On Making Your Own, #2: Friends
It doesn’t matter how strange you are. The human race is very large, and there are people out there who are like you and who will like you.
The real question is not whether they are out there, but how to find them. I’ve long asserted that publication of erotica is not just about expression, but association, a means of forming part of civil society and overcoming personal loneliness. I have yet to tire of enlarging on this point.
Publishing erotic art of whatever kind is actually a pretty good way to find them, especially if you’re weird. It’s unfortunate, but for the most part we live in a society not terribly friendly to kink, and so frank expressions of unusual turn-ons are likely to get you into trouble. But if you can put yourself on the line and manage to get the fantasies out of your head, you are doing two things simultaneously. You are making a friendly gesture and providing a bit of happiness to people who are like you, and you are also identifying yourself as someone they would like to talk to. You are reaching out to people and showing them that they are not alone, and that you are committed to a common interest by having put in time, effort, and resources, to something that will make them happy. Many great friendships have started over less.
(It is also possible that if you identify yourself as interested in something that you’ll find people who want to play with you. In candor I cannot speak to this possibility all that directly myself if only because the thing I’m into can’t — or shouldn’t — be realized in real life. Your situation might be different, because there is a galaxy of things that you can be into — and it can be anything from an interest in exotic edible oils to speaking Russian in bed to re-enacting scenes from Stephen Douglas’s Slaveworld stories — that you can realize with the right partners. And if that’s the case, awesome! I hope you get together with like-minded people and have a blast. Although if you do want to go the Slaveworld route, please make sure to keep it safe, sane, and consensual.)
Also worth nothing is that there are lots of people out there who not only have common interests with you, but who will be interested in being creative partners, and that too is a rewarding form of friendship. If you’re a writer you will want to find artists and vice versa, and working together with the right sort of people you can experience a form of mutual enrichment.
When you publish, you show the world your individuality. Not the phony simulacrum of “individuality” you get through social networking sites, where you check the boxes as to what cheesy pop-cultural phenomena you “like.” You are rather putting something unique into the world, something that’s not just a formula for the convenience of corporate marketers. Remember that your friends aren’t internet persons who “friend” you. They’re people who really care about who you are.
So assert that you are human. Create!
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“It doesn’t matter how strange you are. The human race is very large, and there are people out there who are like you and who will like you.”
“All I want is someone who’ll shit on my face, but even when I find someone who’ll do it, they just aren’t my type.”- the unhappy coprophiliac, according to J.R. Ackerley.
LOL, Roger. Though I cannot help but note that Ackerley was writing in a pre-Internet age.
Publishing erotica to a community can be an amazing way to find you aren’t alone in your weirdest kinks. I write erotic fanfiction, and when I finally got the nerve to write about my most deeply-held secret kink (which I didn’t even publish under my regular handle I was so nervous about it) I got a big positive response.
I think we tend to feel that our most intense kinks are the most strange and shameful. I’ve written a story that was essentially thanatophilia, and it’s one that I sometimes send to my real life friends when they ask about my writing — because it’s not my kink. I think it’s a pretty hot story and it was intense to write, but I don’t feel like a freak for having written it because it’s not part of my identity. Contrast this with my inflation kink story that I was unwilling to associate with the pen name that I write tons of other kinky porn under, that none of my real life friends or partners are allowed to know. Because I’ve held the secret so close for my whole life, kept it from all my sex partners however “kinky” they were, the secrecy itself has become a huge, looming thing. Reading responses to that story, especially from my friends in my writing community who didn’t know it was me, was incredibly comforting. Successfully selling people on a weird variation of the kink that I couldn’t even name… cathartic. Freeing. I’m still not about to admit it to real life partners, and some aspects I kink on are impossible to enact, but I feel more at peace with myself.
P.S. I’m a woman and my entire writing community are also women. I can report that women are, in fact, kinky as fuck, and some are hard core fetishists.
Talking about finding others with similar desires is a bit different than talking about others who are the object of your desires, who you happen to luckily be the object of your desires. Another decent looking, healthy 55 year old male virgin who also desires young Asian girls would indeed be someone who I might enjoy speaking with and becoming friends with. But…
@Extra: I would venture to say that just about 51% of the population is kinky as all get out. What’s that you say, women make up 51% of the world’s population? well, I never :)
I’m into stuff, my partner is into stuff, sometimes it overlaps, sometimes it doesn’t, working out what to do to each other and when/how can be a fun dinner conversation. I’m lucky to have found someone at least willing to talk about otherwise taboo subjects. Thank the good lord/universe for women with big brains.
“Talking about finding others with similar desires is a bit different than talking about others who are the object of your desires… Another decent looking, healthy 55 year old male virgin who also desires young Asian girls would indeed be someone who I might enjoy speaking with and becoming friends with. But…”
I know, it’s so sad that no Asian girls ever read erotica! Ever! /sarcasm
(TBH, maybe fetishizing their ethnicity puts them off?)
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