veni, vidi, vici.

I actually needed to read this

Adonis, from Selected Poems, “To a Soothsayer” (tr. Khaled Mattawa)

Some people are autistic. They spend their entire lives comparing being touched in ways they hate to being in pain, because people refuse to understand any other way. The world is hard to live in for them, because the feelings that hurt them are not categorized as Bad, and therefore what is torturous is not understood as torture.

Kink really unnerves a lot of people because it upends a lot of assumptions about how brains feel things. How can you want to experience something in the Bad category?

But I think kink better understands and allows for the actual complexity and reality of how brains feel things.

It’s actually more like this: There are very few, if any, actually inherently Bad stimuli. Instead, everything has a threshold at which it is unpleasant, even unbearable, and a threshold at which it is neutral or even good. Those are not necessarily opposite ends of the spectrum and can in fact overlap in weird ways. The intensity of a stimulus, or how much it pushes the limits of your processing, is not necessarily the same as “how much” stimulus, either.

Everyone is different in where their thresholds lie. There is a ton of diversity. This is…okay.

Furthermore, your thresholds are not fixed. You can adjust them a lot based on circumstances, such as how predictable the stimulus is, how much control you have over it, how much control you have over the rest of your environment, the amount of things you’re simultaneously processing, and so on.

In other words, if you experience something in an environment that is controlled, planned, and has low levels of unpredictability and extraneous stimuli, in a way that is curated to your ability to process it, that can cause a dramatic shift in whether you experience that thing as pleasurable or horrible.

I see posts written by people who believe that doing a thing categorized as Bad in a sexual context is inherently going to cause harm, regardless of consent. The implication, though, in singling out “kink,” is that there is a “normal, natural” form of sex that is not “inherently harmful,” that lacks the characteristics that make pain, for example, harmful.

These people are regarding “normal” sexual activities, certain forms of touch or stimulation, to be inherently “safer” and less hurtful.

But to an autistic person, a touch may feel much worse than pain, no matter how gentle it appears to be. To an autistic person, many “vanilla” and innocuous acts might feel unbearable. But they don’t get treated with suspicion, because the people for whom they are Bad are not Normal.

When you are autistic, agency over your own perception is one of the biggest things you have to fight for in order to heal and be healthy. “This hurts me because *i* say it hurts me” is…basic. Because people don’t believe you when your hurts are non-normative.

It was a normal-sized sedan.

The drive was 75 minutes long.

I sat in the backseat of that sedan, pressed up against my ex who took the middle seat for me (and, to his credit, did his absolute best to give me some space), quietly losing my mind. Human touch started out feeling like spiders and progressed to a kind of full body skin-nausea that I honestly don’t think I can describe. I was dissociating by half an hour in. There were bruises in my thighs from my nails. And I didn’t know when it was going to stop because they hadn’t told me.

Eventually, they pulled over to argue about whether they were lost, and I lasted about thirty seconds before scrabbling the door open and fleeing down the verge of the road. I genuinely don’t think I managed to speak more than a word or two to any of them for the whole museum trip. To this day I cannot remember how I got home.

The fascinating thing is, these nuances are not actually illusory or just Justin Schmidt being weird—insect venom causes pain in a wide variety of ways depending on how the venom works and what nerves it specifically affects. There are a huge variety of shades to the ways humans can feel pain. Bee venom, for instance, activates nerves that are sensitive to heat, causing a “burning” pain.