Humans don't make judgement calls the way we tend to THINK we do. If you go on YouTube and search for terms like "change blindness" or "inattentional blindness" you can find a variety of videos about how selectively people perceive things.
Probably the more famous example shows up under titles like The Invisible Gorilla or Did you see the gorilla? Though I happen to like this piece titled Person Swap to illustrate just how easily people's mental models of life can be fooled about things in ways you might knee-jerk think "Nah, that would never happen." In other words, life is complicated and has a lot of moving parts and our brains hone in on a FEW things to pay attention to so we have some hope of coping with it all effectively. Thus we routinely make judgement calls every single day based on partial information, actively ignoring a lot of stuff that our brain decides is "irrelevant" for some damn reason and using a simplified mental model of what is going on so we can just get through the damn day.
This can go weird places. It can go funny and entertaining places, as in the above video, or for more serious topics it can go very bad places, as it did for me and my life for a lot of years.
It's the basis of a lot of magician's tricks: How to direct attention to what you want them to see and use their blindspots to make it appear as if something happened that is "impossible." People are endlessly fascinated with this as a harmless and entertaining parlor trick.
I have been much more interested in such things -- how people mentally model the world and make judgement calls -- as a practical matter for fixing my broken life. I had a desperate need to figure out why my personal life was so broken and how to fix it -- aka course correct.
The TLDR is that I was molested from age 11 to about 13.5 or so and then a few months after that stopped some real psychologically traumatic headfuckery occurred that left a deep mark on my life and has been food for thought for a lot of years concerning some tough subjects re sexual morality and consent. (This is a TLDR, so don't "@" me later when I fill in missing details to tell me "That conflicts with what you said...")
Saying I was "molested" is the more socially acceptable, polite framing for what happened to me. The blunter framing for the ugly truth about my life is that I am a victim of incest.
The summer I turned 14, I visited my sister at college, met a friend of hers who was in college and we really liked each other and kept in touch over the course of the summer. He was my first boyfriend but I rarely speak of him because of what my family did.
He was a legal adult and I was underaged. My screwed up family held a secret meeting without me in which both of the male relatives who had molested me helped decide that this man couldn't possibly be anything but a rapey bastard taking advantage of me -- which amounted to them projecting themselves onto him because it was not like that -- and then told me I was not allowed to see him ever again (without even saying goodbye to him) and told him if he tried to contact me again, they would call the police on him due to the age difference.
Let me break that down for you:
In other words, anything that falls under the umbrella term heteronormative is more okay than anything that falls under the term gay and we don't care that much about details like actual consent between the two people in question.
This is a primary way that human sexual morality looks like those videos with titles like "Did you see the gorilla?" We get these quick and dirty rules about what is morally okay or what details we should pay attention to and don't confuse us with the facts and it goes a lot of bad places for a lot of people.
I spent 3.5 years in therapy, about a year in my teens and 2.5 years in my twenties. I've also read a metric fuckton of stuff and watched movies, talked to a zillion folks about such topics, etc.
To some degree I've studied alternative lifestyles, such as polyamory and BDSM, but never really lived that way. I've read up on sexual mores in different times in history and across different cultures. I've explored the edge cases to try to understand who I am and why society works that way and yadda.
My goal was to sort my crap so I could figure out how in the hell to have a "normal" relationship to a man that wasn't just poison for me.
I don't sleep around casually. I read a lot of academic research into human sexual stuff and rarely looked at things like porn, yet if I talk about this stuff, people seem to think I'm some party girl which ends up going problematic places for me -- because a lot of people would very much LIKE me to be a party girl, wink, wink.
For the record, I'm not interested in pursuing polyamory, BDSM, blah blah blah. I studied all that to try to understand the dumb ass fucked up mental models and mental short cuts that lay beneath my life NOT working in the aftermath of terrible things being done to me at a very early age.
I am choosing to write about such topics in hopes of helping a few other people successfully get their shit sorted in something under forty goddamned years, people who may be suicidal -- as I was for years -- unemployable, etc at least in part because of the burden of this garbage.
Probably the more famous example shows up under titles like The Invisible Gorilla or Did you see the gorilla? Though I happen to like this piece titled Person Swap to illustrate just how easily people's mental models of life can be fooled about things in ways you might knee-jerk think "Nah, that would never happen." In other words, life is complicated and has a lot of moving parts and our brains hone in on a FEW things to pay attention to so we have some hope of coping with it all effectively. Thus we routinely make judgement calls every single day based on partial information, actively ignoring a lot of stuff that our brain decides is "irrelevant" for some damn reason and using a simplified mental model of what is going on so we can just get through the damn day.
This can go weird places. It can go funny and entertaining places, as in the above video, or for more serious topics it can go very bad places, as it did for me and my life for a lot of years.
It's the basis of a lot of magician's tricks: How to direct attention to what you want them to see and use their blindspots to make it appear as if something happened that is "impossible." People are endlessly fascinated with this as a harmless and entertaining parlor trick.
I have been much more interested in such things -- how people mentally model the world and make judgement calls -- as a practical matter for fixing my broken life. I had a desperate need to figure out why my personal life was so broken and how to fix it -- aka course correct.
The TLDR is that I was molested from age 11 to about 13.5 or so and then a few months after that stopped some real psychologically traumatic headfuckery occurred that left a deep mark on my life and has been food for thought for a lot of years concerning some tough subjects re sexual morality and consent. (This is a TLDR, so don't "@" me later when I fill in missing details to tell me "That conflicts with what you said...")
Saying I was "molested" is the more socially acceptable, polite framing for what happened to me. The blunter framing for the ugly truth about my life is that I am a victim of incest.
The summer I turned 14, I visited my sister at college, met a friend of hers who was in college and we really liked each other and kept in touch over the course of the summer. He was my first boyfriend but I rarely speak of him because of what my family did.
He was a legal adult and I was underaged. My screwed up family held a secret meeting without me in which both of the male relatives who had molested me helped decide that this man couldn't possibly be anything but a rapey bastard taking advantage of me -- which amounted to them projecting themselves onto him because it was not like that -- and then told me I was not allowed to see him ever again (without even saying goodbye to him) and told him if he tried to contact me again, they would call the police on him due to the age difference.
Let me break that down for you:
- I was sexually assaulted by two male relatives who were so closely related to me it has a special term because it's very taboo: Incest.
- Those two male relatives had the power to decide that there was something extremely wrong with me choosing to date someone who was willing to wait for sex until I was ready to say yes to him.
- Society would have likely readily agreed that his age meant his interest in me was inappropriate and sided with my parents had they called the police.
- Everything I have read indicates if I had tried to press charges against the two people who actually sexually assaulted me, it would have been a huge uphill battle. (A common response to a girl telling someone in the family that a relative molested her is to call her a liar -- that did not happen -- and/or a whore -- it's your fault, not his -- sometimes in the same breath.)
In other words, anything that falls under the umbrella term heteronormative is more okay than anything that falls under the term gay and we don't care that much about details like actual consent between the two people in question.
This is a primary way that human sexual morality looks like those videos with titles like "Did you see the gorilla?" We get these quick and dirty rules about what is morally okay or what details we should pay attention to and don't confuse us with the facts and it goes a lot of bad places for a lot of people.
I spent 3.5 years in therapy, about a year in my teens and 2.5 years in my twenties. I've also read a metric fuckton of stuff and watched movies, talked to a zillion folks about such topics, etc.
To some degree I've studied alternative lifestyles, such as polyamory and BDSM, but never really lived that way. I've read up on sexual mores in different times in history and across different cultures. I've explored the edge cases to try to understand who I am and why society works that way and yadda.
My goal was to sort my crap so I could figure out how in the hell to have a "normal" relationship to a man that wasn't just poison for me.
I don't sleep around casually. I read a lot of academic research into human sexual stuff and rarely looked at things like porn, yet if I talk about this stuff, people seem to think I'm some party girl which ends up going problematic places for me -- because a lot of people would very much LIKE me to be a party girl, wink, wink.
For the record, I'm not interested in pursuing polyamory, BDSM, blah blah blah. I studied all that to try to understand the dumb ass fucked up mental models and mental short cuts that lay beneath my life NOT working in the aftermath of terrible things being done to me at a very early age.
I am choosing to write about such topics in hopes of helping a few other people successfully get their shit sorted in something under forty goddamned years, people who may be suicidal -- as I was for years -- unemployable, etc at least in part because of the burden of this garbage.
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