Daily Shaarli
July 29, 2026
At a basic level, roleplay and feeling powerful and/or desired is fun; psychoanalyzing myself, as an adult, I admit that growing up alienated by the absence of sexual and romantic attraction has made me intellectually ravenous to understand sex of all kinds.
...I didn't write the title, but it does serve as a good content warning, I suppose. I'm more interested in how the author relates to sex & kink as an asexual person more generally... but wow, I learned some new words in the process, too.
Arousal is a funny thing. It’s an involuntary response, one we have little to no control over, that also carries enormous social and psychological weight. Since the era of Freud, we’ve been told that the things that turn us on have deep significance when it comes to unraveling who, exactly, we are – which makes it that much more troubling when the things that turn us on run completely counter to who we want to be when we’re fully clothed and away from the bedroom.
[...]
The more we try to deny our erotic urges, the more they take over our experience – while paradoxically, accepting those parts of ourselves as harmless, if occasionally upsetting, fantasy, allows them to fade into our unconscious and helps integrate them into our daily lives.