#inspiration folder

The original thought I had which started this: Type of girl who grew up in a lesbianism-normative social context and ends up re-inventing the idea of giving men oral sex from first principles via "Is there something like cunnilingus but for boys? I feel like there should be!" but since her technique is directly derived from the techniques she's learned for eating out (cis) girls via "well, I think the ballsack is homologous to the labia and the penis is homologous to the clitoris, so..." her version is mostly eating out her boyfriend's balls and perineum while using one of her hands to stimulate his penis (her boyfriend is not sexually experienced or knowledgeable so it doesn't occur to him to suggest anything different).

And then that got me thinking of 1) this scenario is something I could see happening a lot in some science fictional super-majority female society that has a strong norm that sex is supposed to "private" and isn't talked about very much, 2) other weird-to-us interpretations of how heterosexual sex is "supposed" to work that a lot of women raised in a society like that might have.

So, alternate history concept/setting I ended up spinning out of this:

A world that some time in the early twentieth century got hit by a milder version of a Y: The Last Man type scenario, i.e. by a highly contagious infectious disease that for some physiological reason has a very sex-asymmetric mortality rate in humans. The disease wiped out about half of humanity, mostly men, and then became endemic.

The disease becoming endemic meant there was a period of two or three generations when giving birth to a boy meant probably signing on for a harrowing ordeal of watching your child spend their toddlerhood wasting away from a painful degenerative disease and then dying before their fifth birthday. The enabling technologies for sex-selective abortions were invented in that period, and when they were sex-selective abortions of male fetuses became a very widespread practice; most people saw it as a great mercy to both the potential child who'd probably die anyway and this way wouldn't suffer and the parents who'd be spared from witnessing the suffering of their child (there was a lot of quiet queasy "at least we have been granted this small mercy..." around the facts that the disease effected males worse than females instead of the other way around and the human species really only needed a relatively small number of males to continue...). :(

By the "present day" (which might be in the future from our present day) the situation with the disease is similar to the one with HIV in our world: there is no cure as yet, but it can be greatly mitigated, to the point that these people probably could go back to having a more normal society if they wanted to. But the culture of prophylactic sex-selective abortion has by now acquired significant cultural inertia, so it continues from basically a mix of intergenerational trauma response and sheer cultural and institutional inertia. A lot of mothers/potential mothers have not quite gotten the memo that with modern anti-viral drugs if they have a son he'll probably be basically OK and/or are not very comforted by that statement when it has the probably and basically hedges. Lately there's been a tendency for rationalizations for continuing the sex-selective abortions to shift to it being a prophylactic measure against birth defects, which males are vulnerable to because they lack redundant copies of most genes on the X chromosome; this is scientifically pretty weak, but... In the bad old days before modern anti-virals even a lot of boys who survived the disease were low-key messed up for life by it (think long COVID as the obvious real-world analogy), a lot of older men in this society were kids then and are noticeably kind of messed up, even with modern anti-virals infection often has a noticeable permanent negative effect on health, so "boys/men are naturally less healthy than girls/women" feels plausible in that context.

Some knock-on effects: near-collapse of technological civilization in the early twentieth century that probably took at least a generation to recover from, slower technological progress, and slower population growth. The "present day" might be something like the late twenty-first century with the world having stabilized from demographic transition at a population of 2-3 billion humans. And, of course, basically the entire twentieth century gets butterflied away (at least starting with no Nazis and no WWII with divergences piling up from there, maybe no WWI either - the initial pandemic is some time between 1900 and 1930 so the scenario starts with a world that's relatively recognizable but different enough for culture to develop in very different directions from OTL).

The extremely skewed gender ratios resulting from this meant lesbianism became this world's normative/culturally hegemonic sexuality.

I think this society might be very gender-neutral in a very femininity-as-default way. Like, it might be pretty normalized for guys to wear what we'd consider feminine clothing and present in to us very femmy ways, not as a transgender thing but cause that's just how everyone does things here (also because, lesbianism being the cultural default sexuality, looking femmy would be the obvious way for guys to look sexy to women who've done most of their sexual imprinting on other women). Would be pretty nice for the trans girls (the all of maybe three million or so of them there'd be in this world; in this world transfems would be a small minority of a not very big minority, and the explicit transfem rights situation might be pretty dire just cause there are so few of them it would probably be difficult for them to form effective political pressure groups).

The plague happened before and butterflied away the modern LGBT rights movement; normalization of lesbianism in this world happened through the "romantic friendship" paradigm instead of the "gay marriage" paradigm. It's pretty common for lesbian romantic partners to cohabit and co-parent, but the prevailing cultural script for this kind of relationship is that it's a kind of friendship; it's understood and accepted that a lot of friends of this type have regular sex with each other, but the cultural script for this kind of relationship isn't centered on sexuality; whether the relationship is sexual or not is basically considered the couple's (or triad's etc.) own business. The prevailing fictive kinship paradigm for "I was raised by my mom and her female lover" in this world is to call your mom's partner your aunt or tia or something like that (as opposed to our world's "two moms" paradigm).

The plague also happened before and butterflied away the '60s sexual revolution. This combined with normalization of lesbianism through "romantic friendships" paradigm has led to a culture that would look like an odd mix of very liberal and quite conservative to us. The "romantic friendships" paradigm meant monogamy norms and adultery taboos didn't get imported from heterosexuality, so polyamory and relatively casual sex also got normalized. It's seen as perfectly natural and respectable for somebody to have two or five very close friends instead of just one, and there's nothing particularly weird or shocking about the idea that more casual friendships or even something like "I hitch-hiked to get home on winter break and I ended up really clicking with the trucker who gave me a ride through most of Montana" might have a sexual dimension. Similarly, the functional equivalent of divorce would be relatively easy; if two previously close friends become more distant and one of them moves out of the other's house, well, not a big deal, happens all the time. I think incest might also be relatively tolerated in the sense of, like, it's pretty common in this world for actual sisters to be co-parents and the streams might sometimes get crossed between that and the romantic friendship Boston marriage thing. I think the fact that lesbian relationships involve no possibility of unwanted pregnancy and no concerns about biological paternity might do a lot to encourage development of relatively "free" sexual norms in a society like this. On the other hand, there's a very strong norm that sexuality of this sort is private and you basically only talk about it with intimates. Transmission of sexual culture and practical knowledge about sex (e.g. STD-prevention) mostly happens peer-to-peer and parent-to-child; equivalents of high school sex ed are either very minimal or non-existent. Basically, think of all the horror stories you've heard about red states with "abstinence only" sex education; we're basically talking about that kind of society but lesbian-normative instead of heterosexuality-normative. Well, not quite that bad; sex is considered private but not dirty, so parents here are probably on average better at "the birds and the bees" talks than red state parents, and it's more accepted that teenagers will seek out porn on the internet as a mix of outlet for their urges and autodidactic sex ed and there's a lot of cutesy uwu hegemonic-sexual-norms-affirming lesbian porn that's more-or-less explicitly made to be something teenagers can watch with parental approval or at least parental tolerance. Also, use of sex toys is very normalized on this world (they come in the mail in nice discrete plain cardboard boxes or can be bought in discretely unflamboyant shops and it's considered polite to keep them discretely tucked away in a drawer or box somewhere most of the time).

So, anyway, assuming that scenario at the beginning of this post is happening in this kind of society, other odd-to-us things I think might be going on in it:

The girl vaguely knows lots of guys don't like being penetrated, but understands this by way of analogy to stone butches. Like, that whole penetration-dominance-masculinity/envelopment-submission-femininity thing is not on her mental radar at all, her concept of what's going on is "yeah, most boys don't like most kinds of very intense tactile sexual stimulation, the best thing to do with them is to just let them pleasure you with hands, mouth, and toys and get off on empathy for your pleasure and let them do something like fucking you with a strap-on but the dildo is part of their body, the like strap-on sex but the dildo is part of their body thing is how they get orgasms cause that part of them is pretty sensitive." The girl's primary motivation for re-inventing giving her boyfriend oral from first principles is thinking "Maybe this is typical mind fallacy, but... that seems kind of bleak? He gives me all this fun diverse stimulation with toys and his hands and mouth and he only gets one kind of equivalently intense stimulation, and even that sounds like it might be more empathy-arousal than straightforward pleasure? OMG men's rights [whatever year this is]!"

Accordingly, when she first tries re-invented from first principles giving oral to her boyfriend she's afraid he might find that off-putting and unpleasant and is like "I know this might sound weird, but..." and "Please tell me if it isn't fun, I promise I'll stop!"