calme_rut

“There have been lots of AI-generated articles, and those typically get noticed and retracted quickly,” Heiss tells Rolling Stone. He mentions a paper retracted earlier this month, which discussed the potential to improve autism diagnoses with an AI model and included a nonsensical infographic that was itself created with a text-to-image model. “But this hallucinated journal issue is slightly different,” he says.

so im asexual and alloromantic and i am in a relationship with my partner who is allosexual, I am comfortable having sex I just dont find any real pleasure or attraction in it and im in the point of my relationship that I would be fine letting them have sex with me

I've talked about this arrangement with my friends and they think that letting them have sex with me when im not interested in the sex itself but giving pleasure to my partner is a bad thing and that i shouldn't let someone have sex with me ever because I'm not attracted to it

my partner and i are fine with the arrangement and ive made it very clear that i am consenting, but also everything ive been taught is that you have to be super excited to have sex to actually mean your consent, you can't be kinda meh about it or do it for your partner or thats bad

and now the thought is wriggling in the back of my mind that im somehow lying to myself about being fine with this

No worries, I have a "No Stupid Questions Are Stupid Questions and Even If They Were, I don't Mind" rule, so its fine!

So, I can totally see where you're coming from. "Enthusiastic consent" has been a big theory over the years, specifically among folks who don't listen to asexual people and ignore how thoroughly sex workers have debunked it. But its not really realistic or how consent itself works.

People are allowed to make decisions about their bodies that they're not totally hyped about. They're allowed to make decisions about their bodies that they're neutral about, or even feel negatively about! Part of having bodily autonomy is that you're allowed to make decisions about your body for whatever reason and that's generally your business.

That includes having sex! You're not describing coercion, which would negate your consent. You're just describing communicating your consent with your partner for a different reason than your friends are used to hearing about.

You're allowed to have sex with your partner if you want to, even if you're not sexually attracted to them! That's your business. Just because you don't enjoy it the same way your partner does doesn't mean you don't have the ability to consent. That's not how it works.

Of course, if sex is a pain for you, obviously, I'd recommend finding something else to do but if it's just whatever to you and you like doing it with your partner sometimes because they like it, there's nothing automatically unhealthy about that.

If you're lying to yourself, you're likely to notice side effects of that, btw! Do you feel miserable afterwards or during sex? Do you dread it? Does your partner react badly if you say you don't want to do it? Things like that. You could take note of them for sure but at the end of the day, you still have the ability to consent. Period.

Shane has his dietician recommended, nutritionally balanced diet that isn't what he wants - god he wants a burger so bad - but he knows that the regime he has will sustain him. It will keep him strong and at the top of his hockey game and it doesn't matter that it's not satisfying or indulgent or joyful because within the confines of his life it's enough. It has to be enough, it has to sustain him.

Shane uses his time with Ilya to sustain him for all the time he's not with Ilya right? He gets these beautiful moments with the love of his life, more than he could have dreamt of for the first 8 years they were together. He's trying so hard to make the best of what they have when they’re together so he can retain some of that feeling of joy when they’re apart. So what he has with Ilya is like. It's not perfect, he knows it's not perfect. But it can keep him going. It gives him what he needs and he can't ask any more of it because within the confines of his life it's all he can ask for. It has to sustain him.

But with Ilya, it’s like every second he is with Shane he is absolutely gorging on him. He’s trying to get his fill of that fleeting feeling of adoring and being adored from the second their eyes meet to the second the door closes behind Shane. He gets to live in this sweet, fantasy world when he’s with Shane, but the second he’s alone he’s left hollow and unsatisfied. 

He's been denying himself joy and satiation for so long because he thought it was the only way to keep going. He thought if he allowed himself everything he wanted that it would make him weaker, gluttonous.

He fears that if he gives in - breaks his perfectly planned but ultimately unsatisfying lifestyle - then it will ruin him. That he will lose everything he's spent his life building because he was too greedy for wanting more than he believes he deserved.

But look where it got him! He was outed in the most intrusive, invasive way and every fear he had came true - his team abandoned him, he couldn't play, he was Known by the world in a way he's tried to avoid for his entire adult life. All that restraint was for absolutely nothing.

And you know what was left for him at the bottom of that Pandora's box of horrors? Love. Satisfaction. The joy of having people around you who do more than just tolerate the version of you they have built up in their heads - the version of you who couldn't eat a bar of chocolate out of guilt that you would let them down.