[F4TFriday] What’s Your Taboo ?

It was an interesting tweet with many replies that Floss put out a few days ago asking what do we consider to be taboo ?  There are macro taboos that we agree on as a society.  There are micro taboos that could be for smaller communities or very personal.

Thinking about this one I reckoned that I could be fairly generic and end up retreading themes in other posts that they would probably write about a lot better than me.

In which case, why not go for the unexpected and potentially controversial ?

So for a change I’m going to write about sex !!  That’s a bit of a shocker since you know I don’t write about sex.

There are many taboos around sex.  Mostly cultural and religious that defy rational explanation.  Religious authorities have been running scared of the power of sex since before the Talmud was first passed down by word of mouth.  Controlling, codifying and strict taboos keep the populace, especially women, subservient.

It’s not these taboos that I’m writing about.  I’m diving in to this in a very personal interpretation of taboo sex and what it means to me.  I don’t actually expect people to ‘get it’.

Here goes – Sex is a personal taboo.

Some of you will be asking, how can someone so involved with kink and D/s say that sex is a personal taboo ?

Separating the distinct components of this going as far back as the first stirrings of sexual instincts at puberty is something I’ve only recently been able to achieve as it is now filtered through my understanding of asexuality and how it has applied to me.

It never stopped a teenage me from being aroused and horny and finding the joy in masturbation.  I found both soft and hard porn (scout masters were something else back then) and the weird thing to realise now is that I took my cues as to what was ‘hot’ and sexually desirable from my peers.  I couldn’t make my own frame of reference.

There’s a very subtle distinction in play here that’s important to understand with asexuality.  An appreciation of the physical form is perfectly normal as one type of attraction.  This does not necessarily / probably equate to sexual attraction and desire for the same person or picture.

Young bodies awash with hormones don’t yet understand, they only know that they don’t have the same sexual feelings and reactions as their bragging peers and it’s impossible to talk about it.  All you know is that it’s some kind of social stigma that you can’t put your finger on – talking about sex becomes taboo.

To compound this you realise that everything works physically and that nature has its drives and imperatives in young bodies.  You read and hear about sexual attraction and you don’t know what it means, you can’t relate to it.  There’s a link missing in the head / imagination.  The steamy part of the porn story is met with a disinterested ‘so what ?’ – erotica can become taboo and boring.

An ace (generic term for an asexual) may be eager to pursue a relationship of deep compatibility and affection.  The problem arises when the other party wants to go further and assumes that the ace does, too.  That the partner needs the intimacy of the relationship to be extended to sexual attraction and activities.  The reaction of an ace at this point can range from ambivalence to horror, to anger, to rejection.  It will leave the other party even more confused and assuming rejection – relationships become taboo in case they require sex.

Of course there was the odd sexual encounter – I’m full of curiosity.  Nothing to shout about and the best way to visualise it is the male equivalent of ‘laying back and thinking of England’.  Duty accomplished, as it were – pleasure from sex is taboo.

Finding someone for a relationship where sex is, if not off the menu, only reluctantly engaged in is not easy – the easy path is to give up.  And thankfully that’s where D/s came to the rescue.

Exploration of sex can be a mainstay of D/s.  However, there are areas of D/s where an ace is comfortable because they do not require sexual attraction or sexual performance, yet can fully satisfy the relationship attraction.

Who can say which unconscious motive was more prominent, asexuality or transgender when my initial D/s kink outlet was exploring chastity.

Since I’ve written about this elsewhere here’s only a short recap of the stages I went through

1. Early stage is about taming the natural imperatives.  Where delayed and denied orgasm has the mind an uncontrollable mess.
2. Learning to function with high levels of sex chemicals swimming around the body
3. Finding that the permanent high of the sex chemicals is more addictive than the short-lived pleasure burst of orgasm.
4. Sublimating the sexual imperative in to very deep submission.
5. Eventually the sexual imperative disappeared and chastity became permanent

Reading this now I see how the asexual me readily jumped at this.  I knew from the very beginning that there would never be sexual relations with my mistress and that was so liberating.  I know that people reading this will have visions of a celibate monk in his ascetic cell and will tick off all the negatives with a heartfelt cry of “there’s no sex, what do you get out of it ?”  What I would encourage them to see is the intense intimacy and sensuality, physical and mental.  The relationship attraction that performs sex of the mind as the most active and important erogenous zone.

So let me modify the proposition.  What I’m really talking about is that for me it is the physical act of sex characterised by PIV and mutual orgasm that is taboo.  But sex is such an all encompassing activity.  In D/s I can drown in intimate sensuality or pain that, except for the most puritan definitions, is sex.

Since the chastity relationship ended it’s apparent that the transgender side has taken over from where the chastity left off and the imperatives have changed to reflect that.

At the end of chastity I was probably incapable of functional sex, I can say pretty categorically now that I definitely am.  I find it amazing that this is so liberating to me.  I’d happily see the removal of that sex organ as it serves no purpose.

Being a transgender asexual sounds complicated, but there’s one simplification.  If I ever had gender reassignment surgery, having sex with a vagina would still be taboo.