Outrageously Normal
What is normal? And what is outrageous?
What do we really mean by deviance?
Does wanting someone to spank you bottom until it’s pink and sore make you deviant, or excitingly adventurous and alluring? To a mathematician deviance is an objective measure, not a moral judgement, representing how different a particular characteristic is from the average of every known occurrence.
If you were the only individual in the whole world who craved a smacked bottom, it might indeed seem rather weird to anyone you confessed your secret. Yet what we call deviance is really a degree of novelty, the likelihood of anyone encountering it before. Every subsequent time you discover someone who also likes smacked bottoms, the less weird and deviant your interest seems.
Previously, I’ve talked about why it’s important to be erotically curious, to actively explore our own fantasies, and ask questions about what turns us on. But it's also useful to be aware that we seek answers at two different levels of our minds, a higher rational level, and a lower more fundamental emotional one.
Typically when we ask our rational minds a question, we receive an answer through our inner voice in the form of words and ideas. But if we ask our rational mind an emotional question, sometimes we'll receive an answer in the form of awkward feelings that doesn't seem to make any sense at all.
When we need to query the more primal parts of our mind, about base needs like drive, desire, and sex - we receive answers in the form of emotions rather than words, which then need be interpreted. Everyone is familiar with that kind of introspection whenever we ask ourselves: how does this situation make me feel?
It can be difficult to understand our true feelings about important matters. Fishing our true stories and concerns from our unconscious minds is a skill in itself that can take a lifetime to master. It turns out wisdom isn't a knowledge of facts, it's an awareness and understanding of our feelings.
So many of our questions about sex are really requests for reassurance, hoping to know whether what we're doing is right or wrong. Whether we're normal or weird.
What our rational mind knows is the result of years of assimilating the average opinions of a staid and risk-averse culture. So if we ask our rational mind a primal question, the chances are we'll feel we're doing something quite outrageous. Daring to break the mundane conventions we've been taught to obey can often make us feel rather ashamed.
That's why it's so important to encounter transgressive points of view. We need to hear others talking about how they pleasure themselves, how they express their sexuality, and the fetishes they're no longer embarrassed about. That's why I'm always so thrilled when readers choose to share their fantasies with me.
Decorum prevents us from surveying strangers on the street for the details of their deepest desires. Fortunately erotic content, such as blogs and stories, helps to show us just how huge the spectrum of human sexuality really is, allowing us to develop an informed picture of what really turns others on.
Human sexuality is a bell curve, just like most collections of characteristics are. In these kind of "normal" distributions the horizontal axis reflects how far something is from the average, whilst the vertical axis depicts its frequency, like how many people in a given population are into some sexual activity, for instance. Hence the most popular activities form a big bulge in the middle, with the less common ones becoming the outliers at the edges.
There are two lessons to take away from this: frequency isn't a measure of acceptability, and deviation from the average isn't either. It's perfectly acceptable to have tastes that aren't shared by many others, or to lie far from the mainstream, whether it's music, literature, fashion, or anything other aspect of life. In fact, it's essential for our cultural diversity, otherwise our society would be very boring indeed.
As the online realm becomes ever more prudish, having permissive places to post is increasingly vital. Our culture needs platforms were adults can talk about adult things. We all need reassurance we're not as deviant as we fear we are.
This blog exists because sex-positivity matters. It is important we encounter experiences outside the norm, even if it's only to read about them. Such exposure gives us courage to step outside the boundaries of being 'proper', and permission to express our own individuality. We all have the right to be adventurous, even to be outrageous, and choose our own favourite flavours of joy.
