Enthusiasm, Consent, Ethics, & Passivity

The other day luvtheheaven linked a good post about consent, and while its main point is one that’s good and important, I have some complicated thoughts about how it got there.

Content Note: This post is about ethics and preferences around intimate physical interaction and has talk of hypothetical physical situations (including sexual ones) involving non-responsiveness and complete passivity on one partner’s end.  I’m not sure it’s really a “tw: rape” situation, but you deserve a heads up in case that affects whether you want to skip this post.  You won’t be missing out on much, I promise.  As for the post I’ll be discussing, it includes a description of non-hypothetical actual sex, which you will only see if you decide to click the link to it.

Taking Invetory of Personal Affection Prefrences

Sex isn’t the only area of physical affection where people can have varied preferences.  Just ’cause it’s fun to do and good to think about ahead of time, I’ve made a brief list of what I’ve figured out so far.  You may have opposite preferences, or you may like none of these at all, and that’s all fine.  This is just me and my quirks, and if you read this, I hope it encourages you to think about what your own preferences are.

The Issue of Sexualizing Pleasure

It sounds silly, because even the word “pleasure” itself has taken on a sexual connotation.  Some might even contend that sexual gratification is its definition, or an inherent part of its definition, and I’d argue with that idea, but that’s beside the point.  Somehow, through popular usage of the word, sexual context has become its primary association.  That fact is both demonstrative of and a hindrance to what I want to discuss, which is the paradigm of verbally sexualizing our happiness and satisfaction in order to convey intensity.

I decided to write a post about this after Victrix left a comment on one of my posts, bringing up a valid complaint about how people describe whatever pleases them:

This post pretty much addresses one of the things, partcularly the last paragraph, with the constant use of the word sexy to describe things as being good or appealing. I’ve lost count over a two week period of university lecturers using it to describe phones, roads and even accounting concepts.

Differentiating Types of Attraction

Because sexual attraction usually (but not always) comes mixed with other kinds of attraction, prying them apart for categorization can be a tricky process, firstly because some allosexuals resist attraction disambiguation on the basis that it’s “not necessary” — for them, because they experience these attractions simultaneously.  However, even a bisexual friend of mine reports having experienced sensual attraction to a man she was not sexually attracted to.  We were in the midst of a discussion about attraction types when she came to this realization, with a sudden exclamation of “OH, that’s what it was!”

[This article is now available en français! Thanks, Valentin!]