Overlooked Gems

(Not to oversell the case, but...)

In the course of porting my blog to a SFW Mirror, I've been looking back through the history of this blog, and I've come across some (actually, lots of) unposted drafts that may be of interest. Some of them are indeed a jumble of unfinished thoughts, but others appear to be more or less ready for publication. Perhaps I intended to revise them at a later date and simply forgot, or wanted to add further thoughts that I never got around to formulating. Some of them lack satisfying concluding paragraphs. Others may have been held back due to the inclusion of sensitive topics, or to spare the target of my frustrations. But they are well-written articulations of my thoughts, and I think they deserve to be read, at least as much as anything else I've published on this blog. I've backdated them to the time of their writing (as everything I write is a product of my thought processes at the time I put them down), but since I don't want them to be completely overlooked, I'm providing links here. These posts are listed in reverse chronological order (getting older as you go down the list), with entries from nearly every year going back to within a year of the blog's start.

Exhibitionism al Dente

From about a year and a half ago, this essay is a crystallization of my frustrations dealing with "the nudist community" online (especially on Twitter and Reddit), with their overly judgmental, sex-negative attitudes. It's rather long, and while I was trying to write it in an academic style, maybe it comes off as being overwrought (it didn't test well). In any case, it has some good points to make.

Fixation

This is a short treatise on the side-effects of body acceptance, and what happens when tolerance of diversity turns around and begins to discriminate against what is (or used to be) popular. It's not a very PC perspective these days, but it's one that I stand behind (and reflects the foundational principle of this blog, which is being truthful about what you find beautiful).

Social Nudity and Consent

This post is a bit long, and lacks a satisfying conclusion, but it's a good discussion of a controversial subject that bothers me, relating to some nudists' assertion that you must acquire a person's consent before appearing before them unclothed. Personally, I think that makes nudity sound like a sex act, which is counter to the nudist ethos, but I have more to say at the link.

Closing the Season

Wistful ruminations on a season of social nudism ending leads to another discussion about the controversial subject of finding nudity (especially that of young bodies) visually appealing, and how that conflicts with the pristine public image of nudism.

Naked Public Dares

I no doubt withheld this post originally because I had less than nice things to say about the type of "nudist exhibitionist" who is preoccupied with sharing pictures of him/herself, despite not being the sort of person others typically want to see naked. I wasn't trying to be mean, I was just trying to be honest with my feelings - not solely as an exhibitionist, but as an aesthetic artist. I'm posting it now, since the original link is dead, providing some measure of distance from the target(s) of my comments.

Sexual Safety vs. Sexual Liberty

I've probably articulated this opinion elsewhere, but this is a pretty good writeup of my frustrations with so-called "sex-positive feminism", which in my opinion often seems to be more sex-negative than I'd like.

Outfit of the Day (#ootd)

This was a simple #ootd (outfit of the day) post that turned into a long ramble about the frustrations of fashion while being transgender. I had to go through and parse it into paragraphs to make it readable.

Sex-Positive Education

This is, I believe, a solid post about sex education in the context of teaching your kids from a sex-positive perspective. Teaching kids about sex is an incredibly controversial subject, all the more so when what you're suggesting they learn is positive things and not the usual scare tactics. Which is unfortunate, because it's a critically important subject, and kids are left vulnerable to being harmed in any number of ways when they don't get the right messages from the right people at the right times in their lives.

Let's Talk About Pubic Hair

Pubic hair grooming habits are a weirdly controversial subject, but they're also highly particular. I have preferences, but my opinion is that "to each their own". That's probably why I never published this post. But in hindsight, I guess it doesn't hurt for me to weigh in on the debate. Also, I feel like lots of hate is thrown toward both ends of the spectrum - "smooth" and "bushy" - with the ubiquitous "landing strip" being accepted as the norm, while my opinion is the opposite: I think the landing strip looks ridiculous, and I'd prefer either extreme to it.

Freedom and Anarchy

This is a pretty fascinating stream of consciousness that starts with me considering my position on the legality of public nudity and then detours into a thought experiment on progressivism that explores the limits of freedom and the righteousness of imperialism. It doesn't really end up anywhere in particular, but it's quite good (if I may say so myself) while it's going.

Try A Little Tenderness & Revenging

Being sex-positive often entails becoming the devil's advocate, because the anti-sex crowd (I like to call it "the forces of chastity", after the tagline to the movie about Kinsey) will use any means to drive a wedge into our sexual freedoms. Nobody wants to be seen as the bad guy, but we have to be vigilant every time our freedoms are curtailed, or pretty soon we'll find that we have none left. "Revenge porn" was apparently in vogue in 2015, and I never dove fully into the subject at the time due to its sensitive nature. I understand that not everybody thinks the way that I do, but the very concept of "revenge porn" bothers me precisely because porn can only be used as blackmail if you're ashamed of it, and porn isn't something we should be ashamed of. So, instead of giving prudes more ammunition against porn, we can render revenge porn completely powerless by doing something we should already be doing anyway - accepting and acknowledging our sexual natures.

The "Social Psychology" of Sexting

A short reply to an article on sexting, which straddles the line between making the mistake that everybody makes - assuming there's something wrong with sexting to begin with - and focusing on the real problem, which is the violation of privacy that occurs when those photos are hacked.

Both Sides Now

Dunno why this one never got posted - it's a quite good exploration of the phenomenon of being a model and an exhibitionist, and the value of receiving sexual compliments from people you aren't necessarily going to be reciprocally attracted to. Something I remember writing about (again) just a couple years ago.

Realest Tumblr Posts About Being A Woman

I would hazard a guess that I refrained from posting this due to concerns over expressing an opinion about "being a woman" (considering that I wasn't born one), but to hell with that. I'm entitled to my own opinions, too. Sadly, though the original article is available, all the linked posts (which include the relevant quotes) are gone (remember Tumblr? Me neither, lol), so you'll just have to guess what they said via the context of my replies. In fact, it adds a little mystery!

The Recurring Problem of Sexualizing Nudism

This is a fairly long treatise on the popular problem of people sexualizing nudism (and why I think nudists make more of it than they should - which is to say that, people should be allowed to fantasize about nudism in a sexual context, as long as there are nudists around to remind people that this fantasy does not reflect reality). It kind of fizzles out at the end, but I've appended an additional snippet from another draft that dovetails amazingly well with where the first discussion ended up.

Fantasy vs. Desire

I have no desire to pretend that I don't have dark sexual fantasies sometimes - although in truth it's not a place I go to frequently. Still, there is an inherent vulnerability in admitting that. I have no idea what the fantasy was that inspired this post, all these years later, and actually, I think it's better that way. It's important that we don't become defined by the most extreme limits our imaginations permit themselves to go to.

A Brief Guide to Slut-Shaming

This is a short exploration of different examples of varying degrees of slut-shaming. I'm not generally in favor of the use of trigger warnings, but if you're sensitive to the topic of sexual abuse, you might want to avoid this post. If, however, you don't take it seriously, I think it's actually a little humorous, in a darkly comedic way.

Correlating Homophobia with Transphobia

This post explores an observation I've had about the correlation between homophobia and transphobia, as a result of the confusion between sex, gender, and orientation. It ends with a humorous scenario that I think perfectly illustrates the point.

Business and Pleasure

This is a pretty interesting hypothetical discussion about doing porn - in a more professional sense than I've done (although I think the standards are changing, in this post-OnlyFans world - and that's a good thing). Few things annoy me more than when pundits and their puppets cite the problems in The Industry (r) and use it to stain the very medium of sexual expression on the whole. Like as if porn is a unique case and it's not the very soul of capitalism that's "degrading". I support reform over abolition.

National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month

Teen pregnancy is one of those weird issues, where I kinda agree it's not a great idea (but it's not always a bad idea, either), but methods and approaches toward the issue are either muddled or completely misguided. At the end of the day, it's a choice a person has to make for themself, whether we agree with it or not. But apart from pretending we know what's best for another person, the emphasis needs to be on education and making contraception more widely available. The worst threat in the "problem" of teen pregnancy isn't teens having sex, it's religious conservatives getting in the way of teens 1) having access to contraception, and 2) learning to appreciate it.

Shit Girls Say About Sex

This is a reactionary piece to a magazine article I read that's designed to function as sex education for teens (specifically, girls). Actually, it wasn't a bad article, but I'm fond of niggling over minor details (and I apparently had a lot to say about contraception, peer pressure, and the institution of virginity). In re-reading the post, I thought that it was unfinished, but I dug out the article in question, and it's actually shorter than I imagined.

Chastity as Purity

I can see how this post could be read as sour grapes over an actress refusing to appear topless in a movie, but really, it's about our attitudes to nudity and how we treat people who show off their bodies. I don't want anyone to feel pressure to do anything they're uncomfortable with, but if there's a role that provides an opportunity for nudity, and you come in and change that role, then you're taking that opportunity away from other people who could have appreciated doing it the way it was intended.

Guilty of Perversion

Yet another treatise on nudism and sexuality, and the psychological harm that nudism's appeal to sexual purity does amidst a wider culture that stigmatizes and shames people for their sexual feelings. It's weird, and a little disheartening, to read me complaining about the same things ten years ago, knowing that nothing significant has changed (other than my own confidence, I guess). So if I get a little frustrated sometimes, you'll have to forgive me.

Awakening

This is another discussion of sex education and teen sex, but from the novel approach of my own youthful experiences. I will never forget the feeling of lying naked in bed with my girlfriend as a teenager in high school, and thinking, "what is so broken in this world, that this experience which is so beautiful" - and we weren't even technically having sex! - "is treated so harshly and with so much fear?"

Death Sound Blues

As an unconventional thinker, and someone who's fascinated with the topic of sexual desire, sometimes I like to perform thought experiments about socially-reprehensible fetishes, in an attempt to discover whether it is possible (and ethical) for persons who discover that they have these fetishes - through no choice of their own - to 1) have a positive self-concept (I'm already convinced that having such a fetish doesn't short-circuit one's humanity), and 2) attain sexual satisfaction (whether or not that's limited to one's fantasy life alone). It's easy to think of problematic fetishists as some scary other that's better off not existing, but is it really fair to say that there are some people whose lives simply don't matter? God forbid you should ever find yourself in that position, but what can we learn by exploring what that might be like? I just think that's a better approach than knee-jerk condemnation. I don't always feel comfortable sharing these thought experiments (for obvious reasons), but I thought this one was exceptionally well written - it really commits to its premise. I only wish it had kept on going, instead of ending abruptly (I don't know, ultimately, where I was headed, or if there was really anywhere to go). And I know it's up to you to decide whether you trust me or not, but as a disclaimer, I want to state unequivocally that I do not experience any necrophiliac tendencies. This is all purely hypothetical.

Obscenity (noun)

This post may be a little rough, but it's a fairly decent point-by-point takedown of the Miller Test which is used to identify obscenity, a bizarre legal concept that singularly discriminates against sexual expression, and is as unconstitutional as it is inexplicably tolerated by both the government and the public alike.

Sex as Rebellion

It's hard to talk about sex openly when you fear people making snap judgments - especially in the realm of fantasy where the imagination thrills to wander. In this post I explore the appeal of transgressing taboos, and the distinction between fantasy and reality, inspired by comments I saw while browsing photos on flickr.

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Damn! There were a lot more than I anticipated. It was fun going back through these unposted drafts, though. I feel good having the opportunity to give them new life. I hope it was worth it.