Surprising Yourself

[spiderboi]

I haven't been writing erotica all that long or that consistently, but I've learned a little bit about myself and my interests through my writing. For example, I realized after the third or fourth time I included it in a story that I have a thing for urination. This surprised me as I distinctly remember watching a sexualized piss scene in a show about a decade ago and being really averse to it.

So, are there any interests you've discovered you have through your writing that have surprised you about yourself? Maybe something you didn't like when you were a young person, or something you just plain never considered until you wrote it out the first time or two?

 

[yowser]

An interesting question. My first reaction is Naturally! For me exploration is a huge part of the fun of creation. Make your own sandbox, out of whatever materials you want, using whatever joining mechanisms you want. You are God, so why not do what you like?

My second reaction, and perhaps why you may not get as wide a response as would be most illuminating, is that the underage rulings here will inhibit a huge amount of writer offerings on motivation. Most of us developed our 'take' on sexuality far before the age of 18, but speaking about 'underage' experiences, fantasies, notions etc. won't work well on the forums.

I will say that I have a handful of stories where I took characters modeled on friends from early in life and put them into contemporary settings. I get to throw my lecherous old buddy Lenny from high school days into the present world and see how he acts out and if he's learned anything. Doesn't appear he has.

 

[AG31]

So, are there any interests you've discovered you have through your writing that have surprised you about yourself? Maybe something you didn't like when you were a young person, or something you just plain never considered until you wrote it out the first time or two?

Well, a few things may have actually surprised me, but I can't recall exactly what. I'd have to re-read this post titled Thanks to AH that documents all the things I've learned about myself since joining AH. The learnings were more often refinements in my self understanding than surprises. It continues. I'm gearing up to add some edits to that post in the near future.

 

[gunhilltrain]

An interesting question. My first reaction is Naturally! For me exploration is a huge part of the fun of creation. Make your own sandbox, out of whatever materials you want, using whatever joining mechanisms you want. You are God, so why not do what you like?

My second reaction, and perhaps why you may not get as wide a response as would be most illuminating, is that the underage rulings here will inhibit a huge amount of writer offerings on motivation. Most of us developed our 'take' on sexuality far before the age of 18, but speaking about 'underage' experiences, fantasies, notions etc. won't work well on the forums.

I will say that I have a handful of stories where I took characters modeled on friends from early in life and put them into contemporary settings. I get to throw my lecherous old buddy Lenny from high school days into the present world and see how he acts out and if he's learned anything. Doesn't appear he has.

I know we've gone over the underage rule a number of times. I found two other sites with lower limits. I use them when I want to tell a coming-of-age story. It gives me more flexibility in what I can write. I have an entire series on another place about growing up in my old neighborhood, told by a female narrator. I expected to write maybe three chapters, but I'm writing the fourteenth one now.

 

[spiderboi]

An interesting question. My first reaction is Naturally! For me exploration is a huge part of the fun of creation. Make your own sandbox, out of whatever materials you want, using whatever joining mechanisms you want. You are God, so why not do what you like?

My second reaction, and perhaps why you may not get as wide a response as would be most illuminating, is that the underage rulings here will inhibit a huge amount of writer offerings on motivation. Most of us developed our 'take' on sexuality far before the age of 18, but speaking about 'underage' experiences, fantasies, notions etc. won't work well on the forums.

I will say that I have a handful of stories where I took characters modeled on friends from early in life and put them into contemporary settings. I get to throw my lecherous old buddy Lenny from high school days into the present world and see how he acts out and if he's learned anything. Doesn't appear he has.

Interesting. You make a good point, I'm a bit of a late bloomer for various reasons, so I didn't consider that most people would have gleaned their kinks well before I did mine, and would be linked to being underage.

The learnings were more often refinements in my self understanding than surprises.

That's a good way to put it

I know we've gone over the underage rule a number of times. I found two other sites with lower limits. I use them when I want to tell a coming-of-age story. It gives me more flexibility in what I can write. I have an entire series on another place about growing up in my old neighborhood, told by a female narrator. I expected to write maybe three chapters, but I'm writing the fourteenth one now.

Maybe because of that whole late blooming thing, but my stories normally center around people in their late twenties and on. Some characters will mention that they had sex early, but I've never felt the need to include details, probably because I was too repressed in my teens and twenties

 

[NuclearFairy]

Maybe because of that whole late blooming thing, but my stories normally center around people in their late twenties and on. Some characters will mention that they had sex early, but I've never felt the need to include details, probably because I was too repressed in my teens and twenties

Yeah, I'm also a late bloomer so that about sums me up to. Might also explain why I don't have very many stories about younger adults as well.

I haven't really learned anything new about myself though since I started writing, but that might just be because I found out that sort of stuff while doing text based role play in my late twenties. Back then yeah there were several times where I went, "Huh, yeah that's actually kinda hot. Who knew?" Like ropes, and dominance, and well a lot of things, but even then not blood, or scat, or golden showers.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

So, are there any interests you've discovered you have through your writing that have surprised you about yourself? Maybe something you didn't like when you were a young person, or something you just plain never considered until you wrote it out the first time or two?

Yes, and erotica wasn't the first to do so. Shaking my ass for tips helped me to heal from many wounds my self-perception, and it also mitigated a lot of my gender dysphoria because by that point it's been more than five years since the egg cracked. Surprisingly, this actually made me realize that I was perfectly fine with the voyeur/exhibitionist dynamics, something that I was extremely afraid of because of traumatic experiences that I lived when I was younger... way younger... I'll ditch this tangent now and carry on with the question.

So, with erotica though it helped me realize that my most recent ex wasn't the only one with a thing for age gaps. I took one good look at my headcount and realized everyone that I've been with is either older or younger than me. My first relationships happened with people older than me, and as I went into my mid twenties I was with someone who is younger than me, and I'm showing interest in both people who are younger and older than me, and not my age. I guess this is also partially due to the envrionment I involved myself with. I always got along better with people older or younger, not of my same age, but the thing never clicked until I decided to write erotica.

Most recently I also discovered that I'm perfectly okay with being in a throuple, or having one girlfriend or boyfriend in every corner if I wanted to, which is actually a way of life for someone I used to be very close to had back when they were alive. They will always call themselves a free spirit, and were never in an officially serious relationship, but all their partners love them dearly.

Philosophically speaking, I also started to study libertinism as an actual philosophy because people had been misunderstanding libertinism for the extreme hedonism that it is thanks to Marquis de Sade, and that doesn't seem to be the case the further I read.

 

[PennyThompson]

Writing on Lit and posting on here the forum has made me realize that I'm probably somewhere on the demisexual spectrum! It's not something I ever thought about or considered, but it's helped me make sense of a few things in my life

(also that I might have a liiiiitle bit of a thing for feet)

 

[spiderboi]

Philosophically speaking, I also started to study libertinism as an actual philosophy because people had been misunderstanding libertinism for the extreme hedonism that it is thanks to Marquis de Sade, and that doesn't seem to be the case the further I read.

Tbh I also think of libertinism as the extreme pursuit of pleasure and self-indulgence, but I've never actually spent time looking into Marquis de Sade any further than that. What would you say is the defining characteristic of libertinism if not hedonism? Just a focus on the self and individualism?

Writing on Lit and posting on here the forum has made me realize that I'm probably somewhere on the demisexual spectrum! It's not something I ever thought about or considered, but it's helped me make sense of a few things in my life

(also that I might have a liiiiitle bit of a thing for feet)

I've also discovered an appreciation for feet as I've written, I get it lol. That and forced fem are just too much fun XD And congrats on learning more about your sexuality!

 

[KittyOfSteele]

Tbh I also think of libertinism as the extreme pursuit of pleasure and self-indulgence, but I've never actually spent time looking into Marquis de Sade any further than that. What would you say is the defining characteristic of libertinism if not hedonism? Just a focus on the self and individualism?

I've also discovered an appreciation for feet as I've written, I get it lol. That and forced fem are just too much fun XD And congrats on learning more about your sexuality!

From what I've read so far, right on the surface level, is that John Calvin is the one who coined the term "libertine" as a way to insult opponents to his ideals back in Geneva. It was never about the extreme pursuit of pleasure, but rather questioning some of the extreme ideals that protestants brought to the table. Some lollards held libertine views, like adultery and fornication were not sinful, or, in a more metaphysical manner, anyone who died in faith would be saved irrespective of his way of life. I've met christians, both catholics and protestants, who hold the latter belief, and I did so too before I went into my agnostic period, but I digress.

Aside from epicureanism, libertinism has a lot of roots in ancient skepticism (which differs from what the modern use of the term skepticism is) and the stoic school of pyrrhonism, so I'm refreshing all this knowledge I had back at university, especially because stoicism is all the rage now, albeit a very condensed and ruined version of it. There's also the libertinage érudit from France, but I haven't checked them out just yet. As far as I know they were a freethinking circle.

Knowing this, I'd say that libertinism, in certain way, is a bit of a form of extreme anarchism. It is an anti-establishment and anti-clericalism philosophy that relies more in questioning morals than self-indulgence. Remember, this whole thing begun with people in Geneva disagreeing with Calvin. Two hundred years later, the meaning shifted into debauchery.

That's why I decided to study it: it isn't understood fully. Most of this I blame it on Marquis de Sade. As much as I love his revolutionary and a bit of a political caricaturist spirit, and feel a bit of sympathy for him considering that we've seen similar horrors (hell, I nearly got arrested last year for performing civic duty, and it was a miracle that I survived the persecution; some of the people in my position got tortured for the minimum of a weekend, others were sent to concentration camps without trial or with bogus trials, and those who were in the streets during a near civil war that broke out last summer are still inside those concentration camps, with no contact to the outside, and many families not knowing about them), his writings and his scandals (whether true or false) left a huge stain on libertinism, so huge it was that libertines of his time condemned him for it. Restif de la Bretonne is the most notorious of them. The two hated each other too. Monsieur Restif even penned Anti-Justine, a novel that opposes the very infamous and scandalous Justine.

To carry on with the second paragraph that was more addressed to @PennyThompson than me, Restif de la Bretonne was also a notorious foot fetishist and one of his early works was all about that. That's where the term for shoe fetishism (Retifism) comes from.

But yeah, coming back to libertinism, I actually found it to be a surprisingly good tool to break the chains not only out of 25 years of dictatorship so far, but also to break many shackles that I've learned in my upbringing that had only put me down. Cultural, religious, and even political ideals.