Being semi ARC and a dominant really sucks when you’re repulsed by nearly everything a Good Dom(tm) is supposed to do. The kink community is SO judgmental about this, like nobody is ever allowed to be condom-repulsed, lube-repulsed, safeword-repulsed, reaction-repulsed, repulsed by deliberately trying to give pleasure to another person etc or they’re an evil selfish jerk making excuses to abuse. I’m not against harm reduction but I shouldn’t have to do all this SHIT to be valid!
I don’t know what’s been said to you, but I don’t think the issue is that they think you’re invalid. (If they did say that, they’re wrong) The things you list here are necessary to dom/sub play, so even if you can’t handle abiding by those, it’s understandable why other people would be wary of having you around. Trust is paramount when you’re doing anything in the kink community. You do see how not wanting to have safewords makes doing anything with you much more dangerous, even impossible, since the other person can’t say no to you? Same goes for condoms, that’s the only form of safe sex that protects against STIs at all, and pregnancy for most people. If those are things you can’t do, then you need someone who agrees to that before hand. Everyone else gets to have their own boundaries as much as you do. These are what most people ask for; they ask for a reason, and it sucks that these common red flags happen to be things you can’t do for other reasons. Other people don’t know that, though, and even if they did, that’s generally not going to change their minds about still wanting those things in their kink play. Understanding why you can’t isn’t the same as agreeing to forgo it themselves. It’s not about your validity, it’s about their own boundaries just as it’s about your boundaries. I think the problem you’re trying to say here is that it’s frustrating to want to do bdsm-type things, when you can’t deal with all the stuff needed to safely do that with other people. There’s really no way around other people being able to draw their own boundaries. Either you have to give this up, as lots of arc people with any kind of sex stuff, or find a way around your repulsions. Strong repulsions mess with a lot of things, it’s not a mark of weakness, invalidity/lack of being a “real” kinkster, or of being evil to have to alter your life because of things like this. It sucks, but the brain is an organ just like every other organ, and if it decides it’s going to misbehave, we don’t get a choice in feeling that hell.You could try to let the kink part of you stay untouched. I don’t think we have any posts about trying to make those feelings recede, but maybe someone can chime in. I think there’s communities called “no-fap”, those might be helpful for that. If you try kink anyway, you need to be sure the other person won’t be harmed at all in any way if your attempt to get around your issues fails. If you can’t guarantee that, if your partner(s) can’t just up and leave, then I think it would be better to work on fixing these things with a therapist first, until you can get to that guarantee. Other people being guinea pigs isn’t safe ever, and especially when the price of failure would include pregnancy, bodily harm, and rape. You could get to know someone in other ways first, and then ask if they’d do kink like this. You could find ways around the repulsions, especially the safeword ones, by doing things like agreeing explicitly before hand what can happen and never deviating from that. You could try faking out your safeword repulsion by thinking of all kink as “normal sex”, and letting people safeword out that way in the same way that people say no to you during “normal sex”. You could try faking it out by using a safeword gesture, instead of a verbal word, as long as your partner can always make that gesture. You could simply call it something other than “safeword”; you could think of it as a pause, to be decided whether it’ll resume in a bit or if there needs to be reviewed. You could try having your partner explain to you why they want a condom, lube, safeword, etc; then you get to decide if you want to do kink with them or not--that puts the illusion of the decision in your hands. A lot of these suggestions are really just putting an illusion over the issue; it can work if you can fake yourself out enough and don’t think about it too hard--basically, if you can give yourself enough suspension of disbelief that the illusion is REALLY REALLY the truth, the way you do when you get lost in a good movie and don’t notice that physics does not allow any of what you saw.
