The Female Gaze

[soos_mite_ah]

I have taken the BDSM test many times over the years but I thought I'd take it again because I have more data/personal experience to go off of. I never had super crazy results on this test but I never tested 100% for vanilla lol. I feel like this is pretty accurate given what I know about myself so far.  I didn't include the rest of it because it would be too long for no reason since everything else was in the single digits. 

[soos_mite_ah]

What I Like About My Current Relationship

1. We can be silly with each other and we have a lighthearted relationship.

• I often feel like my inner child is being cared for and is enjoying this relationship. We can be fully ourselves and embrace the childlike parts of ourselves and just be silly when we flirt with each other. 

2. We have a solid foundation outside of sex. 

• Due to various circumstances, unfortunately I don't have the means to have sex or do many sexual things with this person. But this has forced us to focus on other aread of our relationship. I feel like we have a very strong foundation of friendship, communication, knowledge of each other, and generally love every bit of each other because we were forced to slow down and pay attention to that stuff first. 

3. We have similar communication styles due to both of us having ADHD. 

• I think going forward I would want a man who is also neurodivergent in some kind of way because I notice that it's easier to communicate with them, we relate to each other more on shared experiences, and we can stim and be weird with each other in a comfortable setting. 

4. We have created a safe place for each other where we are nonjudgemental and can talk about most things. 

• We have shared parts of our day together, the different issues we dealt with as far as trauma goes, kinks, people we have liked and dated in the past, and more. We also shared all of this in a reasonable pace as we got to know each other. I am very comfortable with opening up to this person and I know he feels the same with me. And even when it comes to things that we are insecure about, while we know we can't fix this in the other person, we know that we support one another and as a result, we both feel very loved and comfortable because we know the other person isn't looking at us the way we see ourselves. 
• We are also very consistent with one another and are very proactive in keeping up with the relationship. We never played hot or cold, we never acted in passive aggressive ways when something was bothering us, and we both do a good job at communicating our needs. 
• This also translates into the bedroom because we don't have any shame around each other which helps us be open in communicating what we like and don't like as well as knowing if we're doing a good job. 

5. We can talk for hours without realizing it. 

• Time flies so fast when I'm with this person. I can enjoy talking to him or sitting in silence with him. I just really enjoy his presance. 

6. We look forward to seeing each other and spending time with one another but we very much still have our own lives. 

• We meet up once a week usually, twice a week if we are lucky. It's something I know that I can look forward to because it's so reliable and a part of our schedule. But it isn't so often to where I feel stifled or that other areas of my life are getting neglected. We talk on the daily basis through text and share little parts of our day. 

7. We both have similar values. 

• I feel like I'm on the same page as him on most things and I think it adds a degree of relatability to our relationship even if we have very different life experiences. It also makes me feel safe around him because I know that we have similar degrees of integrity. 

8. We're both committed to working on this relationship and showing up as a better partner and we check in on each other on a regular basis. 

• We check in regarding things that we both could do better in the relationship, we check in with one another on how the other person is feeling on a daily basis, and we reflect and communicate how we feel as the relationship progresses. And none of these things feel like big, daunting conversations (it's not like either of us pulls the "we need to talk" phrase and keeps the other person in suspense for a couple days). We just bring these things up and work them into a conversation and as a result, it feels casual, not in the sense that it isn't serious, but in the sense that it is not intimidating to either of us.
• As a result, we talk about things before they get heated or turn into an arguement (we haven't had an arguement yet and we've been together for almost a year). If I had any comments or concerns about him or the relationship, we can clear the air really quickly and resolve the issue for the most part.  Everytime I felt like I was picking up on a red or yellow flag, we had a 10-15 min conversation about it and it was resolved so quickly to where we felt like we were both on the same page and we found a solution. 
• This also translates into the bedroom where we both want to please each other, we both check in to see how the other person is doing and what they're comfortable with, and we continously communicate. 

9. We respect each other's boundaries and we let each other fall in love in our own pace. 

• One of the biggest green flags I saw with him was that when he said I love you for the first time and I told him that I really care about him but I don't feel like I'm at the point where I feel comfortable saying it, he was very understanding and nonjudgemental. He was secure in the relationship and he let me fall in love at my own pace. 

Edited April 6, 2023 by soos_mite_ah

[soos_mite_ah]

Just thought this video was interesting  

[soos_mite_ah]

 

[soos_mite_ah]

Not Writing in this Journal / Cringe 

I decided to close one of my journals since it was getting too long and it was getting difficult to navigate. I also decided to close up that journal because I felt like I changed a lot from when I first started it and I wanted to start a new journal as a clear demarcation for this new place I'm at in my life. I also wanted to use the demarcation as a separation of sorts because I'm experiencing a healthy dose of cringe from my previous content. 

And now that I think of it more, yes that cringe was coming from that journal but I also feel like a lot of it is coming from here as well so I want to reflect on that. I read through much of my writing in this journal and I have some thoughts. 

1. Sex feels very mundane and doesn't really occupy my mind much. 

• I tried to watch porn for the first time in a while. Not surprisingly, it felt kind of boring because of the way it's not really shot in a way to appeal to women. I journaled about this in the past: 

  • On 8/3/2021 at 5:02 PM, soos_mite_ah said:

    Second there is the boredom aspect of it. I mentioned that porn made me bored out of my god damn mind earlier in this post. While me identifying as asexual has a huge part in it, I think the male gaze also has a large impact. There is a quote that I feel sums things up well. It goes along the lines of "when you watch porn, you're not watching a man and a woman, you're watching a penis and a vagina." And that really resonates with me. A lot of straight porn feels like it's devoid of connection and chemistry. It also doesn't do a good job on depicting pleasure for women because that isn't the audience that is usually kept in mind during shooting. I remember reading and article on why straight women often prefer lesbian porn over straight porn. A lot of it has to do with how lesbian porn has more of an emphasis on foreplay, giving/receiving oral, and things that actually make women cum. I mean, most women don't climax with penetration alone and when it comes to straight porn, penetration is the main thing that is depicted. 

    Also related to the boredom aspect, there isn't much of an emphasis on the guy at all. Half of the time the guy is fucking ugly and the other half of the time he's just a penis and there is nothing that is there that would appeal to a woman's senses in the situation of watching a video. And as a result, I find myself getting bored and critiquing the interior design of the set and why the curtains don't match the rug literally. I would also say that blow job scenes do absolutely nothing for me. I think it would be fun to give one but watching someone else give one is boring. I would say that I wish they had a female pov but honestly, I just end up thinking about this meme about what you see vs what she sees: 

• But also, I think since I have sex more regullarly since first starting this journal, it just became part of life really. Sure it's enjoyable but it isn't this elusive, special thing that I want to psychoanalyze.  I also don't usually think of sex anymore unless I have been away from my partner for a while. I remember before entering this relationship it was one of those things that was constantly on my mind but I'm glad that I have more mental space now lol. 
• I'm embarrassed about horny posting a few times in this journal years ago. I'm going to go into talking about privacy in a minute but with a greater emphasis of privacy I have now in these matters, it feels kind of cringe to just be horny posting. Granted, I remember this being worse but as I read through this journal I probably found less than 10 posts where I found myself cringing at. That's not too bad since this journal has more than 180 posts. I'm not even going to bother deleting these posts becuase even though it's not an accurate reflection of who I am now, it was an accurate reflection at a certain point of time and I want to own up to it even though it is a little cringe. 
  • I think when you're in your late teens / early 20s it's pretty normal at that stage to be talking about and thinking about sex a lot even in more crude ways. I think it's more to do with sex being a relatively new thing for most people at that age and they're beginning to think more critically about it and figure it out for themselves. But I feel like as you get older, you have figured out much of this for yourself, and you have a more long term partner that discussing this feels like you're making a big deal out of the mundane and that you want to prioritize privacy more. 

2. I'm hesitant to talk about my sexuality and my challenges when it comes to sex in this journal since I have been with my current partner for a while and I want to respect his privacy. I have encountered a few challenges here and there when it came to our sex lives from differing drives, physical health concerns, and just some of weird messages I have internalized from this forum and being exposed to pick up related content. I guess I have been hesitant to write about sex, not because I think it's dirty, shameful, immoral, or something I'm supposed to keep hidden away but because a lot of my experiences do closely involve another person in my life. I guess it's more about the way I go about explaining things and the amount of personal information I unveil on the internet. Maybe some things are best to journal privately first and then figure out how much I want to be open with. 

3. I'm not as kinky as I thought I was way back when. I wrote about this numerous other journal posts but one thing I didn't really touch on is how the sexualization of fear doesn't resonate with me at all. I wrote in earlier posts on how there was a part of me that felt turned on by being a little nervous and tensed up and I feel like that's not the case anymore. I was writing from a place of anticipation and lack of experience and now that I'm more comfortable with myself and I know how I carry myself in these situations due to more experience, it simply doesn't appeal to me. 

[RendHeaven]

On 12/31/2022 at 6:12 PM, soos_mite_ah said:

I have taken the BDSM test many times over the years but I thought I'd take it again because I have more data/personal experience to go off of. I never had super crazy results on this test but I never tested 100% for vanilla lol. I feel like this is pretty accurate given what I know about myself so far.  I didn't include the rest of it because it would be too long for no reason since everything else was in the single digits. 

This is so fire now I gotta send this test to all my friends

[soos_mite_ah]

Self-Consent and Internalized Messages

One thing that this website and pickup messaging made me feel was that sex and sexual acts were a requirement in a romantic relationship. That if you’re not pleasing your man sexually, then they have no point in being with you. And I am aware that this is very objectifying and transactional way of looking at relationships yet that is the messaging that I found myself internalizing after viewing pickup related content. I have debated whether or not to post this because I want to preserve the privacy of my partner even though this is an anonymous internet forum. But after writing this, I thought that this is important to share given the influence of pick up on this forum and because I did censor out the more private/personal parts of my sexual relationship.

I have been with my current partner for 2.5 years now. We started dating back in May 2022 and we didn’t have sex until August 2023 even though we did do other things in the meantime. Much of it was down to me feeling anxious in my body and afraid of getting pregnant despite using protection and being on birth control because of the abortion ban in Texas. I was afraid of the possibility of something going wrong, like the condom breaking or me taking my birth control to early or late, and that resulting in a pregnancy that would ruin my life. I'm 100% sure that I wouldn't have waited this long had Roe v. Wade not been over turned. I felt ready to have sex in this relationship like 3 months in but I just didn't feel physically safe due to the overturning.  

We started having sex once a month, a week before my period. During the week of my period, when taking birth control, I’m on some placebo pills. The placebo pills don’t prevent pregnancy, so you can get pregnant on that week, but they are there to regulate your menstrual cycle and so you can have your period that week. We would have sex the week before the placebo pills so I would still be on birth control but I wouldn’t be waiting too long before I got my period. I knew that I wanted to have the confirmation of having my period within a few days having sex. That way I wasn’t going to be anxious for 2+ weeks after having sex to see if my period was going to come.

The first 3-4 times doing this, I was anxious after sex. Despite taking precautions, I felt like I couldn’t trust my body since the safety net of abortion, the last resort emergency solution, was taken from me. After doing this a few times, I found myself feeling comfortable with my body and not being anxious about the possibility of pregnancy anymore. After that, my partner and I started having sex about 2x a month. I brought this up with my partner and how I felt about not having sex more often. I felt like this was fine for my sex drive, but I felt this pressure since I had this thing in my mind that told me that most couples have sex 2-3x a week. He told me that he wished that we could have it more often, but it wasn’t something that was particularly bothering him.

To be fair, we don’t live together, and we see each other about twice a week. He spends the night at my place like once or twice a month. We’re not one of those couples who are attached at the hip due to geographical difference and due to having a life lol. I feel like we would be having sex more frequently if we lived together. But that is not to say we’re not affectionate with one another. We’re always kissing and cuddling when we’re around each other. He told me that us having sex like once or twice a month was alright and is what works for us as a couple and that we shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to other people.

I think I internalized this fantasy of what a relationship should look like based on the experiences of what people in this forum expressed as ideal. It’s not that there is anything wrong with expressing that a person might want to have sex more frequently, like a few times a week, but it's more so this assertion that you can’t have a relationship without it. There were a handful of times where I felt like I had to have sex even though I didn’t feel like it, because I was afraid that I was depriving my partner since we haven’t had sex in a while. There were a couple times when my partner caught that I was forcing myself to have sex and had to tell me that I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do and we just opted to cuddle for the rest of the night instead. There were also a couple times where I was having some difficulties physically and I didn’t want to go on and he reassured me saying that he’s in this relationship because he cares about me and not because of whether he can have sex with me. He said that he would still love me and want to be in a relationship with me even if we never have sex again. 

I can’t say that this felt incredibly romantic. It isn’t romantic for someone to tell you that you don’t have to do anything you don’t feel comfortable with and that they will still love you even if you don’t have sex with them. That’s just being a decent person who doesn’t want to violate the person they love and doesn’t view the relationship as transactional. It’s the bare minimum. But, I will say, it felt reassuring more than anything else. It felt like a reality check I needed to cleanse myself of the misogynistic brain rot the alpha males of the internet have spewed. I understood early on before getting exposed to this content that sex means something different for different people. It can carry varying degrees of importance in a relationship, which is why it’s important to find someone who is compatible in that way. For some people, sex is a really important part of a relationship. For others, it’s not as important and it’s a nice bonus. But in the same way that pickup makes you think there is only one way to be attractive as a woman, it does also make you think there is only one way to be in a (let’s be real, heterosexual) relationship.

That fucked me up for a while. I would say that my partner honors consent with me better than me honoring consent from myself. There were times where I felt insecure about my sexual performance because I didn’t want to have sex super frequently and because I had some physical issues here and there that made sex uncomfortable. And I always knew porn wasn’t an accurate depiction of sex. Most of those positions just look uncomfortable even if they look good on camera. But I still felt like I was somehow underperforming in this relationship or being a bad girlfriend because I wasn’t this confident and competent sex god that is capable to doing various acrobatics and twisting myself into a pretzel.

 It took me a minute but eventually I got to a place where I made peace that my partner and I are both alright with the frequency we were having sex and that I shouldn’t get wrapped up in the potential performance of expectations of what other couples may or may not be doing. It mainly took reassurance from my partner and me distancing my intake of the alpha male/ pick up type of content since it wasn’t healthy for me and was setting unrealistic expectations given the context of this relationship. 

Edited January 2 by soos_mite_ah

[soos_mite_ah]

 

[soos_mite_ah]

 

Grooming and Being Groomed

I remember having a phase in like middle school (like age 12-14) where I got really into Pretty Little Liars. I think I mainly lost interest after one of the seasons started taking the plot in directions that got absurd and they were doing plot twists for the sake of plot twists. I feel like this video was not only a way of revisiting the nostalgia from a show that i loved but also analyzing it from the lens of my 13 year old self and comparing it to what I think now at 25 particularly in the topic of age gap relationships. 

I think looking back, many people look at this show as a text book definition of how NOT to portray an age gap relationship on screen for an impressionable audience. I think the video above did a really good job breaking down every element of this, from the way that the couples were portrayed in the plot, the settings they were portrayed in romantic lighthearted way, the way that the narrative was framed to get the audience to root for them, and common grooming tactics that were played of as normal in a romantic dynamic. I also learned more about the fandom and how they treated the age gap dynamic. I didn't know how creepy the writers were even off screen and how that translated in the way that they created merch and interacted with their fans on social media. 

I remember looking at both Wren and Spencer and Ezra and Aria as scandelous when I first watched the show at like 12/13. But I remember that the whole show felt scandelous because of the plot twists, the general drama between the characters, and the creepy murder mystery vibes. It's like the scandelous elements of those relationships blended in with the rest of the show. On top of that, I think it's important to recognize WHY I thought these relationships were scandelous at age 13. I thought Wren and Spencer was scanadelous because it's fucked up to sleep with your sister's fiance. And I thought Ezra and Aria's relationship was scandelous because it's a teacher/student dynamic. At that age, I was not thinking about the age gap at all and if anything I think I remember thinking the girls were fucked up for being in these dynamics because the show really does portray them as the pursuers rather than acknowledging these guys as the creeps and manipulators they were. Spencer and Aria didn't know better regarding the reprucussions of such relationships and the exploitative nature of them at their age of like 15-17 and neither did I as a middle schooler. I'm going to be honest, at that age, getting pursued by a guy whose in his like early to mid 20s did seem sexy because when you're surrounded by 14 year old boys, guys in their early 20s look like they have their lives together.

Also,  the actors in real life were closer in age with each other compared to the characters they portrayed. And as a result, visually the dynamic doesn't seem as jarring. Especially with Ezra and Aria, I remember thinking both of them were attractive and as a result looked great together, totally ignoring the context of that relationship. And the video does a great job in going into the ways that the relationship was portrayed to make it seem less predatory. I also caught myself thinking about the portrayal of another age gap relationship I saw on screen which is the movie Priscilla, about the story of Priscilla Presley and her relationship to Elvis. 

Priscilla did a really good job at showing why this age gap relationship would feel glamorous for a teenager while not glamorizing the relationship to the audience. You can see what Priscilla saw in Elvis while as the viewer feeling how uncomfortable, awkward, tense, and just down right weird and dark ther realtionship was. I think if I remember correctly, Priscilla was 14 and Elvis was 24 when they met. Sophia Coppola did a really good job of creating this nuanced atmosphere in the movie. I remember feeling groomed while watching this movie and recognizing the predatory, unsettling nature of it. But looking back at Pretty Little Liars and the analysis of it, at my age it feels unsettling, not only because I know better but because of the way that it sneakily was portrayed in a positive light that was undetectable to most of the audience during the time in which the show aired. Priscilla felt unsettling in the moment while Pretty Little Liars feels unsettling in retrospect.  

Relating this back to real life, even if you're not trying to catch a case, the thought of dating someone older when you're in your teen years seemed aspirational at the time. I have this memory of this girl that I was in the 8th grade with (so we're like 13/14 years old). She was like this stereotypical pretty girl who could probably get any guy she wanted. She was 13 and she was dating someone who was 16. I remember thinking that she was so cool and so pretty that she could fit in with and date older guys and meanwhile I'm here looking awkward and I can't even get my crush to notice me. Looking back, I don't envy this girl at all because of the number of sketchy situations she ended up in and how her parents were pretty negligent on so many aspects of her life. I don't see what she went through as cool or aspirational rather I just feel gross and awful for her and the trauma she likely got from that. 

Ii have been thinking about this since I hit 18 but preying on kids who are younger than you or in a very different place in life than you is peak weirdo behavior. I remember turning 18 and going to college, and thinking about how weird it would be if I were to date a 16 year old who is a sophomore in highschool. I remember turning 21 and thinking how weird it would be to date an 18 year old. And I think that as I get older, this visceral reaction to not prey on younger people gets stronger. I cannot imagine being 25 now and trying to be friends with, let alone date and have sex with a teenager like the guys in this show. Not only that, I can't imagine wanting to thrist after a guy who is significantly older than me, especially now that I have my own money, I am supporting myself financially with no problem, and I have stable life on so many levels.  Basically, when I think of age gap relationships, regardless of whether I envision myself as the older or younger party, I feel like this cat right here.