![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
CW: Talk about several creepy or NSFW topics. Just. A weird post. Maybe. Proceed with caution or not.
Today, I was taking a bath/shower during which I left some color depositing hair conditioner on my hair for several minutes. This time, I was using a true red, so when I looked down before rinsing my hands, the color and the viscosity of this substance made it look just like I had a copious amount of fresh blood all over my hands.
There was a little prick of instinctive excitement that ran through my nervous system while my conscious mind remained calm and a little amused.
And I was thinking about how so much of my personal aesthetic and interests revolve around this strange tension and contradiction.
I hate bleak, hopeless, gorefest type horror. I am particularly horrified by cruelty for cruelty's sake. And yet, I have an interest in things that exist on the borderline of those things that takes up a lot of my aesthetic sense. I like things that can be creepy but not fully horrifying, or I like horror that defies its genre convention to let love, goodness, friendship, or whatever else "win" over the thing that is so horrifying. That's one reason I think the early parts of New Doctor Who captivated me so much. Of course, they had plenty of scifi, but a lot of it was also centered around various kinds of family-friendly and humanity-affirming horror that could, in the end, be defeated or cozied up to.
In the case of shipping, since everyone knows I am chronically single, I like relatively mild but sometimes moderate BDSM stuff that involves pain or "suffering". I am not interested in BDSM as a "practice" or "lifestyle" so much as I am with it as an occasional kind of adult "play" that involves that encapsulation of dread or fear or pain that, on its flipside, offers comfort and security. (This is not to say that people who are really into the BDSM scene aren't also there for the same reasons; I just get unsettled when I think about the idea of living that as a life because I have seen/heard about a lot of people sort of crash and burn out of that as a primary lifestyle. The people who stay in it are a) very serious about the ethical considerations or b) creeps who are preying upon my previous example, imo.) And I think I've had that kind of attitude toward sexuality ever since I had even my most nascent sexual thoughts ever in my entire life.
And I guess I was just thinking about how those two things are connected for the first time.
Another thing about me: When I was undergrad age, and maybe even in late high school, I developed this outsized ick factor surrounding the idea of cannibalism. (Don't worry, I have not come a round on the idea...) I mean, I would imagine that everyone is like "Okay, almost no one is into the idea of cannibalism, Prix..." And yeah, but what I mean is that thinking about it is one of those things that has caused me occasional but significant nervous system-rewiring distress.
I avoid pork in my diet. There are a number of reasons for this, but the simple summary of it goes: When I was a teenager, I really liked CSI. In one episode, they talked about how body farms and such will sometimes use pig carcasses as test cases when no donated cadavers would be available or appropriate. They explained that the reason for this is that pig flesh is the most analogous to human flesh among domesticated animals. At the time, I just processed this as an interesting fact, but it stuck with me. (I was actually interested in forensic science because of CSI for a number of years, and I grew up watching Law and Order with my family. It was sort of like these kinds of crime dramas were the only things we could all agree on watching, though my dad got the ick a lot more easily than my mom or me.) Then, one day, I was eating lunch at high school. I usually went through the sandwich, salad, and baked potato options line because it was usually the fastest and I liked it okay. (We were a big high school and there were like five different lines that were divided by food type.) I am usually a turkey sandwich person, if I can get it, but I was kind of bored of it and got a ham sandwich that day. It was a kind of thick-sliced cold-cut ham, so maybe a quarter inch thick. But the moment I bit into it, the texture overwhelmed me. For some reason, it entered my brain that this was what biting into prepared human flesh might be like, and I had to spit it out. I ate the rest of my lunch, but after that, I never ate ham again.
Then, in college, I just got out of the habit of eating any pork because the vegetarian/vegan evangelists were passing out this pamphlet trying to encourage people to eat LESS meat, even if they did not give it up entirely. I tried to take that to heart and, as a part of it, thought if I could give up one particular type of meat altogether, which would it be? So, I decided on pork, because of the aforementioned distaste for ham, the fact that I had a friend who avoided it for cultural reasons, and the fact that I knew pigs were probably the smartest animals kept as livestock in America. I don't judge you if you eat pork, though. I still occasionally eat pepperoni pizza (I did not realize at the time that it was a blended product and since have stopped being fastidious, though I still generally tell people not to serve or expect me to eat a pork main dish). My best friend loves pork over all other meats. It's fine.
Back to my point, though: the genesis of my avoiding pork of any kind came from being afraid that eating pork was very similar to what it would be like to eat people, and it really bothered me.
Then, around 2011, when I first started actively using tumblr, I fell in with a group of users through one person who had a fandom in common with me. In that group, there was this one particular person whom I initially liked a lot. However, the more I got to know them, the more unsettled I was by their worldview. They were a lesbian, and I am saying they because if I recall correctly maybe they had some nonbinary leanings, but maybe not? Anyway, I just remember looking with sort of horrified fascination at their blog.
Back then, tumblr was the wild west and you could post virtually anything that was not directly party to a very obvious crime.
This person was into body modification and erotica involving suspension not with, like, shibari but like using specialized piercings and meathooks and things like that. I think it was done in such a way that it did not generally cause more damage to the person, but it creeped me the fuck out, and I was in a mindset at the time that I needed to convince myself to somehow incorporate "support" for this as a part of my personality. At the time, I was very much stewing in becoming a young adult (on tumblr, no less) and thought that by rejecting the idea that this was a healthy expression of desire, embodiment, or artistry would be "kinkshaming" and wholesale rejection of kink as an idea or identity.
Then, one day, in our chat room (was it on Skype?), they shared this set of stories they had found online.
The two I remember skimming through were a fanfic that somehow involved cannibalism and Lady Gaga (I cannot remember if she was the victim or the cannibal, because of how fast I noped) and some kind of coverage or description of the true story of Armin Meiwes, who "consensually" cannibalized Bernd Brandesin 2001. They talked about this with aplomb and as though it were really hot, or something???
At that point, I felt my adrenaline kick in. This was something that really bothered me. And, to be completely honest, I do think that this was just a fantasy escalation for this person. I have fantasies about various things, sexual or no, that are more intense than what I would like to have happen in real life. Ido not think this person truly wanted to be a cannibal or to be cannibalized. That said, I think that they were doing something akin to kink-processed-self-harm through this constant lionization of cannibalism. One of the last things I remember reading from their blog was about how they, as a lesbian with big tits, hated being around men at all because they thought that men looked at their body "like it was a piece of meat". And I just... couldn't help but think that these two things were connected. Like, yes, men commonly objectify women, but they were making it much worse for their own mental health and acceptance of life around them?
Anyway, this was on my mind, because after reading about the above true story off of some link they shared, I developed a deep fear of cannibalism that, yes, was irrational in its intensity, but it would give me the chills to think about it. I would avoid any mention of it. I would ask people not to expose me to mentions of it, even, as though it is a common topic of polite conversation? (This has something to do with the weird initial reaction of tumblrites to essentially ARM strangers with a list of your deepest vulnerabilities under the name of being accommodated, somehow? It is still going on, but I think it started then.) And today, I was voluntarily listening to a YouTube video (I think LazyMasquerade?) about a recent case of supposed "consensual" cannibalism in Vietnam that's being unraveled, after having just mentioned earlier in the day -- as a rhetorical point -- that I do not think anyone should ever be able to "consent" to being cannibalized/murdered. And yeah, I still think that. Again, don't worry. This is not my cozying up to the concept, lol.
Instead, it was more that I was thinking about how, ten or 12 years ago, I would not have been able to listen to that video. Even seeing the name might have actually "triggered" a sense of dread in me.
Now, it doesn't bother me.
Probably to an unhealthy degree, I keep myself company with podcasts and youtube videos, and a great number of those are in the genre of "true crime" or "creepy stories". I understand the critiques of true crime as an entertainment genre, but I guess there's just a part of me that wants to consume and categorize and catalogue the trivia about method and motive for a lot of crimes. I know that there is no rhyme or reason for a lot of evil. And yet.
And I guess, in some ways, I have burned down the wick of my own ability to be truly terrified. Every now and then, I get creeped out, but for the most part, it is just that little momentary spine tingle and my rational brain taking over in a way that it did not have the ability to a decade ago.
And, as I go through my own frustrations about not feeling very inspired to do fandomy or creative stuff, I wonder how much of my frustrations are the result of an overstimulation of my brain. I am a deeply curious person, and I love language and information! I just... wonder how much of it is too much.
I notice that the more poorly I am doing mentally, the less often I listen to music and the more often I listen to spoken content like YouTube videos or podcasts. But the thing is, it is not always a direct correlation. It is just a pattern. I enjoy podcasts and videos even when I am content. However, I feel more turned off by any desire to listen to music when I'm sad, annoyed, angry, etc.
I just wonder if what I've done to myself in wandering down this road of being fascinated by "dark" imagery and themes has been a net positive or a net negative for my life.
I still am creeped out by cannibalism especially and any kind of real malice or violence. Anytime I've seen a horror movie that ended with a downer ending, it just makes me mad because of who I am as a person. And yet, I love the aesthetic without the detail of the morbidity.
When I was a little kid, I was freaking terrified of blood, too. There's a humorous anecdote of me reading a NatGeo kids magazine my mom used to subscribe me to. Every other month, they would send one that was either science or social studies, and one month, the magazine was all about blood. It included stuff about the science of blood and about animals that eat blood and all things like that. And I had this really weird relationship with this magazine that was a prototype for my propensity to morbid fascination. I had a stack of these magazines, and every time I would pull that one out and saw the giant blown up depiction of red blood cells, I was at once drawn to the color and dizzy in that Vagus-nerve activation might-pass-out kind of way. I never did pass out, but in that very same magazine, which I read cover to cover, it explained what hemophobia was. I was carrying my little stack of magazines around in the car one day when my mom went to get her hair cut by a woman she'd known for years, and so I was telling the hairdresser about what I was reading, and I told her, insistently, over and over, that I had learned from this magazine that I was "homophobic" because I had gotten the "e" wrong...
In my young adulthood, I could handle blood when it involved helping someone who'd fallen and cut themselves, but I was still squeamish about my own blood, especially.
And then, I got diagnosed with diabetes, that has led to me becoming a lot more frequently poked and prodded and required to give my blood into little tubes. Now, I finally realized that it doesn't actually bother me anymore to look at my own blood beginning to flow through the tube into the vial. For years, I was at the point of, "I'm okay but don't want to look."
I'm still self-protective in a natural way. I don't want to bleed or be harmed.
And yet, I have noticed that I have just become more comfortable with the tingle of fear?
At the very end of October, my initial "Halloween-esque" manicure was chipping off, so right before Halloween, I went to get my nails redone. I chose a kind of neutral one with one nail done to look like "marble" but instead had them use a true-red as the "marbling" over the white instead of a brown or black, thinking that it would work well as "slightly creepy if looked at in a certain context but good for a transition into the winter holiday season/generic". And then, I was shocked at how well the little "marbling" of red did totally look like I had blood on or under my fingernail the first handful of times when I would look at it right after waking up. And I enjoyed and laughed at that little sense of alarm. No one else even commented on it, but it was something there for me and my... what? Amusement? Edification? Fascination?
I guess I am writing this post because of trying to label what that feeling is, which is the same feeling I got when I looked down at both the undersides of my hand, absolutely covered in red, viscous stuff in the bath this afternoon. A moment of my animal-brain feeling frightened or excited and my higher-order brain feeling happy about my leash on, if not mastery, of that fear.
Also, is "hope-punk horror" anything?
This song feels appropriate for my mood. It's sort of creepy/playful/creepy/playful in the way that this general sensation makes me feel.
Today, I was taking a bath/shower during which I left some color depositing hair conditioner on my hair for several minutes. This time, I was using a true red, so when I looked down before rinsing my hands, the color and the viscosity of this substance made it look just like I had a copious amount of fresh blood all over my hands.
There was a little prick of instinctive excitement that ran through my nervous system while my conscious mind remained calm and a little amused.
And I was thinking about how so much of my personal aesthetic and interests revolve around this strange tension and contradiction.
I hate bleak, hopeless, gorefest type horror. I am particularly horrified by cruelty for cruelty's sake. And yet, I have an interest in things that exist on the borderline of those things that takes up a lot of my aesthetic sense. I like things that can be creepy but not fully horrifying, or I like horror that defies its genre convention to let love, goodness, friendship, or whatever else "win" over the thing that is so horrifying. That's one reason I think the early parts of New Doctor Who captivated me so much. Of course, they had plenty of scifi, but a lot of it was also centered around various kinds of family-friendly and humanity-affirming horror that could, in the end, be defeated or cozied up to.
In the case of shipping, since everyone knows I am chronically single, I like relatively mild but sometimes moderate BDSM stuff that involves pain or "suffering". I am not interested in BDSM as a "practice" or "lifestyle" so much as I am with it as an occasional kind of adult "play" that involves that encapsulation of dread or fear or pain that, on its flipside, offers comfort and security. (This is not to say that people who are really into the BDSM scene aren't also there for the same reasons; I just get unsettled when I think about the idea of living that as a life because I have seen/heard about a lot of people sort of crash and burn out of that as a primary lifestyle. The people who stay in it are a) very serious about the ethical considerations or b) creeps who are preying upon my previous example, imo.) And I think I've had that kind of attitude toward sexuality ever since I had even my most nascent sexual thoughts ever in my entire life.
And I guess I was just thinking about how those two things are connected for the first time.
Another thing about me: When I was undergrad age, and maybe even in late high school, I developed this outsized ick factor surrounding the idea of cannibalism. (Don't worry, I have not come a round on the idea...) I mean, I would imagine that everyone is like "Okay, almost no one is into the idea of cannibalism, Prix..." And yeah, but what I mean is that thinking about it is one of those things that has caused me occasional but significant nervous system-rewiring distress.
I avoid pork in my diet. There are a number of reasons for this, but the simple summary of it goes: When I was a teenager, I really liked CSI. In one episode, they talked about how body farms and such will sometimes use pig carcasses as test cases when no donated cadavers would be available or appropriate. They explained that the reason for this is that pig flesh is the most analogous to human flesh among domesticated animals. At the time, I just processed this as an interesting fact, but it stuck with me. (I was actually interested in forensic science because of CSI for a number of years, and I grew up watching Law and Order with my family. It was sort of like these kinds of crime dramas were the only things we could all agree on watching, though my dad got the ick a lot more easily than my mom or me.) Then, one day, I was eating lunch at high school. I usually went through the sandwich, salad, and baked potato options line because it was usually the fastest and I liked it okay. (We were a big high school and there were like five different lines that were divided by food type.) I am usually a turkey sandwich person, if I can get it, but I was kind of bored of it and got a ham sandwich that day. It was a kind of thick-sliced cold-cut ham, so maybe a quarter inch thick. But the moment I bit into it, the texture overwhelmed me. For some reason, it entered my brain that this was what biting into prepared human flesh might be like, and I had to spit it out. I ate the rest of my lunch, but after that, I never ate ham again.
Then, in college, I just got out of the habit of eating any pork because the vegetarian/vegan evangelists were passing out this pamphlet trying to encourage people to eat LESS meat, even if they did not give it up entirely. I tried to take that to heart and, as a part of it, thought if I could give up one particular type of meat altogether, which would it be? So, I decided on pork, because of the aforementioned distaste for ham, the fact that I had a friend who avoided it for cultural reasons, and the fact that I knew pigs were probably the smartest animals kept as livestock in America. I don't judge you if you eat pork, though. I still occasionally eat pepperoni pizza (I did not realize at the time that it was a blended product and since have stopped being fastidious, though I still generally tell people not to serve or expect me to eat a pork main dish). My best friend loves pork over all other meats. It's fine.
Back to my point, though: the genesis of my avoiding pork of any kind came from being afraid that eating pork was very similar to what it would be like to eat people, and it really bothered me.
Then, around 2011, when I first started actively using tumblr, I fell in with a group of users through one person who had a fandom in common with me. In that group, there was this one particular person whom I initially liked a lot. However, the more I got to know them, the more unsettled I was by their worldview. They were a lesbian, and I am saying they because if I recall correctly maybe they had some nonbinary leanings, but maybe not? Anyway, I just remember looking with sort of horrified fascination at their blog.
Back then, tumblr was the wild west and you could post virtually anything that was not directly party to a very obvious crime.
This person was into body modification and erotica involving suspension not with, like, shibari but like using specialized piercings and meathooks and things like that. I think it was done in such a way that it did not generally cause more damage to the person, but it creeped me the fuck out, and I was in a mindset at the time that I needed to convince myself to somehow incorporate "support" for this as a part of my personality. At the time, I was very much stewing in becoming a young adult (on tumblr, no less) and thought that by rejecting the idea that this was a healthy expression of desire, embodiment, or artistry would be "kinkshaming" and wholesale rejection of kink as an idea or identity.
Then, one day, in our chat room (was it on Skype?), they shared this set of stories they had found online.
The two I remember skimming through were a fanfic that somehow involved cannibalism and Lady Gaga (I cannot remember if she was the victim or the cannibal, because of how fast I noped) and some kind of coverage or description of the true story of Armin Meiwes, who "consensually" cannibalized Bernd Brandesin 2001. They talked about this with aplomb and as though it were really hot, or something???
At that point, I felt my adrenaline kick in. This was something that really bothered me. And, to be completely honest, I do think that this was just a fantasy escalation for this person. I have fantasies about various things, sexual or no, that are more intense than what I would like to have happen in real life. Ido not think this person truly wanted to be a cannibal or to be cannibalized. That said, I think that they were doing something akin to kink-processed-self-harm through this constant lionization of cannibalism. One of the last things I remember reading from their blog was about how they, as a lesbian with big tits, hated being around men at all because they thought that men looked at their body "like it was a piece of meat". And I just... couldn't help but think that these two things were connected. Like, yes, men commonly objectify women, but they were making it much worse for their own mental health and acceptance of life around them?
Anyway, this was on my mind, because after reading about the above true story off of some link they shared, I developed a deep fear of cannibalism that, yes, was irrational in its intensity, but it would give me the chills to think about it. I would avoid any mention of it. I would ask people not to expose me to mentions of it, even, as though it is a common topic of polite conversation? (This has something to do with the weird initial reaction of tumblrites to essentially ARM strangers with a list of your deepest vulnerabilities under the name of being accommodated, somehow? It is still going on, but I think it started then.) And today, I was voluntarily listening to a YouTube video (I think LazyMasquerade?) about a recent case of supposed "consensual" cannibalism in Vietnam that's being unraveled, after having just mentioned earlier in the day -- as a rhetorical point -- that I do not think anyone should ever be able to "consent" to being cannibalized/murdered. And yeah, I still think that. Again, don't worry. This is not my cozying up to the concept, lol.
Instead, it was more that I was thinking about how, ten or 12 years ago, I would not have been able to listen to that video. Even seeing the name might have actually "triggered" a sense of dread in me.
Now, it doesn't bother me.
Probably to an unhealthy degree, I keep myself company with podcasts and youtube videos, and a great number of those are in the genre of "true crime" or "creepy stories". I understand the critiques of true crime as an entertainment genre, but I guess there's just a part of me that wants to consume and categorize and catalogue the trivia about method and motive for a lot of crimes. I know that there is no rhyme or reason for a lot of evil. And yet.
And I guess, in some ways, I have burned down the wick of my own ability to be truly terrified. Every now and then, I get creeped out, but for the most part, it is just that little momentary spine tingle and my rational brain taking over in a way that it did not have the ability to a decade ago.
And, as I go through my own frustrations about not feeling very inspired to do fandomy or creative stuff, I wonder how much of my frustrations are the result of an overstimulation of my brain. I am a deeply curious person, and I love language and information! I just... wonder how much of it is too much.
I notice that the more poorly I am doing mentally, the less often I listen to music and the more often I listen to spoken content like YouTube videos or podcasts. But the thing is, it is not always a direct correlation. It is just a pattern. I enjoy podcasts and videos even when I am content. However, I feel more turned off by any desire to listen to music when I'm sad, annoyed, angry, etc.
I just wonder if what I've done to myself in wandering down this road of being fascinated by "dark" imagery and themes has been a net positive or a net negative for my life.
I still am creeped out by cannibalism especially and any kind of real malice or violence. Anytime I've seen a horror movie that ended with a downer ending, it just makes me mad because of who I am as a person. And yet, I love the aesthetic without the detail of the morbidity.
When I was a little kid, I was freaking terrified of blood, too. There's a humorous anecdote of me reading a NatGeo kids magazine my mom used to subscribe me to. Every other month, they would send one that was either science or social studies, and one month, the magazine was all about blood. It included stuff about the science of blood and about animals that eat blood and all things like that. And I had this really weird relationship with this magazine that was a prototype for my propensity to morbid fascination. I had a stack of these magazines, and every time I would pull that one out and saw the giant blown up depiction of red blood cells, I was at once drawn to the color and dizzy in that Vagus-nerve activation might-pass-out kind of way. I never did pass out, but in that very same magazine, which I read cover to cover, it explained what hemophobia was. I was carrying my little stack of magazines around in the car one day when my mom went to get her hair cut by a woman she'd known for years, and so I was telling the hairdresser about what I was reading, and I told her, insistently, over and over, that I had learned from this magazine that I was "homophobic" because I had gotten the "e" wrong...
In my young adulthood, I could handle blood when it involved helping someone who'd fallen and cut themselves, but I was still squeamish about my own blood, especially.
And then, I got diagnosed with diabetes, that has led to me becoming a lot more frequently poked and prodded and required to give my blood into little tubes. Now, I finally realized that it doesn't actually bother me anymore to look at my own blood beginning to flow through the tube into the vial. For years, I was at the point of, "I'm okay but don't want to look."
I'm still self-protective in a natural way. I don't want to bleed or be harmed.
And yet, I have noticed that I have just become more comfortable with the tingle of fear?
At the very end of October, my initial "Halloween-esque" manicure was chipping off, so right before Halloween, I went to get my nails redone. I chose a kind of neutral one with one nail done to look like "marble" but instead had them use a true-red as the "marbling" over the white instead of a brown or black, thinking that it would work well as "slightly creepy if looked at in a certain context but good for a transition into the winter holiday season/generic". And then, I was shocked at how well the little "marbling" of red did totally look like I had blood on or under my fingernail the first handful of times when I would look at it right after waking up. And I enjoyed and laughed at that little sense of alarm. No one else even commented on it, but it was something there for me and my... what? Amusement? Edification? Fascination?
I guess I am writing this post because of trying to label what that feeling is, which is the same feeling I got when I looked down at both the undersides of my hand, absolutely covered in red, viscous stuff in the bath this afternoon. A moment of my animal-brain feeling frightened or excited and my higher-order brain feeling happy about my leash on, if not mastery, of that fear.
Also, is "hope-punk horror" anything?
This song feels appropriate for my mood. It's sort of creepy/playful/creepy/playful in the way that this general sensation makes me feel.
