Miscellaneous musings on sexuality #1 (Mature/NSFW/Adult)

Miscellaneous musings on sexuality #1
@lychee writes stuff - blog post #9
Accompanying listening music: Beautiful Sorrow | Relaxing Atmosphere Created In Blender


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It seems that I'm flying with blog posts these past two days! Haru is on vacation (in Iceland!), so I'm home alone. Perhaps this has led to me feeling more needy and clingy than usual?

In my Five Love Languages test, physical intimacy (read: hugs & touch) is my second highest score (after quality time). Consequently, I feel like I am more scatterbrained than usual with an empty bed. These days, it's increasingly hard for me to imagine how we previously survived four years in a long distance relationship.

Just earlier, I read a really powerful autobiographical manga called My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Nagata Kabi. It won the Harvey Award for the Best Manga of 2018 and the author narrates her 28-year-old experiences through mental illness (e.g. eating disorder, depression), severe loneliness, struggling through being a NEET, her difficulty with her parents, as well as its intersectionality with a belated exploration of her sexuality.

I connected to it through a dozen different levels even though I'm not lesbian or a NEET, but a lot of the things that she puts beautifully into pictures is powerfully relatable if you're strugglebussing in life in any fashion. I highly recommend it regardless of your gender or background or life experiences!

In my honest opinion, the author is a really incredible person and she really deserves a hug. If you like reading any of my blog posts, Nagata-san's manga has an introspective-like atmosphere very similar to the type of essay-blogs I make. She's bluntly honest and genuine with her feelings and telling her story. There's a lot that somebody can learn from her.

The first standalone volume is only five chapters, so it's very manageable to read even if you're busy!

• Original: The Private Report on My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness (5 chapters)
• Sequel: My Solo Exchange Diary (2 volumes so far)

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So I should stop right here and say before proceeding any further that this blog post is intended for mature audiences only. That said, it's not really lewd, so you're not going to find any hentai or smut here. However, if you can't talk about a penis without feeling uncomfortable, you're probably not ready to be here.

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I've wanted to do a series on sexuality using @lychee for quite some time now, but I've always hesitated because it's such an enormous beast of a topic to even broach and deconstruct. Furthermore, most cultures assign a degree of taboo to female sexuality, and it has a high degree of erasure even in free-speech online spaces where male sexuality runs rampant (e.g. 4chan, Internet memes, porn/hentai, or even anime fanservice).

Lastly, I feel like I'm barely qualified to even write substantively on this subject. Although I've talked to a lot of people (of both genders!) privately on this subject, I've been wrestling with my own sexuality and sexual expression for more than a decade, and it feels like I've barely made headway into the that thick murky cloud that I barely understand for myself.

Regardless of how we put it, our bodies have innate desires and interests.

For a lot of us, we live in a cultural environment where it feels like having any kind of desire can be wrong or immoral. In my honest opinion, the result of that kind of puritan atmosphere is that many of us explore our sexual expression in very roundabout ways.

The classic example that I think most readers can instantly understand is boys love or yaoi -- or specifically in my case, how it is suddenly okay to read something explicit and hardcore in one particular medium or setting, but not another. For many women, I think it is very common for female sexuality to be subconsciously bent in very funky odd convoluted ways because of the baggage and unique complexes ("weird shit" -- using the words of an article I once read) that each of us have.

It's not necessarily a bad thing — it just means I think most women are especially diverse with respect to sexuality, due to the cultural norms of being female in most contemporary societies.

Most of us probably aren't anywhere to close to the same, although a number of us might be similar.

And if it feels like you're a freak unicorn alone out there with some zebra sexuality, that is totally normal.

TBH, I think most of us have something that we're hiding in our closets anyways.

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It's sort of inevitable that talking about something like this would be rather awkward.

TBH, all of a sudden I'm hesitant to even begin...

I mean, I guess I can start with the relatively uncontroversial things.

First off, I often get the thought in my brain that sexuality feels wrong.

I was never the kind of person who was open about their sexuality growing up. I always associated it with something that was considered a bad thing. My parents (and grandparents) engrained it in me as a bad thing, particularly since honestly I discovered it at a really young age.

My family isn't religious in any way, and they don't have any issue with premarital sex, but somehow nonetheless I grew up with the sense that sexuality was something to be ashamed of.

I was definitely the kind of child who wanted to please my parents, and I wasn't rebellious in any way.

Consequently, it was very easy to slip into the mold of exactly the kind of person they wanted me to be.

I was really chaste I guess? While I certainly knew that porn existed, I never went looking for lewd pictures or videos until almost the end of my university years. Apparently, I hear from many of my friends(?) that it's common for girls as well as guys to watch porn, but somehow I missed out entirely on that.

I mean, nominally speaking, you might get the impression that I was a really pure and innocent person.

I've only had one sexual partner in my lifetime (Haru), as well as only one person I've ever kissed, and given that we'll probably be engaged before the end of the year, it would be the same person as who I marry.

First impressions are very useful, but you would be totally wrong on the pure and innocent part.

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Recently, @userunfriendly called me out on one of my polls for being a perv.

I spend a lot of effort curating and protecting my public image, and those of you familiar with @yuzuki would get the sense that she has a very refined and mature and elegant atmosphere — which is fairly artificial in many regards, yet also quite close to the type of person that I actually am in real life.

On the other hand, @lychee is sort of like the shameless trash can version of me.

I think for a couple years, I had set @lychee's title to: [- you're all perverted -]

But really that's also a jab at the fact that I do think about lewd things quite a bit.

I don't really consider myself pure or innocent even the slightest.

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The truth is that I read a lotttttt of lewd stories.

Do not underestimate the lychee!

I read so many that I can't remember most of them.

In fact, I've even translated a horribly obscene and badly written smut novel that is on NU — the title of which I am never sharing with anyone!!!

I may not be a very visual person, but most of my lewdity comes from reading text and my imagination.

It's pretty common for me to read something pretty late into the night when everyone else is asleep.

I think it's really the only time that I'm ever lewd, because I always shared a room growing up and I never really had my own privacy. Additionally, my parents were the very overprotective type who monitored my email, social media, and the type of places I visited on the Internet. I definitely wasn't going to do anything suspicious with someone constantly watching over my shoulder.

One of the first erotic stories I accidentally stumbled across online was a bondage-related one, and I think I must have re-read it dozens of times growing up. Additionally, I read most of my mom's romance novels too, and many of them had an abduction plot. Ironically, you could say that you can blame my mom for the tastes that I developed. I've never spoken to her about it, and I don't quite intend to, but it would be kinda weird if we actually secretly had similar tastes in a vague sense.

I'll spend another post taking about this fetish, because there's a lot to unpack here (I had an *enormous* amount of shame about it for YEARS!), and it wasn't until after I was in college when 50 Shades of Grey came out, making it sort of "normal and mainstream" to be interested in BDSM.

Later on, I might also talk about slash fics and BL, but those actually appeared way later in my life because I didn't start reading explicit yaoi manga until quite late. By that point, I was already well swamped with my fics, but I think there's a good amount of content in them too!

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There are two more things I want to touch on before concluding this blog post.

The first, is that just because I like reading lewd stories doesn't mean that I have a high libido.

There was a conversation about this in my personal group PM, and actually my libido is really quite low. While I don't consider myself asexual ("ace") or a gray-asexual, I have many friends who are — and that doesn't mean that they don't read lewd stories.

Plenty of aces love lewd stuff — but they're not interested in having sex themselves.

That is normal and that is a thing!

I actually once had a friend who did really intense hardcore R18 roleplays but was completely disinterested in sex/masturbation/etc. Really, she just only enjoyed the roleplaying.

Conversely, sex isn't really about lewdity either! Coming as a person who has been dating for a long time, in my view, sex is more about intimacy and connection and communication than straight up about pleasure. They are quite different things, at least in my eye! Sometimes, they might overlap, but in other aspects they won't!

The second thing (mostly for the dudes out there reading this), female sexuality isn't this glorious mythical holy grail legendary pokemon thing.

I often get this impression that there's this idea that female sexuality is a really sexy mysterious thing, kind of like this:

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But really what I want emphasize is that it's really quite normal.

Guys masturbate.

Girls masturbate.

There's nothing so magical or mystical about it.

It happens and we move on with our lives. It's nothing to make a big deal out of. This is a part of human biology, and part of the point of this planned blog series is to help reduce the taboo about it.

Over the years I've been online, I almost always come out feeling relieved when I somehow have a conversation about sexuality with a peer, because it often turns out that I'm not as much of a freaky sexual deviant that I thought I was when I was younger.

—Thank god for yaoi and BL (and fanfiction), because without it I probably wouldn't be writing this today.

While each of us may hold it privately as something we never talk about, each of us will go on to live perfectly normal and fulfilling lives outside of our bedrooms.

What happens inside, isn't something to be ashamed of.

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