breathy groan that brought a small smile to their lips.

They worked their way all the way across his broad shoulders, and then down his back, all the way to the band of his low-riding sweatpants and back up to repeat the motion again in backwards order. Switching between soft kneading and harder circles with the heel of their small hand, continuing for the better part of an hour until his muscles were back to their previous limber flexibility.

They had noted some twenty minutes before that his groans and sighs of apriciation had morphed into soft snores and the rapid flow of rabid emotions that had cut though his consciousness before were now down to a minimum.

'Good,' they thought, 'its working.'

But now that they needed him to move, it could be possibly problematic. Gently, they moved up to his face and gingerly placed a pale hand upon it, shaking him slightly to wake him and whispered quietly.

"Hey, Mistah Rogers... he, I need you to roll over for me... Do you think you can, love?"

His beautiful blue eyes opened just a slit to see their face and he let out a rather loud, gutteral moan as he pushed himself to roll onto his back, his tired muscles not quite awake enough to push himself up with much grace, as he just kind of flopped over, one arm layed across his abdomen the other still trapped under his body. They gently pulled his arm from under his body, and layed the other straight beside him, before re-applying more lotions and returning to message his front side.

Again, they started at one shoulder and worked their way across to the other, then worked their way down his chest and stomach, then back up before going to his bicep and massaging down his arm, all the way to his hand, going back up, then repeating the action with his other arm.

They left him for a moment to go to his bathroom and start the bath. Taking the correct products from their bag, they began pouring in generous amounts of bath salts and bubbles as it filled.

They quickly went back into his bedroom and softly shook him back awake, careful not to be too harsh.

"Hey, there, Mistah Rogers, come on, I've got a bath running for you."

His eyes opened ever so slightly yet again to take in their face, and process what the (eye colored) eyed empath had said. With a groan, he pushed himself to a sitting position, and allowed them to pull him into the bathroom. Once there, they turned to him expectantly before blushing heavily and turning their back to him so he could slip out of his sweats. He was far too tired to be very embarrassed at the happenings as he gingerly climbed into the bath, using the bubbles as a sort of blanket to hide his, heh, "intimate area" from view.

As soon as they knew he was covered decently, they turned back with a washcloth and poured some soap onto it, scrubbing the foam into the rag to make it sudsy.

They bent and sat on their knees at the side of the tub, leaning forward and not hesitating to begin washing him with the utmost care.

~~~~~~~

The feeling of their rag covered hand scouring over his body gave him chills, he hadn't felt so well taken care of like this since before the serum, when his oldest freind would take care of him when he was sick. And, as much as he hated to admit it, it felt amazing. To be vulnerable to someone like this had an almost orgasmic quality to it. He let his head drop back onto the edge of the tub and closed his eyes, allowing himself to fully relax against their adept hands as they swept his body.

He felt the soft rag cross his shoulders, then down his arms, then accros his toned stomache, stopping before their hands dipped bellow the belt line and went down his legs, all the way down to his feet.

He felt as their unclothed hand moved down his arm and gently grabbed his wrist, pulling his hand above the waters bubbly surface and setting the wash rag in his hand. Wordlessly, they gestured to his groin area, asking him to wash himself while they left to get some dry towels.

He did as they had silently asked, and they returned quickly with two large, fluffy, white towels to dry him with. The empath helped him stand and step out of the bathtub, handing him one of the towels to dry his front while they patted dry his back.

He stood as still as he could on limbs that felt like jeletin as they finished drying him and helped him back into his sweat pants. Leading him back to his bed. They pulled back the bed spread and helped him lie down in a comfortable position.

They stayed like that for a few moment, just watching eachother, before (name) smiled a small smile, squeezed his hand, and turned to leave.

But their hand didn't leave his.

He held them back until they looked back down at him with curious eyes.

"Thank you," they said simply. "and... call me Steve."

Their answer was just a kind smile and another soft squeeze to his hand. They tried yet again to move away from him, but again was stopped by him not releasing their hand. A small blush creaped onto his cheeks as he asked quietly:

"Would you, uh, would, would you mind staying with me, for tonight?" He quietly questioned.

Yet again their responding smile answered his question as they crawled down into the bed beside him. He turned towards the empath and they pulled him towards them, resting his head on their chest and reaching up to toy with his still slightly wet blonde hair.

It didn't take long for him to fall asleep in their embrace, and not much longer for them to follow suit. Their hand still buried in his soft hair.

Let's just say that it was the best night of sleep either of them had had in a very long time.

#Captain america x nonbinary reader #Fluff #Cute #Cuddling #I like cuddling #Okay?#Fight me #Hurt/comfort #Captain amarica x reader #Steve rogers x nonbinary reader #Steve rogers x reader

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freedom-of-fanfic · 6 years

Note

I'm curious for your thoughts on this subject. I dislike the way antis use the term "yaoi" and "fujoshi" since I feel like these terms were created to mean specific things (in Japanese culture) and antis often apply it without considering differences between slash and yaoi. Also, I dislike the way they use yaoi to pretty much mean fetishizing mlm/content, and fujoshi as fetishizing women since both terms are from Japan and I feel weird seeing these terms associated with fetishizing.

I also am really bothered by the way English fandom has adopted genre words from Japan to mean ‘the worst version of [x]/fans of [x]’. it feels like a form of looking down anything coming from Japan/Japanese culture and treating Japanese culture as the source of these ‘worst versions’.

(a lot of what follows is from light research I’ve done over the years and personal experience. It’s my opinion and experiences rather than a closely researched and heavily sourced essay.)

I think the reason for this weird English-speaking take is two-fold:

Americans/western culture interprets the Japanese subgenre ‘yaoi’ and its Japanese creators & fans through the lens of American/western culture and finds them wanting

the reinterpretation of the concept of ‘yaoi’ and ‘fujoshi’ in American/western culture and the unfortunate associations created as a result

Without going into historical depth, any western - particularly American - interaction with Japanese culture is an unequal one. Besides the ignominious end of WWII, the American army was the means of forcing Japan to reopen their borders in the 1850′s. And frankly: western culture has been obsessed with Japanese culture (and other East Asian cultures) for literal centuries. and we’ve been taking their cool shit and appropriating and bastardizing it for just as long.[$]

the way that the words ‘yaoi’ and ‘fujoshi’ are being treated now is, in my opinion, an extension of this.

(this post was heavily updated on August 2-3rd, 2018, to add a lot more about the word ‘fujoshi’: it originally focused more on ‘yaoi’. huge thanks to blogs like @rottenboysclub, @oh-suketora, and @satans-tiddies for all the information they’ve put out on tumblr about these words.[%] )

American understanding of yaoi in Japan & its Japanese fans

Americans don’t understand yaoi or fujoshi in their original Japanese context, but we belittle and denigrate it as if we do.

BL (Boy’s Love) and its subgenre ‘yaoi’ seem to have a similar relationship to Japanese fans as ‘slashfic’ and mlm fiction does to American fans. But that doesn’t mean we understand yaoi/BL in the context of Japanese culture or that we interact with yaoi/BL the same way Japanese fans do. Same for the word ‘fujoshi’ - a term that seems to have been coined in a derogatory context but was ‘reclaimed’ by the very female-aligned fans that it was meant to denigrate. (but more on ‘fujoshi’ later.)

In Japan, the word ‘yaoi’ is more equivalent to a Japanese acronym for the English ‘pwp’ (plot? what plot?) than a word referring to mlm. Like ‘pwp’ in its original usage, ‘yaoi’ indicates a fanwork or small-time/one-shot original work (doujinshi) that has little to no plot and/or focuses almost exclusively on the sex part of a fictional ship, though ‘yaoi’ is specifically applied to mlm-focused ‘plotless’ fanworks*.

(*it’s worth noting that - as mentioned in the wiki link above - the word ‘yaoi’ does not, on its own, have a meaning attached to BL. it has more to do with who adopted the acronym for common use: specifically, BL doujin writers.)

‘yaoi’ has fallen out of use in Japanese fan circles. ‘BL’ - ‘boy’s love’ - is the word which is more of an umbrella term for mlm in the way ‘slash’ is in English-speaking fandom, covering everything from explicit sex to soft pre-romance hand-holding. however, ‘yaoi’ was the word that became known as the Japanese-equivalent mlm fan genre to ‘slash’ in English-speaking circles, which had the unfortunate effect of leading English-speaking animanga fans to compare only the most tropey, explicit mlm content from Japanese fandom against all varieties of mlm ‘slash’ content from English-speaking fandom.

This was comparing apples to oranges; a more equivalent Western fandom comparison to Japanese ‘yaoi’ would probably be silly oneshot crackfic and kinkmeme fics. But the misapprehension was already in place and only got worse as some of the tropes of the explicit versions of yaoi genre doujinshi became increasingly known - the ‘seme’ (’top’) and ‘uke’ (’bottom’) and their supposedly male/female-like roles, the ‘rapey’ tendency to show the uke as crying and reluctant under an aggressive seme, etc.

These kinds of tropes don’t sit well with a modern American audience. And Japanese bl fans have had their own conversations about whether bl/yaoi is harmful to or supportive of Japanese gay culture (and long before Western / English-speaking fandom circles were having them, at least in a widespread way.)

But Americans are ill-equipped to judge the situation from the sidelines. To provide a few examples of things we generally don’t have cultural context on to truly understand yaoi (BL, tbh) and its Japanese fans:

LGBTQ+ culture in Japan

the Japanese flavor of gender essentialism

social and societal pressures on Japanese people, particularly women (trans, cis, and intersex) & nb ppl who identify as femme-aligned

what it means to be ‘feminine’ in Japan

strongly gendered roles in the bedroom (sex in Japan)

Without knowing all this, how can we understand why yaoi (or BL) is constructed the way it is? how can we understand what draws people to it, or how it sits with Japanese LGBTQ people?

But because many yaoi tropes don’t sit well with Americans in the context of our own culture and increasing openness to LGBT+/queer people, and because we’ve given yaoi a false equivalence with a western genre of fiction that has a much wider range of subject and form, we’re apt to look down on yaoi as ‘bad mlm’ and on its ‘fujoshi’ fans as genuinely ‘rotten women’.

The international reinterpretation of ‘yaoi’ & international yaoi fans

the other way the word ‘yaoi’ is used by many people in fandom-centric tumblr - anti and non-anti alike - is in reference to how Americans/Western fans ‘initially’ interacted with Japanese-sourced mlm (’initially’ being when yaoi became well-known enough for a noticeable interaction to appear in American/western geek subculture).

Manga and anime had a popularity boom in the US around 2003/2004 thanks to improving internet speeds and the 24-hour cartoon channel Cartoon Network looking for fresh animated content to air. Media companies caught on and a glut of manga and anime were officially licensed, translated, and sold overseas.

As the popularity of Japanese media grew, the word ‘yaoi’ became more popular and widely used in fandom circles, usually as a substitute for ‘slash’ or ‘gay’ (fictional mlm) when the source material for the fannish subject was Japanese in origin. I think this hit its peak around 2006-2007; at that time many teenage and young adult anime fans (primarily female/femme) who enjoyed slashfic/mlm fic called themselves ‘yaoi fans’.

Why was ‘yaoi’ so popular in America/western culture? and why did its fans get such an awful reputation over time?

as for popularity, here’s a few aspects:

Just another word for ‘slash’ - it wasn’t so much that yaoi as a publishing genre was popular as that there were a lot anime fans in fandom using the word ‘yaoi’ for their mlm fan content instead of the word ‘slash’. (and it still is used this way in some circles.)

male-attracted teen’s first fanservice - because of the size of the boom and the comparative diffidence of American marketers to young (male-attracted) people, a young anime fan’s first published media experience with the sexual ‘female gaze’ directed towards men was more likely to be sourced in Japanese BL content.

American gaze on Japanese male companionship - manga geared towards young men / perceived men in Japan (such as Shonen Jump titles) features a lot of male companionship and tight bonds of friendship. So does American media, but American male culture rarely allows men to touch one another in friendly ways (any gentle touch from a cis man is treated as expressing sexual interest). Japanese male friendship culture lacks this physical distance. Guess how it was interpreted, and guess what kind of effect it had on American anime/manga fandom.

relatedly, this LGBT/queer read on Japanese-sourced masc-centric content, plus the willingness of works aimed towards femme audiences to present all-but-canon mlm relationships, probably functioned as a poor man’s substitute for the lack of LGBT representation in American media in some cases.

and some reasons for the terrible reputation ‘yaoi fans’ garnered:

American ‘yaoi fans’ in the mid-2000′s were mostly teenage girls/femme-aligned young people, and it is an American pastime to shit on teenage girls for being teenagers and girls at the same time.

10 years on, those teenage girls are young adults in their 20′s looking back on their younger selves with embarrassed disgust. That is: the word ‘yaoi’ started to garner its sour taste in the 2010′s because that’s when most of the teenagers of the 2000′s outgrew that particular flavor of immaturity.

a lack of LGBT/queer culture awareness and education in America. Yaoi or slash fanworks may have been Baby’s First Gay Content. It also might have been the entire extent of their knowledge about non-straight anything because America had by no means the same level of LGBT/queer visibility that it does now and certainly didn’t (doesn’t) educate about it. people said and did some awful stuff out of sheer ignorance and lack of thought.

fandom got better about it because resources improved and visibility increased, which was itself in some measure because of the popularity of mlm fiction in fandom circles leading to people doing more research and queer fans educating those who knew less. BL wasn’t necessarily intended as queer rep, but it did act as a gateway to queer culture for people who discovered things about themselves through BL.

socially inappropriate behavior of many, many kinds - including those who refused to separate fiction and reality and treated real mlm like live fanservice (‘omg real life yaoi!’). But as an icon of ‘yaoi fan in the 2000′s cringe culture’, perhaps nothing is so prominent and well-known as the ‘yaoi paddle’.

why is the yaoi paddle so illustrative and iconic? Well - the paddles were sold at anime conventions as a silly novelty item. Anime convention attendees tended (and still tend) to skew young, particularly compared to other nerdy social gatherings. And as you would expect of a bunch of (a) overexcited young people (b) relatively lacking in supervision and (c ) surrounded by things liable to raise their excitement levels even more, they did a lot of foolish things when handed wooden oars that were easy to swing around and hit people with.

At about the same time that anime fandom was truly exploding in size and the yaoi paddle craze was hitting its peak, the internet was juuust about bandwidth friendly enough to allow people to take videos and upload them to this awesome new site ‘youtube’.

I’d say ‘you can imagine what kinds of videos people uploaded’ but you don’t have to imagine. you can see for yourself. The human interest news articles practically wrote themselves. And while yaoi paddles were quickly banned from conventions and their popularity dropped almost as fast, it was an impression to linger. particularly, IMO, combined with other invasive social behaviors that were somewhat more tolerated at anime conventions back then: ‘glomping’, ‘free hugs!’ signs, awkwardly following relative strangers around conventions as nominal ‘friends’, cosplayers publicly ‘making out’ as ‘fanservice’, etc.*

so this is the image of the ‘yaoi fan’ today - a young, white American cis girl at an anime convention in 2007, lacking self-restraint, social grace, and the ability to distinguish fiction from reality. and though this image has little to do with the original Japanese concept, we use the Japanese word to conjure it.

*these behaviors weren’t limited to young female / perceived female ‘yaoi fans’ by any means, but partially because of yaoi paddles, ‘cringe culture’ and ‘yaoi fangirls’ were inexorably linked to one another.

International (mis)use of ‘Fujoshi’: a Brief History

In contrast with ‘yaoi’, the word ‘fujoshi’ has a comparatively short history in American culture. It had a brief rise to popularity in the early- to mid- 2010′s, but for the past year or two it has been heavily invoked by the (so to speak) ‘fandom police’ as an invective against (perceived) women who ship fictional mlm and/or create explicit fictional mlm fanworks.

‘fujoshi’ ( 腐女子 ) is a compound word composed of the kanji/hanzi for ‘rotten’/’fermented’ (腐) and ‘woman’ (女子 ) and is a homonym with an old Japanese word for ‘respectable woman’ (婦女子 ). It was coined on 2ch (a Japanese text board popular with men) to insult (perceived) female fans who ‘queered’ media content written for & centered around men: re-imagining (canon straight) male characters as queer/gay/bi, shipping them with one another, and discussing/creating explicit, sexual work around those ships. (sound familiar?)

In its original insulting context, a ‘fujoshi’ was woman who was no longer a desirable marriage partner because of her interest in BL. She had ruined herself by marinating in sexual fantasies - and not even normal sexual fantasies about having sex with a man herself. Instead, she had fantasies about men having sex with men! Not only had a fujoshi woman lost her cute naivete and innocence: she’d also turned into a sexual deviant. She was fermented, overripe, disgusting, undesirable.

I don’t know how long this meaning had any clout, because Japanese BL fans - BL fans from all over Asia, in fact - embraced the ‘fujoshi’ label. to me, the implication of the ‘fujoshi’ reclamation reads like a giant, queer ‘fuck you’ to the kind of dudebros who hated them: ‘you find me undesirable because i like gay/queer content? That’s hilarious, because I never wanted you in the first place.’

And to this day (mid-2018), 'fu’/ 腐, ’fujo’/ 腐女, and its varieties (腐男子, 腐人, etc) have positive connotations in kanji/hanzi-using fandom circles.

The word ‘fujoshi’ reached English-speaking Western fandom eventually (I want to say in the late 2000′s/early 2010′s). It came to us already reclaimed and was picked up as a positive self-label. In those earlier days, Western fandom called themselves ‘fujoshi’ in a way much more similar to how Eastern fandom still uses it:

It’s not my job to please you.

I’m allowed to enjoy taboo things like queer fanworks, headcanoning canon straight male characters as gay, and sexually explicit content.

If you think that makes me gross, then fine: i’m gross. your opinion doesn’t hurt me. in fact, I embrace it.

(now go away and let me ship.)

this connotation of ‘fujoshi’ enjoyed a brief period of popularity. There was a fandom ‘sweet spot’ for slash in 2011-2012: shifts in public opinion meant shipping gay ships wasn’t utterly taboo anymore and AO3 was a safe space for sharing slashfic. ‘Fujoshi’ came to semi-replace ‘yaoi fan’ in the English lexicon, at this time, becoming synonymous with ‘ships gay ships in animanga fandoms’, with the added bonus of partially shedding the connotation of loving old yaoi doujin tropes in one’s slashfic.

But in the last few years - starting in around 2014/2015, I want to say - there was a shift in the attitude towards shipping mlm here on tumblr.

mlm fans who are seen as women - whether they are or not - are increasingly told that shipping fictional slash ships or creating fictional content about men in love with/having sex with men is terrible. mlm shippers/fanwork creators who aren’t mlm themselves - especially perceived-female mlm shippers/fanwork creators - are apparent no different from the ‘yaoi fangirl’ stereotype above: the 2007 cis white socially awkward fangirl, holding a yaoi paddle and screaming with excitement about real life yaoi!!! whenever two real gay men kiss.

the word ‘fujoshi’ - still tied to the English-speaking concept of ‘yaoi’ by both words being Japanese in origin and related to mlm fan content - was about to get unreclaimed with a vengeance … by American/Western fans with hardly a drop of knowledge about Japanese culture, fandom, or language.

And it’s been every bit as ugly as you can imagine.

‘yaoi’ and ‘fujoshi’ on tumblr today (mid-2018)

fandom on tumblr, deeply into policing everyone’s fannish interests in the name of social awareness, invokes ‘yaoi’ in a two-fold way:

‘yaoi’ as a doujinshi subgenre in Japan: featuring fictional mlm in sexual situations for titillation written by Japanese women (& femme-identifying nb people) for Japanese women (& femme-identifying nb people), and the distasteful feelings American/western culture bears towards its tropes as being unacceptably unrealistic and ‘backwards’ by modern progressive American standards.

‘yaoi’ as ‘cringe culture’: an imperialistic American/western read on Japanese media content + exposure to Japanese BL, blending unfavorably with a lack of education on real LGBT/queer culture, a lack of alternative LGBT/queer media representation, and teenagers being teenagers

Tumblr fandom police, feeling that ‘fujoshi’ was equally bad as ‘yaoi’ by dint of being adopted as a label by animanga slashfic fans & as another Japanese word relating to mlm shipping, proceeded to co-opt, redefine, and ‘un-claim’ the word ‘fujoshi’:

‘fujoshi’, but literally. having gotten wind of the literal meaning of the word ‘fujoshi’, but completely lacking the context under which the word was created, invoked, and reclaimed, fandom policers designated their own negative meaning for ‘rotten girl’. ‘fujoshi’ means ‘straight girl that’s rotten because she fetishizes gay men!’ fandom policers say - even though that has literally nothing to do with ‘fujoshi’ in its proper context.

telling East Asian fujoshi they can’t call themselves fujoshi. having decided the word ‘fujoshi’ is tied to being homophobic (by ‘fetishizing’ gay romance), and that its derogatory of women because they rely on their own re-take on the literal, negative meaning, American fandom policers start attacking East Asian fans that proudly call themselves fujoshi. (I wish I was joking.)

In summary, English-speaking fans are using their own twisted, ill-informed, and imperialistic treatment and understanding of Japanese concepts to turn those words into pejoratives for use in petty ship wars.

(And when you put it like that it kind of starts to look a little … well … racist.)

[%] This post was never intended as an exhaustive resource - as noted at the beginning of the post, it was based on my absorbed knowledge from being in animanga fandom as an American for many years - but thanks to the blogs I listed, who have a much more thorough knowledge of kanji / hanzi-using fan spaces such as Japan/China/Taiwan, Korea (in part), etc, I learned a lot about the current usage of ‘yaoi’ (or lack thereof) in Japan & how fujoshi was adopted as a popular label over the last 9 months.

If you’re ever looking for more information on these topics, I would especially point you to @rottenboysclub, as their blog is focused on educating English-speaking fandom on Japanese queer/LGBT+ and fandom terminology.

[$] regarding western tendency to appropriate Japanese culture - Japan is eager to export the unique aspects of their culture. but how many times have you seen an English article with titles like ‘10 Reasons Why Japan is So Weird’ or ‘25 Weird Things About Japan that will make you say ‘buy why?’’ (the literacy rate in Japan being nearly 100% is #3 on this list). and okay - Japanese culture is remarkably different from American culture. But this ‘Japan is so weird’ talk is often accompanied by a tone of mild superiority.

consider how we treat Japanese cultural products such as movies. The recent Death Note debacle is only the latest in a long string of this kind of nonsense (though thank goodness it’s getting the reputation it deserves.) Remember The Ring? American remake of Ringu. And of course there’s dozens of other examples of Americans buying or taking things from its original Japanese context and trying to make it ‘better’ for a mainstream American audience, even though the American audience liked the original Japanese product just fine. (Dragonball Z comes to mind.)

(On the flip side you have ‘weaboos/weebs’, the contemporary word for ‘Japanophiles’, putting Japanese culture on a pedestal, which is not any better, and disgust with ‘weebs’ tends to be extended to the aspects of Japanese culture they worship.)

#racism in fandom #this is an americentric post #yaoi as a trope #in defense of fujoshi #in defense of freedom to fandom #animanga fandom #fandom history #TEH HOT YAOIZ

2K notes · View notes

cynological · 7 years

Note

Hey so concerning that post about flip your card that you jsut reblogged, i'm super intrigued by your comment; would you mind sharing some of those ideas you can pull from it? Or referring me to someone/something that would?

Oh boy, buckle your seat belts y’allbecause I’m about to seriously brain dump and write a novel. Hi, my name isNovice Dog Training Nobody and I got some opinions and examples of my terriblyN00bish training mistakes.

Everything you do in dog training relies on communication. Iliked @attackfish’s explanation a LOT, because they address so many good pointsand I’ll try to expand on them and not just re-articulate what they said. One poster mentions how “talking out of turn” got themmoved, and so they never spoke up in class again. Clearly, that is someonesensitive to punishment- a simple verbal warning probably would have worked. Myfirst dog? Raising your voice was more than enough of a punishment for her.Before I knew anything about dog training, I put a prong on her to try to teachher to stop pulling. She hit the end of it once and I don’t think I ever had anissue with her trying to pull on the leash again- and then even so much as apull enough to jingle her tags got her to step way back. And just as moving theabove poster’s card to yellow prevented the poster from being disruptive again,putting a prong on my sensitive cattle dog/bbm and fixing her pulling issue,made them both overtly cautious and left an obvious emotional impact. It does not address the WHY. WHY what the person speaking upin class? WHY was my dog pulling? Were they too amped up and excited? Were theypreemptively answering a question? Trying to chase a car? Did they know theywere not supposed to speak during that time and made the conscious decision todo it anyway? Did my dog know any better (no)? What is barely a punishment forone student/dog can be devastating for another. Of course in humans, you caneasily get accused of favoritism if you alter the way you apply punishment tofit the individual, which is why most jobs have some sort of escalating ladderof punishment (verbal, written, suspension, termination) to cover their bases.Applying too harsh of a punishment for that individual will also break downyour trust- (”I never spoke up in class again.”) That is not something as ateacher you want to do to your students (or as a trainer, that you want to doto your dog), or at least not often, because then you’re going to have to spendtime rebuilding that trust, which I’ll try to touch on later. And if you’re tooharsh, you’re going to start encroaching on learned helplessness, when instead,you want to build resiliency. In dogs, the response to an unfair or overtly harshcorrection can present in a variety of ways. Some dogs will shut down, becomeovertly cautious, growl, whine, bark, muzzle punch, try to tag you, or come upthe leash. In agility, my dog has started this utterly OBNOXIOUS trend ofbarking. The easy and most obvious answer to this? Flip your card. Punish thebarking. Except for the part where it made the barking worse, which brings usto the next point: Emotional regulation. When I punished my dog for barking while we were running, Iwas not necessarily looking at why he was barking. I wanted the short termsolution: stop your damn barking. Well, it turns out, that made it worse. Why?Because he was barking out of -frustration- and not anticipation or excitement(as I’d assumed it was, and it might have been and then escalated). At the timeI did not realize it, but I was not effectively communicating what direction Iwanted him to go in, where he needed to be. So he was getting frustrated andvoicing his protests. Verbally correcting him, physically correcting him, andeven ending the run prematurely and removing him off the field thus far has notworked-he thinks it’s unfair because he does not understand why and he istrying to tell me that something is wrong. If I have him on leash and he startsfrustrated barking and I don’t do something to bring down his emotional state,he may try to muzzle punch or tag me or grab the leash. At that level of frustration, heloses clear headedness and he’s all worked up with no outlet. As with most animals, too much or too great of apunishment, even if it’s -P, and he starts to shut down and/or escalate,especially if he does not understand -why-. And I’m getting frustrated becauseno matter what I do, my dog won’t stop screaming at me and it’s like a horrible feedback loop of confused yelling. “WHYWHYWHY.” “WHY ARE YOU YELLING.” “WHY ARE -YOU- YELLING?” “WHY-” It wasn’t until my training mentor saw us practicingone day and basically said “Hey dumbass, stop being unfair to your dog. This isyour fault, not his. Look at where your body is facing; it’s the oppositedirection of where you are pointing/ want him to go. You’re also too late on tellinghim where he needs to go. You haven’t been working him when he’s in driveenough. And-” several of my other sins and character flaws. Guess what, improving mytiming and body language works wonders, as does working on exercises where hehas to think through that emotional state and has an outlet. It’s differentwhen he’s barking or screaming out of sheer excitement. Again, issues withemotional regulation. That can and has evolved into frustration barking,because he is much closer to that threshold. And again, we need to work onthose thresholds and work on increasing resiliency, and also trying to find away to address the barking and give him direction on what to do -instead-. I was trying to solve it the ‘flip your card’ way,and my dog started giving up. There are two steps to learned helplessness:Nothing I do is going to be right so I’m going to escalate to try to get mypoint across, or I’m going to shut down and not want to play anymore and giveup. We don’t want either of those. My dog is generally motivated to want towork with me and to run agility. He thinks it is a blast and he -wants- to workwith me. The problem is Dad Is a Horrible Navigator and Can’t Direct Worth aShit. There is the WHY. Addressing that is the first step in fixing ourproblems.This is not to say that punishment is ineffective; just that –unfair- or –unclear-punishment is ineffective, especially if you are not working on the root causeof the issues. But that is a lecture for another day and one I’m sure peoplefar more qualified than me have written extensively on.Which, ironically, brings us to our next point: Bias. This may come as acomplete and utter shock, but there is a lot of bias in dog training, and eventhe best trainers can struggle with it. From everything concerning dog breeds, ageof the trainer, training methods, gender of the trainer, even gender of thedog, everyone has an opinion and a world view that is going to affect the waythey train. I’m biased, you’re biased, we are all biased. Identify your biasesand find a way to become less biased. Now, choice. Animals learn best through play and through decision making-comingto their own conclusions and working out problems on their own vs being toldwhat to do. This is why the FF movement has taken off in recent years. It’s notnew information by any means, but more people are becoming aware that they wantsomething beyond the bare minimum obedience out of their dog. Shaping is agreat intro to this. Try to do 101 Things To Do With a Box with a dog who hasonly even been told –what- to think, instead of –how- to think, or even play It’sYour Choice with them… compare them to a blank slate or a dog whose foundationwas in learning how to think, and the difference is remarkable. A dog who isjust working for food or a toy or to avoid punishment is going to look a lot differentthan a dog working because he is engaged in the work and understand the work isintrinsically motivating. Resource guarding is another example of this. Iabsolutely love Patricia McConnell’s method of dealing with it. Punishingresource guarding is going to make it worse. Trying to –make- it stop is goingto make it worse. But giving the dog a choice and letting it come to its ownconclusions that it’s not worth it? My dog was a resource guarder and now –brings-me stuff that he used to try to guard. I’ve watched the progress of another dogwho would have mauled someone for a ball show significant improvement in lessthan two weeks just by being offered a –choice- and not being pushed. Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation: Think about your job:If you are only working just to get a paycheck, you are doing so out ofextrinsic motivation; you are doing it to obtain an external reward (yourpaycheck) or to avoid an external punishment (being homeless). Now, if you havea job that you love doing, and you work in that job for the sake of enjoyment,you are working out of intrinsic motivation. People who do a lot of volunteerwork, work with animals, or work with children, or who work in public servicetypically do so out of intrinsic motivation. A dog that is intrinsicallymotivated does something for the sheer joy of doing it. The name of the game wewant is Engagement. We want to build intrinsic motivation in our dogs to work –withus-. A dog who only works for food or a toy is doing so out of extrinsic motivation.It works, but it won’t be as strong as a dog who works intrinsically. Geneticsplay a huge role in this. I personally want a dog who is born motivated to work.I love watching my dog track, because he does not want to stop, even afterreaching the end and getting his ‘reward.’ He loves tracking for the sheer joyof tracking. In training, we use extrinsic motivators to help create a bridgeto building the dog’s intrinsic motivation.Now nothing is black and white, there are all kinds of grey areas and overlap.Try to communicate with your dog effectively, above all else. At some point, Flip Your Card may be appropriate. I have found that if what you’re doing isn’t working-try something else. Forgive me ifanything is unclear; it is 0540 am and I’ve tried to address as much as I couldin less than 2,000 words.

#flip your card #death by text wall

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secondsofhappiness · 7 years

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I'm sorry if I'm being offensive here but I was just wondering, you've talked about being asexual and realising later in life and I wondered if you can have crushes if you are ace and if you like the way people look like you find them attractive on some level but not on THAT level? Like for example if you found Ryan or Michelle attractive? Sorry, i feel like im learning and I don't want to be gross and ignorant about stuff and you seem nice so I thought I'd ask.

Love, don’t apologise for asking questions. You’re not being offensive in the slightest. ❤️If you don’t know, you don’t know! Plus, ace stuff is rarely talked about or known so it’s not something I expect people to be aware of.

So, I’m not the oracle on all things asexuality and can often go off my own experiences/feelings and what I know of the spectrum etc but I guess the way to view it is splitting attraction up.

Aka sexual, romantic, aesthetic etc. I’m not delving into aromanticism (lack of romantic attraction) as I don’t feel I am able to. So sexual attraction would be where you feel drawn to someone sexually and feel all of those feelings (hahaha i’m utter crap at knowing so you can fill in those blanks yourself). Romantic attraction would be feeling that pull towards someone in a romantic sense so wishing to have a partner type connection with them, to be romantic with someone but not necessarily feeling the desire for anything more (and the regular caveats exist here re: some ace folks do have sex etc). Aesthetic attraction is finding someone pretty to look at - in a round about way! There’s not a sexual element to it like “oh my god you’re hot”. It can be finding someone handsome or beautiful or fascinating to look at or striking or cute.

I definitely experience romantic and aesthetic attraction. If I act on it is another matter because that’s still a confusion to me and still a difficult thing for me to work out because of MANY complicated things that just frustrate me and therefore I pretty much live my life without any of that. It’s easier and perhaps people would say it’s not right as in they think I shouldn’t think that way but hey - everyone’s a product of experience and I find romantic attraction confusing as hell, difficult to imagine acting on or sustaining as any kind of relationship etc.

So that’s kind of the difference and you can experience that attraction to various kinds of people aka you can be bi romantic or hetero romantic or pan romantic etc. Yes! More labels…! Haha. They do help though even if people think ace people are making themselves “special snowflakes”. Hahaha. Screw those people. I’d rather I wasn’t so complicated.

So when you asked about Ryan and Michelle… haha. You picked a pretty decent two! Yes, aesthetic attraction is a thing. Ryan is hella handsome and Michelle is overwhelmingly beautiful.I have had things for Colin Firth and Keira Knightley most of my life and I d always said I’d marry either of them haha.

I think Hayley Atwell is the person I always think of when people ask me this question. She is STUNNINGLY beautiful. I mean, off the charts. She is also what I am told and I imagine to be someone that people would think was wildly hot but I just don’t have those feelings. Then I always include Chris Evans. He is GORGEOUS and handsome man and by standards I am pretty certain apply, would be described as hot.

I could be in a room with both of them. They could be dressed “sexy” or WHATEVER would trigger some sort of response from people and I’d be standing there in awe of their collective beauty but nothing else. I’d appreciate them for their stunning genes and would no doubt be bowled over by how lovely they were but nothing else. These are two people I’m pretty certain are off the charts on scales of attractiveness etc but I wouldn't feel anything beyond that.

So Ryan getting his kit off in the scene with Lawrence did nothing for me. Same with shirtless scenes or Aaron in the bath or any other fandom swoon moment. Absolutely zilch. Despite the fact Ryan’s a very handsome dude and I’d stare at him for hours. Nakedness, boobs, general states of being that people find traditionally sexy pretty much flummox me and I haven’t a clue what I’d even do if present with it hahaha it’s like a foreign concept to me and I’d rather someone wore a nice jumper or a cool dress or whatever… you know?

It makes for working out who you’re “attracted to” in my personal sense VERY DIFFICULT. Aka nobody for a long time not even romantically. So there’s that too!

Anyway I hope this helped. It’s a really difficult one to explain and sometimes I struggle myself but I hope it was in some way helpful. God I have probably butchered this explanation but hey ho! I’m no oracle!

Also I feel awful for effectively objectifying the poor souls above in a weird way but I needed examples to use to explain my point!!

Again, don’t you worry about asking questions. No need to apologise ❤️

#ace stuff #ugh I never know how to tag this so it doesn't show up in main tags but so people can blacklist

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7goodangel · 7 years

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I'm new here, sorry to bother, but why won't answer any paperfresh questions?

Warning: Long post so yeah... hence why the read more o-o

(From Blog Description)

(From FAQ)

But... I’m gonna add slightly more detail to this - cause then I can just link this exact ask/answer to my description for more detail.

So yeah... It’s not really the full ‘ship’ that I dislike. I am... just... meh with this ship if we are just talking about it in general.

However - what I don’t like was/is how people were so obsessed over it, so focused onto that specific ship that it caused these things (in this order):

Mischaracterization of Fresh and PJ - So yeah - first was this whole thing. At the beginning - it seemed like a fun, yet harmless ship. Both CQ and I saw few things on it, added our two cents, and just continued to observe the fun (at least for me - it just seemed like CQ was doing that too and she’s really chill). It even got to a point where I was trying to see how this ship would actually work. However - this ship kinda brought in a wave of misunderstanding. Which - I don’t know - I was okay with that for PJ since I knew/know that I’m not a popular blog or anyone important so it’s my own fault for not getting all of the info on PJ out there straight away. But for Fresh? I honestly felt like it was my own fault that people were not seeing him as the complex character he is. Gosh have you guys read MommaCQ By Alania? That, at this time, is the closest Fresh that is to the actual Fresh (ya know... without that whole parasite thing). I just felt horrible that Fresh was getting mischaracterized due to my character (who was also getting super misinterpreted). It felt like it was my fault for that whole thing - so I started to not like FreshPaper starting at the peak of all of that mess. Moving from an OTP to a ‘eh it’s okay!’. I am still dealing with this aftermath today. People are seriously getting shocked that Paper isn’t in a canon ship with Fresh. (Examples come from the Undertale AU Amino on quizzes others made on canon PJ [you guys rock for making those quizzes!]):

(still continuing from above)Yeah - these are actual responses to stuff in the quizzes. I also made a quiz in that Amino and majority of the people who have done it (8 at this time cause it’s brand new) did not have a score over 20 (top score is 124... by a user named Paperfresh which gosh that was funny to me! Kudos to you though!) 7 out of 8 couldn’t do it. People outside of Tumblr still think that Canon PJ is a nice, shy, and innocent little 17 year old. Which is far from the truth. Again - people need to understand the difference between AUs and Canon stories for OCs. And that plays a part into this whole thing.

Tossing any other ships that are not ‘just for fun’ under the bus/Tossing other users under the bus due to shipsNow this was the second wave of stuff that happened, and this happened right after Christmas of last year. Ever since I said “Oh yeah - This character named Omni (by Cereusblue)? PJ likes them. They are in a canon ship.” And gosh... you know what? Those Freshpaper shippers started to slowly ramp up their headcanons on their ship and tried to make it fact. Try to hide that PJ is in a different relationship with Omni than being in a ‘relationship with Fresh’. Let me first say that at first - it seemed like people who followed me were cool with this. From people who hate FreshPaper to loving FreshPaper. They were all cool with the idea that PJ wasn’t going to be with Fresh. OK! Awesomesauce!But then, I saw people complaining to Cereusblue and Askinfresh (an amazing Fresh RPer) about this - even calling them out (which by the way - Askinfresh had nothing to do with this so...?) and tossing them under a metaphorical bus for why their ship now cannot be canon. (which by the way - at this point CQ and I have stressed out enough times that it just won’t happen!)And eventually - there was one user that I have now blocked due to this - but I am going to go into detail about this, that made me just shut down on the whole topic of FreshPaper together. They were the straw on the camel’s back. And it hit right during the time I was trying to finish up my Masters. (fabulous timing there.)But gosh ok this story is long so just a warning:~~~So - I don’t know how it exactly started - but someone mentioned to me that this user (who honestly I loved and respected their work even though it was mostly FreshPaper stuff [and let me go ahead and say no - it’s not the first person you thought of]) was talking about me not only behind my back, but in a different language entirely. And they just kept saying on occasion on how I was the one who ruined FreshPaper, how I didn’t had the “kindness of being a multishipper” and that I was too blinded by this new ship OmniPJ to even notice how amazing Freshpaper is!And just... while this was translated by Google Translate for me - someone later on confirmed that the translation was pretty close to what they said...I just... I guess I snapped? But I took my time to respond to this, had others read it so then I had less of a chance to offend anyone - cause I HATE HATE HATE making other’s feel bad. And I just wanted to explain my side of the story - especially since this wasn’t the first time they tossed me under like that. And after that? What did they do?Cut PJ out of their story, blamed me for their action on that, and just - continued to draw without seeming like it hurt them even though they kept stating ‘how much they were hurt to even think about PJ’. ...DudeI broke down.I extended my hiatus at that time to “TBD”IT HURT me so MUCH to know that someone was SAD, or ANGRY, or just... so frustrated that they go to my face and say “well then I’m removing your character from my story” and then proceeding to put the blame on me when in fact that wasn’t what I was saying at all. I even replied to that comment and after that - I broke down and cried. And I hate to sound like I was exaggerating on this but - any of my close friends would be able to verify that this happened. I went to a table that I haven’t crawled under within a year - and laid there with a blanket, crying, until I just felt numb. It... kinda showed me that I wasn’t ready for any form of hate on the internet - where you kinda need to have a think skin in order to brush off hate. And while generic hate I was able to brush off until that moment - that.. THAT to me was like this:For a whole month, I panicked. I talked to friends on what I should do. Even after soft blocking and fully blocking their blog - I kept going back. Translating questions with the number 7 in them or with PJ in them to make sure they were not still angry about it... which then spiraled me down. I was afraid... afraid that a whole section of people who could only read and speak that language would see me as the devil’s advocate. Yep - I took the bait. And honestly that whole part of me feeling bad for a month was on me. That was entirely my fault. But... I guess this was the first personal attack I had received in my life - so I didn’t know how to handle it.~~~But now? I know better. I have taken that experience and will use what I had learned from it in a similar situation in the future (if that ever happens). Just... know that you will not please everyone even if you try your dang hardest at that. That was me learning that fully in action. However - due to knowing that discussing FreshPaper was behind all of that - and I didn’t want anyone to feel like that EVER - That’s why I took a stand and just said “nope. I am not going to discuss this ship anymore. I will not like any art of this ship (but know I still do appreciate it and some I bookmark cause it’s so good) but I just need to take this side and stand - not let any more confusion or miscommunication happen.”

And...well... that is the full story of how it became to be a topic I will not discuss again. It’s just do to all of these things piling up on one another until one thing just shattered me.

I honestly thought about deactivating back during that break down. I thought about keeping my blog up for archive reasons, and starting from scratch with a brand new username and not ever bring PJ back again. I thought about possibly only using Tumblr to stay connected with friends I made but never ever do another social media blog again.

But eh - I decided to keep going! I’m kinda persistent! Or Determined!

Anyway - this was the LONG LONG L O N G explanation of why I don’t answer any FreshPaper Questions. Just... it was due to bad situations and circumstances that just piled up on me until I just couldn’t look at the word “FreshPaper’ in any positive light.

BUT LET ME JUST SAY:

I am completely fine if you ship FreshPaper.

It’s 100% ok!

YOU ship what you WISH to ship! And being a multishipper - I see those Freshpaper ships as alternate timelines! All coexisting at the same time as the canon timeline.

Just - I wanted you all to know where I am coming from with this ship... and know why I don’t really like it. And sadly - it’s not even about the characters - it’s about the bad experiences within the fandom for me.

In the end, respect the canon stories that people made for their OCs - whether it’s for OTPs, NOTPs, and BROTPs,. Respect that people can see certain ships work and others not be able to work.

Let that whole ‘ship war’ thing die already and let’s create an area where people can discuss ships without the fear to be ridiculed, to be driven to insanity, to be harmed physically or mentally about what they ship or not ship.

And this has gone on long enough! ^^

If you read this far - thank you. And I hope that with seeing things from my perspective, it brought a new angle to this whole shipping thing. At least with the Freshpaper stuff o-oAgain - you can still ship Freshpaper! Go for it! You like it - draw it! Write it! Sing it! Just... make sure you respect those who don’t like it or can’t see why you ship it. And apply that mentality to any ship you have in any fandom! ^^

Hope you all have a fantastic day!

#faq #// long post #I am so sorry this turned out this long but.. I feel like all points needed to be in there #some will repeat over and over but that's due to how much I wanted to stress on them #and that story int the middle? I felt like people should see how #those things at a breaking point are for me from my perspective #getting more perspectives on situations helps others figure out what happened #and to bring their own conclusions to a situation #so yeah o-o #also did not want to say who that person was but I still have my responses to stuff on my blog #and yeah just... I feel like people are gonna first see that and go #oh my gosh did rouge did that? And I will say no #hence the 'no it's not who you first thought' part #sorry for this long mess of a post #Anonymous

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actuallyschizoid · 7 years

Note

Hi, thanks for your blog! I wanted to ask if you play anything. You said you have a good hearing or so, and I was thinking if it's possible for SZPD to be musicians? I used to play bass myself, and I'm SZ{D, but I'm not too good at it.

Someone asked me about music before, like in this post, and there could be more on my music tag. But I guess we can talk a bit about music again.

No, I don’t really play anything. I used to visit a children music school… something like three times, actually — around 7, then couple years later and… another couple years later (I’m not quite sure if there was actually third time applying there, though, or maybe I just took a long break from it). But each time I could only last for a few weeks before dropping it. So I literally remember nothing, and there wasn’t much to remember in first place coz it was just the basic stuff all over again.

Still, I do know a bit about music theory — I learned it much later (most of it not too long ago, actually). Not much, just some general stuff about scales, keys, chords, etc. Why? Well, because I find it curious sometimes. I like that system thing about sounds and human perception of it, etc.

Basically, I treat music just like any other language, poking on patterns and interconnections, finding correlations and dependencies, all that tension/resolution interplay and other not-too-obvious details about music.

On occasion I even toy a bit with composing. Of course, most of it is just messing around with whatever weird ass scale and rhythm I pick at random. It’s never meant to be heard by anyone but me, anyway. Most of the time it probably sounds like a poor parody on old anime tunes or whatever old dusty classic bits I heard before and forgot where it’s from. I don’t generally share this kind of stuff, but just to illustrate, here’s a tiny example:

https://instaud.io/Xiv

I tried to grab at least somewhat less-then-horrible bit of my resent massive piece of random noise, but yeah… (btw, if you happen to recognize any familiar pattern in it, I’d actually appreciate if you let me know coz my memory sucks at recalling sources)

Anyway, for whatever reason I had this tendency to come up with weird “music” ever since, like, grade school?.. Though people never believed I didn’t just heard it somewhere (which pissed me off sometimes) . >.> And mostly likely that’s exactly what I did — just not from a single source. I remember “composing” silly songs out of bits of whatever pop garbage was on repeat on tv/radio back then, which… actually, compared to the quality of what’s currently considered pop music in Russia, it probably wasn’t all that terrible. -_-’ Sometimes I have a subtile feeling it is, in fact, being composed by random toddlers nowadays. >.>

Now, the tricky part is… I don’t really play any instrument. Not even piano. If you give me a keyboard and say “play it”, that just won’t work. I might know how it could be played, but my fingers dexterity and skill is barely enough to play Mary has a little lamb or something. I don’t even own any kind of piano. There are couple dad’s old guitars collecting dust somewhere, but I literally have zero clue how to use those.

You might ask, how can I write anything if that’s the case? Well that’s pretty easy because there’s a free GarageBand app shipped with some of my apple devices. ^^’ It has this nice little mode that allows to just draw synthesia-like notes with either general laptop keyboard and even just by tapping on touchpad/iPad.

So yeah, tbh I don’t care enough to learn to play anything as long as I can still write down all those shitty tunes that boggles my mind whenever I feel like it. That being said, I don’t really know all that much about music in general and honestly I barely listen anything. I don’t even know which genre I prefer (tho know the ones I really dislike).

The only exception being some awesome musicians, mostly perfect-pitch ones, who just do really impressive stuff that doesn’t hurt my ears and which at least isn’t annoying to get stuck on when there’s nothing else to do. Lately I got a habit of listening to life improv streams on twitch, like those two.

Also I can’t listen to music while doing other stuff. Not sure how people manage to have music as a background while still being able to focus on something else. If there’s music, 99% of my focus will be stuck to it. Hence there’s almost never music unless that is exactly the effect I intend to achieve like in public places where I get annoyed a lot by the noises, voices and just general too many people around.

Now, the separate issue is that music is generally being tied to emotions. That’s probably part of the problem why I don’t feel all that strongly attached to music in first place. Though I think I got a bit better in this regard over last couple years. Not that I can actually feel things from music, but at least it’s no longer 9 out of 10 chance to just fall completely flat unless it’s over the top amazing and then it might be just enough to barely grab my attention.

Still, like in my tiny example above, I’m not even quite sure which emotional tone it has. If at all?.. Maybe, I dunno, some light curiosity/fascination mood? But I heard it before that music can help some schizoids (as well as autistic people and others who has alexythymia and similar oblivious-to-your-own-emotions issues) to get at least some feedback out of otherwise unreachable parts of sub/consciousness. Not quite sure if it actually works, but it might have some potential.

Oh, and now I scrolled up to (re-)read the rest of the question. >.> Hm… well, I don’t really think there’s anything stopping szpd people from being musicians. Other then, probably, disliking the very idea to play for other people, to be the center of attention, or having too strong emotional void trait to the point where music has no value. But that’s not the case for every schizoid, though no idea about you, anon.

Perhaps if you really feel like music is your thing, you could try what I’m talking about in this post — to just compose music instead of playing it. Most schizoids are good with patterns, and music is all about patterns. I’m pretty sure there are lots of schizoids among all those famous (and not so much) composers of the past and present. Maybe some performers with szpd also exist, especially among some alternative kinds of music that isn’t quite mainstream. Though I can’t think of many examples, but I don’t know personalities of all that many musicians.

Ok, I hope no one’s too surprised by now that I ended up writing a wall of text even on nearing a complete offtopic ask. >.> Srsly, you should get used to it by now if you follow me and read this. To make it at least a bit closer to the blog theme, feel free to add up if you have any specific thoughts about music in context of schizoidness or coping with szpd or whatever else.

#actuallyschizoid #szpd #music #emotions #schizoid

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i-just-really-like-ladies · 3 years

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Hey op, I saw your post about discovering you were autistic. Something similar is happening to me except I haven't gone for a diagnosis yet. Would it be okay for you to talk about how you knew?

For me there are things that...fit really well, that hit very close to home, but others not so, so Im not sure if whatever it is that I've got (because clearly, something is there.) I'm not very sure if the autistic spectrum can be so wide as for me to be included in it.

Any tips?

Of course, happy to help.

For me there were three kind of bigger indicators.

First, and after discussing this one with my therapist, it seems to be very consistent across autistic people: I've always felt different. Like I knew that I was at the very least slightly off in comparison to other people. (Please excuse the phrasing, I couldn't think of another way to put it properly).

Second, linked with the first: I have always experienced this thing I like to describe as 'not feeling like a real person'. All that really means is that I see the way other people are out laughing boldly with friends or joking or just straight up experiencing the world, and I think "man, I wish I could be a real person." And it always made me sad because I was consciously realising that I cannot and do not experience the world in the same way most neurotypical people do. It was just this huge feeling of otherness. (My therapist indicated that this is very common)

Third: masking. Now, this one made me feel bad for a really long time because I had no clue what was going on until my ex-girlfriend was like "oh, yeah, that's masking." For me, one of the biggest ways I mask is to copy mannerisms and speech patterns of people I'm around. I do it the most when I really like someone (friend like or romantically) or when a person makes me so extremely uncomfortable that I guess my brain is like "you need to mimic them for safety reasons." The reason this one bothered me so much is that I always felt like I just couldn't have my own personality, why was I always copying other people, surely they've all noticed and think I'm a fucking weirdo. It was very upsetting until I learned it was masking. Finding that out has helped me to accept it when I do it, even though I am trying to mask less.

So, those are the big three. There are lots of other minor things. I have ocd, which very commonly goes hand in hand with Autism. I got that need for rigid schedule and following the same patterns almost daily (slight variations are okay, but people planning stuff and not telling me when I've already set up my personal schedule for the day in my head, big no no). I eat the same foods on repeat and have an extremely difficult time changing it up. When I like food or dislike it, the primary reason is texture. (My fiance actually pointed this one out. Apparently I talk about the texture of food a ton).

I'm sure you've probably come across information about the emotionality of Autistic people. The common trope is that we are very emotionless. However, thats not accurate at all. There are two main big categories of where we can fall: tending to not feel emotions very strongly (the trope), and feeling emotions very intensely, more intensely than neurotypical society says is appropriate 🙄. I fall into this category, and I hate it because I have spent so much time trying to just not feel my emotions because they are so intense and my expression of them is 'inappropriate' that it has caused a great many mental health issues for me. So the eye roll face is because I think that the appropriate expression of emotion dictated by most of society is stupid. Along with this one, I have a hard time verbalizing and verbally identifying how I am feeling. As a result, I tend to just tell people I am upset. My therapist says this is somewhat common amongst Autistic individuals. I cannot recall the reasoning she gave for it being common, but I am including it because it was brought up in the process of discussing all this.

I also have this huge tendency to overexplain my reasons for things I've done or said because I do not want to be misunderstood/I have experienced misunderstanding so many times that I learned to do this at some point (I consider this to be part of my masking). This one seems to be pretty common, at least from tiktok. I've seen a lot of Autistic people on tiktok mention it.

Side note in relation to this but still relevant to the post imo, I hate that society tends to think you are lying the more detail you provide. I have a tendency to find all details absolutely vital. So when telling someone about what happened in a situation, I relay as much information as I can. Apparently, that means you are lying. It frustrates me a lot.

In that same vein, another thing my therapist said is fairly common: many Autistic people like to ask why continuously. Not as in just repeating "why," but rather that someone will say "I don't know" or provide an answer, but we often are still seeking a further reason. I've done this my entire life, and booooy does it aggravate people. For me it is just that I want to know the reasoning behind things. I want to know as much information as possible about the topic, and, as mentioned above, I tend to find every single detail absolutely important. That just leads to continuously asking why.

So another one for me, of which I am unsure the commonality: I have a very difficult time maintaining friendships unless I see someone most days of the week. I would say about 5 out of the 7 makes it the easiest for me, but it has worked out on less than that, rarely. The reason for this is that I forget to talk to people when I cannot physically see them. I mean, I just don't think about it for weeks on end. Then I will for a second, but won't message them because I'm doing something, and then forget about it again for ages. Part of this is that I prefer in person communication because I can try to read people's body language and facial expressions. The other part is tone of voice is more clear in person than via text. Now, this one bothered me when I was trying to figure out if I was autistic because it is common for Autistic people to not recognise facial cues and body language the same way as neurotypical people. Turns out, according to my testing results paperwork, i just have a higher ability to recognise facial expressions than most people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. So, I just vary a bit from the average.

Within this same vein is the commonly known 'eye contact issue'. The stereotype is that we cannot and do not make eye contact. This is so false. Many Autistic people do not make eye contact well, yes, but not all. For example, I do. I told one of my brothers I was getting tested for Autism and his response was, and I quote literally here, "I don't think you're Autistic because you make eye contact." What he didn't know is the reason why I make eye contact. I do it because I was taught repeatedly that it is how you show people you are listening. So, basically, I'm masking when I make eye contact because I'm solely doing it to show someone I am listening to them. In fact, 😆 I commonly am sitting there telling myself to make eye contact in order to indicate that I am present and interested in what the other person is saying. I also have a harder time masking this way when attempting to talk about things that are important and emotionally relevant to me. In therapy, I rarely make eye contact with my therapist because it is so difficult to talk about things in general that I cannot also make eye contact. Lastly, for this one, the more comfortable I am with someone, the less I make eye contact with them. My fiance, for example, not very common at all that I do it.

There is also the very common special interests phenomenon. The media tends to show this as a math or science thing, but it really isn't. I follow one tiktoker whose special interest is bugs and, I believe, art. I highly recommend her. Her handle is: soundoftheforest. For me, it's language/linguistics and ancient egypt, Greece and Rome. Really, I'd say ancient anywhere history, but those are the big three. Egypt has been my longest interest, besides language. I actually remember the moment I was like "this is it for life." I was 7 and had finished my library books but was bored at daycare. So I went to the book shelf and picked up a book about King Tut. It was the page I read about the day Howard Carter found the tomb. And I just knew me and Ancient Egypt were meant to be forever. As for language, I've literally always been fascinated by it. I started speaking very early and with more complex words than is usual. And I just continued to love language from there. I ended up studying ancient Greek and Latin in college. Also, I info dump about these all the time, almost anytime I possibly can because they're so fucking cool. 😁

Another side note, it is common for Autistic individuals to have delays in speaking, I just did not. It is not something required for the diagnosis. It is just very common.

This one is a little bit weird, and might just be a me thing, but I've discussed it with my therapist. She indicated that it very much aligns with Autism. I cannot, or can but with extreme apprehension and knowledge that I will leave depressed; I simply cannot go into buildings of certain lighting, age, and design. It seems to be buildings that look and/or feel like they were built in the 1960s or 1970s. We haven't really figured out why that is a thing, but it is. I once didn't bother to finish applying for a job to teach Latin that I'd basically been guaranteed so long as I sent in the app because when I went for the interview I saw the building and knew I could not teach there, even part time, because the building would depress me constantly. It's a weird one, but if you have anything at all where you just cannot do it because you know it will affect you like this, I'd bring it up in discussing potentially being Autistic.

I nearly forgot to mention this one, but you've probably heard about the sensory issues that many Autistic people deal with. I have some with touching things, but it is less common an issue for me than my sound sensitivity issues. I am very sensitive to sound. If I had to give a 4th big reason, this would be it because I get overstimulated and overwhelmed by sound multiple times a day. Its rough. If you also have this issue, I cannot recommend enough noise cancelling headphones and chew stim toys when you don't have your headphones. It's really helpful.

This last one I'm going to mention is something that I think I do just to help prevent burnout from masking, but is also part of me specifically. I am an introvert. So that plays a role in this. I spend the vast majority of my time completely by myself. I do mean even when at home with my fiance. We are often in different rooms. I have no problem with it. It doesn't feel like it is bad for our relationship, thankfully. I just prefer to be alone most of the time. The more time I spend around people, the more time afterwards I need alone. That is partially my introvertedness but also me needing to because I am socially exhausted from masking and trying to read all the social cues and not make weird errors when in social settings 😳, which I do a lot. I think I just default to spending time by myself when I am not required to engage with people in order to ensure that I can later. Plus, in discussing this one with my therapist, we concluded that I do this at least in part to prevent burnout and overstimulation.

As for the testing itself. I discussed this with my therapist for a while when waiting to get tested, and by the time I did get tested, I had a nice long list of stuff to bring up. I would definitely recommend compiling a list of the symptoms/signs you feel are indicative for yourself. It was very quick after I first brought it up in therapy that I decided I needed the official diagnosis for myself. So my therapist gave me recommendations of who to see. I also looked myself because the recommended people were so booked they couldn't even schedule further out. Once I got it scheduled, I had to wait like 3 months for the appointments. So, if you are seeking the official diagnosis, don't give up because it's a long wait. From what I've seen others saying, it's pretty common to have to wait a bit to be seen.

There were 3 appointments, an intake, a testing, and a feedback appointment. The intake appointment involved me talking to the doctor about my experiences and why I thought I might be autistic. She asked me a few questions about the more commonly known signs of autism if I did not mention them. The testing appointment took about 4 hours and involved a self report personality assessment, several verbal and memory activities, a teaching activity, two story telling/creating activities, and (the part I thought was most difficult) an activity in which I had to identify the emotion being expressed by just the eye and eyebrow area of black and white photos of people. I also had a take home assessment for someone who knew me really well. It was related to executive functioning abilities and emotional regulation abilities. I cannot speak on the feedback appointment because of technical issues resulting in not actually having that appointment. I have rescheduled it and will be doing that later this month.

If you have anything more specific you want to ask me about, please do. I am happy to answer.

#autistic #autistic adult #autism spectrum #autism #autism diagnosis #i am autistic #therapy #autism testing #anon #anonymous

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