Because my views on sex are a complex and leave me most vexed.
Over the past year, I’ve tried to be more… personal on Natalie.TF. Between details about my life, my experiences, and showing off my personality through introspective Rambles or by writing short stories and novels that I put a lot of myself into. I think the best example of this would be Natalie Rambles About Being Trans, Autistic, and Weird, which was akin to an abridged autobiography, and in that article, I mentioned my thoughts on sex, my orientation, and why I might have a somewhat skewed perspective on the matter.
However, as the months have gone on, I’ve been thinking about how I perceive sex, sexual content, and how the manner in which I interact with it is rather… strange. So I figured it is time for another deep dive into the trainwreck that is my subconscious, and this time… it’s gonna be extra lewd!
Part 1: Echoes and Origins
There exists a school of thought which dictates that everything about one’s current self can be traced back to or explained by events or circumstances they experienced or were subjected to during their youth, as that is when the brain is forming, and everything a person is can be derived from their early years. And it is a school of thought that I do subscribe to, with an asterisk reading: ‘for the most part’.
Sometimes… sometimes people are just the way they are because… that’s how they are. It’s how their brains work. It’s just a part of them. The human brain does not behave in a strictly predictable or logical manner, and there are so many exceptions to established rules, so many behavioral abnormalities to be found, so many minor mental disorders, that it is darn near impossible to explain every quirk of every person.
I bring this up as a sort of preface to say that, while I can point out certain events from my childhood, I truly do not know what caused me to be like this, to view these subjects the way I do. But for the sake of thoroughness, I shall summarize my childhood experience with sexual media and sexual situations, as that is useful information even if it is not definitive or strictly explanatory.
I think the best place to begin here is with a discussion of private parts, a child-friendly term that encompasses the butt, the crotch, and the breasts. From a very young age, I took the idea of private parts very seriously, internalizing it as being an intrinsically bad thing for one to show their privates to another person, even if by request or necessity by my mother, a doctor, or whoever. They were not to be discussed, not to be seen, and not to be acknowledged. My only guess as to why I was so strongly uncomfortable with this sort of thing when I was 2, 3, or however old I was in this vague memory I am recollecting, is due to the environment I grew up in, coming from a middle-class midwestern American family, and having been born in 1994. A puritanical place and a more puritanical time, where nudity was automatically linked with sex, and children were told to avoid sex for obvious reasons.
However, my mother evidently wasn’t too concerned about me seeing or knowing about more sexual content, as she decided it was a-okay to introduce me to sexual content when I was far too young to understand it, and with little explanation. What do I mean by that? Well, back when I was 6 my mother decided to invite me to watch 1968’s Halloween. A film I have not seen since, but as I recall, it begins with a brief scene of female frontal nudity, where a young woman is murdered for having pre-marital sex, and the rest of the film is about a murderer going on a vindictive rampage against sex having teenagers. For teenagers having sex is a crime deserving of death. Which, come to think of it, is how my mother curbed my fears after watching this film. She said I was in no danger of getting killed because I was not a sex-having teenager. Also, bear in mind, that I had no understanding of what sex even was at the time.
This meant that my first experience with nudity, my first experience with the word ‘sex,’ my first time seeing an R-rated movie, and my first time seeing a realistic depiction of murder. So, as you can imagine, this set a bad precedent regarding anything related to nudity and sex, and throughout my entire childhood, I cannot recall any positive experience. But I can recall a number of negative experiences, which I will detail in list form:
- When I was 7, I visited a public pool and went to the male changing room, where I caught a glance at an old man’s hairy crotch. I was horrified by what I saw but lacked an understanding of what an adult man’s penis looked like. Hell, I don’t think I even knew the word penis at that point.
- When I was 10, I accidentally visited a porn site when trying to visit Cheat Code Central as recommended to me by a GameStop clerk, who said I should visit CCC.com. This was shortly after I got my own computer, and I was terrified of being punished for this honest mistake.
- When I was 12, I was watching a RogerregoRRoger Newgrounds flash animation that had nippleless female frontal nudity in it, and my mother came into my room while I was watching it and covering the screen myself using a tissue. This was before I knew that tissues were a masturbation aid, or what masturbation even was.
- When I was 14, my school decided to show the film adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank to a group of students who didn’t want to go on a camping trip, which features a scene where a group of naked women are lined up and sent off to a gas chamber.
- Literally everything about Health class (also known as Sex-Ed) in middle school made sex out to be this horrible thing that nobody should ever do, but everybody would be compelled to for ill-defined reasons.
- Due to the lack of figures and data seen in my Health classes, I assumed that the majority of the world’s population had STDs until I was 16, and viewed sex during these formative adolescent years as a way to propagate incurrable and deadly diseases, as I knew condoms had a nonzero failure rate.
This put me in something of an odd spot as I got older and started progressing into my adolescence and adulthood, as I had no real desire to do anything sexual with anyone or see anybody naked, which has remained true to this day. However, that did not necessarily mean that I forwent any sort of sexual stimulation or desire, as I spent an embarrassing amount of time between the ages of 15 and 20 (I’m 25 by the way) indulging in kinky fetish bullshit that all fell under the umbrella of TG. Also known as Gender Bending and less commonly known as Trans-Sexual Fantasy. I already did a Ramble on the subject, where I defined it as: “Media where a character undergoes a change in sex through some fictitious or fantastical means, with the ensuing narrative, assuming there is one beyond the initial transformation, centering on how they adapt to this new situation.”
I won’t repeat how I fell down this rabbit hole, and I’m only bringing it up to reiterate how TG is the only thing I have ever found to be sexually provocative, and I got off to everything between crappy TG Captions, Writing.com interactive stories, and TG sequences wherein underaged characters transformed into other underaged characters. But you know what I could never get off too, at least not reliably, due to how uncomfortable it made me feel? Nudity.
Yes, in the hundreds of times I masturbated, I always did my best to avoid any nudity. Avoiding sites that hosted liberal nudity or simply looking away from the nudey bits when fapping to and clicking through static images. And even now, long after I gave up even masturbating entirely due to gender dysphoria issues and a non-existent sex drive, and after having gone all-in when it comes to the kinky, the perverted, and the lewd, I still don’t like seeing nudity. I don’t like viewing sexual situations. And I do not find sex in and of itself visually interesting or compelling.
You might look at that claim and raise an eyebrow, citing how many of the short stories I have written over the past year are extremely sexual. How my 2019 novel Psycho Shatter 1985: Black Vice Re;Birth, is arguably even more sexual. How much I talk about and praise games like Student Transfer and Press-Switch. And how often I reference or use images from TG hentai comics, which I do peruse regularly. I mean, in 2019’s Natalie Rambles about TG, I openly recommended a bunch of them. How do I come to terms with making or enjoying these things when I cannot even comfortably look at a photograph of another person’s bare breast?
Well, the answer is not simple— nothing about this matter is simple, as it is all weird obtuse bullcrap that I am trying to make sense of as I am writing this post— but I do have a visual shorthand to describe the loose and bizarre rules my brain operates on with regards to these most sexual matters.
Part 2: /d/a /d/umb /d/eviant /d/ivide
…Ya got it? No? Well, it might help a bit if I put my Master’s degree to work and define my terms first.
Live Action: A term meant to distinguish works that are made by recording or capturing the real world, primarily films, but I am using it to describe anything using photography, videography, etc. Or in other words, a direct representation of reality.
Abstraction: A term relating to a work that is not based in reality or realism, and is not meant to represent a real person. Such as illustrations, comics, animated films, computer-rendered images, and so forth.
Non-Visual: A term that denotes itself by excluding all visual forms of media, that is to say, film, television, comics, and et cetera, while including the mediums of writing, music, podcasts, and so forth. For the sake of this post, Non-Visual mostly refers to the written word.
Absurd: A term that refers to media that, while still abstract in nature, features contents that are too foolish, bizarre, or unrealistic to be taken seriously. A more formal way of saying wacky fetish nonsense that may be considered more humorous than sexual. This is a subjective measurement that varies from person to person.
Sexually Suggestive: Material or actions with sexual undertones that themselves are not explicitly sexual. Basically, anything that alludes to or references sex without being sex, or alludes to or references nudity without being nudity. This is a subjective measurement that varies from person to person and between cultures.
Sexually Explicit: I actually found a definition I really liked for this one, but I am going to slightly modify it as the following: “Sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex as well as bestiality, masturbation, sadistic or masochistic abuse, and the … exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person.” Or in other words: pornography, sex, and nudity.
Now, these definitions and this chart do give you a fairly good grasp of where I stand with regards to various types of media and their sexual content. Combine these with the 5-point image-based rating scale, and you can get a pretty good grasp of what my neutral baseline stance is towards each variant of sexual media. That being said, this stance does naturally shift and veer wildly when it comes to the execution, implementation, and context of this content.
Just to highlight one example using two pieces of sexually suggestive abstract media, I very much enjoyed the lighthearted lewdness and revealing character designs of something like Slayer Perfect, which I gushed about in Natalie Rambles About Anime. However, I found the more sexual content of Master of Martial Hearts, a show about women beating the clothes off each other, to be somewhere between dreadful and disgusting.
To make this matter as clear as possible, and to hit my usual 5,000+ word count, I will go through each of these combinations in detail and offer my detailed thoughts on all of them for the sake of clarity.
Sexually Suggestive Live Action Media:
This is a roundabout way of saying when a real-life homo sapien with flesh and skin and hair and stuff person is doing something suggestive, revealing, or overall lewd. This can be anything from a lady wearing a low-cut shirt to a man vigorously polishing a pole. It’s all stuff that I recognize and do not think too hard about. It’s found in ads, it’s found on clothing websites, it is anything that a perverted mind can directly trace back to the sexual, and it’s so gosh darn common in society, and the world, that it is barely registered by most. I acknowledge and appreciate attractive people visually, I do not like it when sexual suggestive content is shoved into my face by marketers or like, and overall I am pretty apathetic towards this type of sexually charged content.
Now, part of that could disinterest be attributed to an instance of indulgence I went on several years ago, where I did make Sexually Suggestive Live Action Media in the form of TG Captions, a subject that I enjoyed regularly throughout my adolescence. Hell, I enjoyed it so much that, 5 years ago, I started up my own TG Caption site, VD Captions. The site only lasted for a few months, and during said months I created over 300 TG Captions by taking busty candids (that was the search term that came up when reverse image searching for similar images) and attaching a brief story to them.
The process of scouring for photos of women in sexually suggestive attire and trying to use their pose and appearance to inspire micro-stories was an experience that left me disinterested in sexually suggestive content involving real people, and that disinterest only hardened in the ensuing years. Where growing gender dysphoria, hormone replacement therapy, and just growing up all caused me to lose whatever fascination I once had with looking at sexy human beings with the skin and the flesh and the three dimensions.
Sexually Explicit Live Action Media:
When I was younger, I used to be horrified by the sight of a naked adult man or woman, and now… now I just get upset whenever I stumble across such imagery. Human genitalia does not interest me at all, and the sight of it rendered in gratuitous live action detail looks genuinely disgusting to me, and I like to avoid it whenever possible. I don’t want to see anybody’s privates, and I certainly do not want to see them clashing together to illicit pleasure or procreation.
This is something that I have tried to get over, as I recognize this as abnormal behavior, and I attempted to do so by looking at nude TG Captions and trying to watch a couple of TG pornography videos that somebody on Farhad’s TG forums shared as part of their fap collection. But I could not stand the sight of a naked person. I have so deeply internalized the idea that one should not look at a naked person, much less get off to the sight, that even as I consciously tried to get over this revulsion, I still found myself glazing my eyes over or ignoring the nudey bits. While I can look at this content if need be, I don’t enjoy it, I don’t want to see it, and I would rather have these instances of nudity be censored for my comfort.
Sexually Suggestive Abstract Media:
If you were to do a deep dive into Natalie.TF and unpack my gradually revealed likes and preferences, look over my reviews and see how often I talk about a pervy anime game, or just sift through who I follow on Twitter and DeviantArt, you would see that I am quite receptive to the perverted. What can I say? I am a simple woman who enjoys a nice drawing of a sexy character, playful lewdness, and innocuous fetish art. It is a taste developed throughout an adolescence of browsing throughout imageboards, turning my nose up at the rambunctious sex nonsense and thrusting it down as I saw something that was trying to be sexy without involving any of the nudity and also appealing to my distinctive yet vague aesthetic preferences. I like lewd art. I think it’s fun, I think it’s cute, and so long as it meets my vague, ethereal, and hard to define tastefulness and aesthetic threshold, it gets a thumbs up from me.
Sexually Explicit Abstract Media:
This is probably the one facet where I have the most mixed feelings about, as from an outsider’s perspective, I have no trouble indulging in Sexually Explicit Abstract Media. I regularly reference hentai comics. I have dedicated pages to games made from the recobbled assets of hentai video games (Press-Switch and Student Transfer). I engage with a lot of media that involves me looking at a lot of abstractly created sex and nudity, so saying that I blanketly don’t like it will assuredly sound somewhat disingenuous. But… I don’t. If I had my way, everything I would look at that involved a visible pecker, a bare bosom, or an exposed vulva would have a black censor bar stapled over it, discarding any and all explicit elements.
I like these examples of sexually explicit abstract media in spite of the visual content available in them. I do not focus on the genitalia or visual depictions of sex. I do not appreciate the associated visual craftsmanship of an explicit illustration as much as I would if it was merely sexually suggestive. And most of the time, I skim over the associated content, going through the associated sex scene before seeing the plot progress. If this sexually explicit content is merely a part of something larger and simply needs to be parsed through to get back to the good stuff, then I can tolerate it fairly well, and may even enjoy it to some extent. If the media I am engaging with is merely a delivery method for sex, like the 15 page hit-it-and-quit-it cum-fiestas that populate the majority of the hentai comics industry, then I don’t care, I don’t like it, and I won’t look at it. And in special cases, I will be totally okay with the sexually explicit content of an abstract work.
I think the best of this is Elfen Lied, a show that makes liberal use of nudity, and my favorite anime series of all time. However, as I explained in my review of the series, I do not consider the nudity in question to be presented for solely sexual purposes. It is there to reinforce the humanity of its characters by showing off their naked and undeniably human bodies. It has a purpose and it isn’t, or at least isn’t entirely, there for the sake of titillation and to show the viewer sexy imagery.
Sexually Suggestive Non-Visual Media:
So far all of my problems have been with the visual depiction of sex and the sexual, and when you remove those elements from a work, I become completely fine with it. There’s no reservations, no hesitations, and no revulsions to be had when it comes to something that is presented using words, sounds, or whatever (but mostly words). This allows me to appreciate and admire content that conveys its sexual suggestiveness through description, wordplay, or just writing in general. If anything, I kind of prefer it.
When I am told about a character with a perky round bum, it comes off as more innocent and playful than showing a character with a nice firm tuchus. Both are pervy as heck, but whatever sense of hesitation I feel when looking at something perverted does not apply when the only thing in front of me is some text, and the visual perversions only exist in my mind. And because I have no real reservations about writing the lewd, I both do it constantly and enjoy seeing it when I come across it.
Sexually Explicit Non-Visual Media:
…I’ve written so many gosh darn sex scenes over the past year. Random #001, #002, #005, and #006 were all short stories that used sex as a central plot element. Psycho Shatter 1985: Black Vice Re;Birth was a novel featuring masturbation, rape, and cannibal rape. Again, this is because I wrote these stories as… stories. As text. They are not part of a visual medium, I cannot visually see the sex with my eyeballs. My dislike for the visual depiction of sex is not triggered, and I am allowed to create works that incorporate sex. Now, you might be asking why I do this, if this is just for me to get my jollies off, or if I am trying to make something that will appeal to more people because sex sells. But the real answer is that I simply recognize, understand, and appreciate sex as a narrative tool.
My general rule of thumb when writing sexually explicit content, and what I look for when reading them, is descriptions of the emotional and mental state of characters as they engage in this involved, exhilarating, and potentially formative, form of intimacy. As a narrative shorthand, as a climax, as a tool for developing characters, sex is exceptionally versatile. It can be euphoric. It can be horrific. It can be comedic. It can be serene and saccharine. It can be deprived and deplorable. It can be kinky and goofy. There is so much that somebody can do with sex as a concept, and that is what honestly draws me to the subject in a lot of my writing, and why I do enjoy it as a storytelling mechanism across all mediums. Because it has more range than just about any other narrative tool.
Sexually Suggestive Absurd Media:
You know, the fact that I have never seen a video of two people having full intercourse, let alone having done anything sexual with anyone in real life, and instead grew up with DeviantArt based horny, can probably explain most of my off-kilter views on sexual media. And nothing proves that more than the fact that I have the following pieces of art on my solid-state drive, where they serve as treasured mementos: the DeviantKibate Fart Vore trilogy, this delisted mpreg gay boy fart foot thing by Da-Fuze, Primatina Suiting by AuratierDreemurr, ThadyGrant’s Twix TF, that Animal Crossing tent-ification piece by secretgoombaman12345, and many, many, many others I found by sporadically going on DeviantArt rabbit hole over the years.
Do I find these to be sexy or provocative? No, no I do not. I find them to be hilarious. When you bust down the wall of reality and embrace full-on lunacy, when your sexual fantasy is just a fantasy with a sexual overtone, you reach a level, a status, that I admire just because of the creativity on display here. I am eternally enamored with the creativity and depths one’s sexual indulgences can reach, and even if it is done for laughs, even if it is just “ironic,” it is so divorced from what I traditionally view as inherently sexual that I can appreciate it with zero reservations of restraint.
Again, to reiterate, I do not think that people turning into food is sexy, I think that when you take the concept of people turning into food and sexualize it, then it becomes funny, silly, cool, and entertaining. It transcends the sexual.
Sexually Explicit Absurd Media:
This same idea of transcending the sexual applies when a work is explicit, in that it involves penises and vaginas and butts and boobies and stuffs. I once considered this sort of thing to be shocking and horrifying, but after several years of stewing in the proximity of this material and stumbling across crazy-ass big-dick-motherfuckers like ModeSeven, Lemonfont, ONATaRT, I’ve come to appreciate and admire over the absurd and explicit over the years. I won’t directly link to any piece of theirs, as I have a reservation about directly linking to pornographic images or related sites (but not Twitter accounts), and ONATaRT’s real crazy stuff is locked behind the Patreon paywall. Though I recommend checking out their work, as it is consistently wild, routinely preposterous, and genuinely beautiful all at the same time.
Now, one may ask how exactly a work transcends the threshold of absurdity in my opinion. What makes me go from ‘ugh, this is just a drawing of two people having sex, how disgusting’ to ‘this is a crazy fetish that this fellow went and drew, and I love it.’ Well… I don’t know. It is all contextual, all based on the composition of the work, and is dictated by so many factors that it is damn near useless to map it out in more detail beyond stating that it is a work that exceeds the previously defined threshold of absurdity.
To give some more clear cut examples, those giant lady centaur things with giant neon horse penises that ModeSeven drew back in 2015? That’s absurd, and I like it. That scene in part 4 of Lemonfont’s epic comics series, Shapeshifter where that lady opens an elevator to a 50-foot-tall penis and proceeds to be carried away in a wave of hundreds of gallons of spunk? That is crazy with a capital Q, and also amazing.
Now, just because something is absurd does not mean that I will inherently like it, as if the work is sexual in a very specific way, I will simply not be interested in, and most likely repulsed by it, for while it is wacky and wild, it lacks the foundational silliness needed to breach the absurdity threshold. Such as that one multi-part TG hentai comic about people traveling to different dimensions (I could not find the name) which featured a scene where the protagonists are raped in their nipple-vaginas (nipples with vagina-esque orifices). That was just regular old hentai, but with a different sex-hole and a stupid plot that existed to facilitate spontaneous tentacle rape.
Or most of the work from the comic artist Arania, who loves drawing people turning into anatomically accurate animals, penises, vaginas, cloacas and all. Because that’s not absurd, that’s some wackadoo shit for otherkins and people who like the idea of jerking it with a giant mouse cock. I’m not dissing those people’s fetish, but I don’t like it all the same.
Does that all make sense? Do you understand my insane views on something that should be simple and basic? Yes? Sorta? No? Well… here is the most succinct way I can summarize my thoughts on this subject of sexual content in media: Regulat old sex, live action or abstract, is gross garbage that I don’t want to see. But I like tasteful sexy drawings, believe sex is a great plot device, and think absurd high-level fetististic bullshit are somewhere between awesome and hilarious.
Part 3: Real Life and the Sexual
So, I thoroughly explained what my thoughts were regarding sexual content and media, but what about real life? Well, the answer to that is actually simple. I don’t care and I never really did. While I can recognize and internalize if somebody is attractive, and I do have preferences over how people look and present themselves, I have never had any true sexual inclinations to be with another human being.
I’ve never been on a date with anyone, never expressed lust towards someone I saw in person, and I’ve naturally never done anything sexual with anyone in my 25 years of living on planet Earth. Have I had opportunities? Not really, and I never chose to pursue any due to how I went through so much of my life foregoing social interaction with people. I enjoy solitude, isolation, and being able to easily quantify and control those around me. I am a loner through and through, and though I am receptive to social interactions and know how to communicate with others in a moderately pleasant manner, I have never really strived for social interaction, as I… simply do not enjoy it.
Because I am not very social, and because I dislike the explicit, I also have no interest in the suggestive. Whenever I encounter it in my day-to-day life, I try to ignore or evade it, turning my head away whenever I see somebody taking off a shirt, dressed in their underwear, or wearing a bathing suit. This also extends to the auditory, as I tend to shy away whenever somebody I don’t know starts talking dirty in my proximity. When outside of my personal bubble, I do not want to even think of sex, I do not want to view anybody I see in a sexual manner, and I do not want to be reminded that everybody has these gross malformed looking things in their crotches that they ram together to procreate.
Lump all of these things together and what do you get? An aromantic asexual introvert. One who also happens to be autistic and is transgender, which only goes to muddle my thoughts of sexuality further, to the point where I do not want anything to do with anybody sexual, and I doubt my thoughts on this matter will ever change. I do not want to be around people who dress or behave in a sexually suggestive manner, I do not want to see any engage in sexually explicit activities, and I certainly do not want to involve myself in either of those things. While it may sound foolish to state that I will never do something while still being so young, I simply cannot see a future where I would ever change my mind on this stance.
Besides, even if I wanted to, I would realistically need to have surgeries done if I wanted to be seen as sexually appealing, or if I wanted to experience sexual pleasure. While Facial Feminization Surgery did wonders for my face, and HRT has improved the softness of my skin, I am still a very skinny person with a boxy rectangular frame, micro-breasts, a flat butt, and a penis that… I don’t even think I could physically or mentally channel up the erection needed to so much as masturbate using it. I am neither sexy nor do I even think I am capable of doing anything sexual with another person.
Do I plan on correcting this? No, not really. I do not want to draw people’s attention. I do not feel the need to be seen as attractive to others. And while I would love to be rid of this stupid useless flesh tube between my legs, and the accompanying malformed skin sacks, I know that if I did get a vaginoplasty done, I wouldn’t do anything with it other than using a stent on occasion to prevent it from collapsing. You know, after a year of recovery.
…Okay, I think that is about everything I have to say on this matter, or at least as it relates to myself. It’s a strange needlessly convoluted stance on something that is a massive part of human culture and the human experience as a whole, but it’s how my brain works, where I am fine with and can even joy sexual content in more non-visual, abstract, and absurd, but the closer you get to reality, the more uncomfortable I become. I hope that I made my stance here clear, as I really would rather not dredge up this subject again, and if not, feel free to ask questions in the comments, assuming the machinations of my mind are intriguing enough to you to ask pertinent queries.
Image Sources:
TS Rinkan Sakusei Zenpen: Gender Bender Gangbang Sperm Milking part1 by Aomushi
Sons Will Be Mothers And Mothers Will Be Sons by VD Captions (my most popular TG Caption of all time, with nearly 20,000 views)
Ojou-sama Irekawari by Yuniba
Transformation In The Park by Accessworld
Fukigen Na Kajitsu-Tachi ~Displeased Fruits~ by Kuroiwa Menou
The reaction images I used for the media and sexual content chart come from Matsu-sensei, also known as GraphiteKnight and SenpaiScribe. They were originally part of a chart meant to show one’s fetishistic interests, so I figured it would be at least somewhat appropriate to use them in this context.