For a lot of people, asking someone to do something sexual with you can be an intensely vulnerable experience. Many of us have had it reinforced over and over that our worth, our purpose, is all tied up in being sexually desirable/desired. This can make the stakes feel much, much higher than they actually are when you ask for consent.
For some people, asking for consent feels like asking someone their opinion of your inherent desirability and maybe even your worth. Rejection of an activity can feel like a rejection of your entire self.
This is a problem. It’s not healthy for your entire relationship to be on the line every time you ask someone for sex. You need and deserve to be secure in your own desirability and worth without relying on the unpredictable sexual urges of other people to maintain that security. Your partners need and deserve the space to say “no” freely and without emotional pressure.
Rationally, you probably know that what makes sexual desire happen is complicated and that someone not wanting sex isn’t a punishment or an attack – it’s your emotional response that doesn’t have that memo. When it feels like “no” is a violent dismissal of your entire being, not just a refusal to do something specific, it’s really important to acknowledge those feelings and also realize that they’re not an accurate reflection of reality.
Plan ahead of time how you can work through these feelings without making your partner feel punished or obligated to change their mind. If you have a regular partner, it might be good to let them know about your insecurities and how you plan to handle your response, so they know, for instance, that if you need to go for a walk or take some alone time, you’re not punishing them and you don’t want them to change their mind to placate you – that you know it’s your responsibility to work through your feelings and that you’ve got it handled.
You can also preempt some of these insecurities by working on finding other ways to feel good about your body or to feel close and connected to another person in a way they do freely consent to.
The most important thing is to consistently reinforce your desire to hear an honest answer, even though sometimes you have an emotional response that may be uncomfortable, and to not treat those uncomfortable feelings as a crisis that your partner must handle.
They need to hear and see from your consistent actions that it’s not their job to to agree to anything they don’t want just to keep you from having bad feelings. And that even when “No” feels bad for you, you’d rather hear it and respect it, and deal with your feelings yourself, than do something sexually that they’re not interested in. Without this groundwork, it’s easy to make someone feel obligated to agree to unwanted sex, maybe without realizing that’s what you’re doing.
It is possible to work through this fear and make it less scary to hear “no”. It starts with accepting that “no” is going to happen sometimes and figuring out how you can take care of yourself and your partner when “no” hurts.
Day: August 24, 2018
Antonio Pirrello’s gasoline-powered roller skates. Made by Antonio Pirrello in 1956, these skates feature a 19-pound gasoline motor that is worn like a backpack. The gas connects to the right skate to push while the skater holds his left foot out in front to steer. A second cable connects to the hand-held clutch to regulate speed: quite a lot of speed. These skates can roll at up to 40 miles-per-hour! Mr. Pirrello and his motorized skates were featured in the magazines Life and Popular Mechanics and were guests on You Asked for It and The Today Show.
No offense but can ya’ll like also normalize trans guys that DON’T bind. Like there’s guys who don’t want to, choose not to because of the risks, and guys who CAN’T because of medical reasons. Not every Trans dude is wearing a binder 24/7 and some don’t ever.
… also i know its just hyperbole but literally no one should be wearing a binder 24/7. even guys who bind will have times they are *not* binding.
for any number of reasons: its hot (binders in the heat? worse than bras), they’ve already worn it for 8+ hours that day, they are in the privacy of their own home, they just woke up, they’re doing laundry, they just plain can’t be arsed because binding is a pain in the ass even as it helps…
and then yeah, all of what OP says, too. (another demographic: too big to bind, or too small to bother)
“Did these people [in academia who claim that they are not exposed to disabled people] realize that when they encountered the work of Rosa Luxemburg (who limped), Antonio Gramsci (a crippled, dwarfed hunchback), John Milton (blind), Alexander Pope (dwarfed hunchback), George Gordon Brown (club foot), [Jorge] Luis Borges, James Joyce, and James Thurber (all blind), Harriet Martineau (deaf), Toulouse-Lautrec (spinal deformity), Frida Kahlo (osteomyelitis), Virginia Woolf (lupus), they were meeting people with disabilities? Do filmgoers realize when they watch the films of James Ford, Raoul Walsh, André de Toth, Nicholas Ray, Tay Garnett and William Wyler that these directors were all physically impaired? Why is it when one looks these figures in dictionaries of biography or encyclopedias that their physical disabilities are usually not mentioned – unless the disability is seen as related to creativity, as in the case of the blind bard Milton or the deaf Beethoven? There is an ableist notion at work here that anyone who creates a canonical work must be physically able. Likewise, why do we not know that Helen Keller was a socialist, a member of the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World, and an advocate of free love? We assume that our ‘official’ mascots of disability are nothing else but their disability.”
— Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (via irwonder)
From someone else, elsenet:
I do not want you to punch a Nazi on my behalf.
I want you to include Jews in your activism.
When solidarity is expected from Jews but not offered to us, speak up.
When Jews are left off the lists of people who are threatened, add us.
When bomb threats against Jewish institutions are taken lightly by progressives, take them seriously.
When Jewishness is equated with whiteness to dismiss us, educate your peers.
When activist event planners ignore Shabbat or Jewish holidays, remind them.
When criticism of Israel becomes Jew-hatred, step in.
When Jewish deaths are considered justifiable, grieve with us.
When Jewish contributions to activism are erased, amplify them.
When Jewish ideas or concepts are appropriated, point it out.
When Jews are silenced in your community, make room for us.
When Nazis see that activists don’t care about Jews, they know that we are a safe target. Don’t let that happen.
“A former government contractor who pleaded guilty to mailing a classified U.S. report to a news organization was sentenced to more than five years Thursday as part of a deal with prosecutors, who called it the longest sentence ever imposed for a federal crime involving leaks to the media. Reality Winner, 26, pleaded guilty in June to a single count of transmitting national security information. The former Air Force translator worked as a contractor at a National Security Agency’s office in Augusta, Georgia, when she printed a classified report and left the building with it tucked into her pantyhose. Winner told the FBI she mailed the document to an online news outlet. In court Thursday, Winner apologized and acknowledged that what she did was wrong. Authorities never identified the news organization. But the Justice Department announced Winner’s June 2017 arrest the same day The Intercept reported on a secret NSA document. It detailed Russian government efforts to penetrate a Florida-based supplier of voting software and the accounts of election officials ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The NSA report was dated May 5, the same as the document Winner had leaked. U.S. intelligence agencies later confirmed Russian meddling.”
— Reality Winner, Who Leaked A Secret Report On Russian Hacking, Gets 5 Years – Talking Points Memo
An elections board decided not to close all but 2 polling places in a majority-black county in Georgia
Hey millenials we have some more brands to kill.
Ah, dammit all. Corona is by far my favorite beer, and I don’t know of anything similar to it
“Not all toxic people are cruel and uncaring. Some of them love us dearly. Many of them have good intentions. Most are simply toxic to our being simply because their needs and way of existing force us to compromise ourselves and our happiness. They aren’t inherently bad people, but they aren’t the right people for us”
— Daniell Koepke
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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