I sometimes do interviews of people with obscure fetishes, here's some of my favorites -- 1. A guy was aroused by the moment women discovered they had accidentally put on some weight.
It had to be accidental, and it had to only be some weight (like, not getting obese). He loved the concept of a woman going on vacation, eating good food, coming back home, and realizing she couldn't really button her jeans anymore. When women would make posts online like 'omg how did I gain 10 pounds over the summer' that was prime erotic fodder for him.

He didn't seem to be particularly into anything adjacent. I was like, 'is this about embarrassment and loss of control', but he didn't seem to be into anything else involving embarrassment or loss of control.

Guys I used to think that true love didn't factor into status, that paying attention to someone's rank was something only shallow people did.
But turns out it's easy to be deluded about this if you've never experienced large power gaps I used to be convinced that I didn't care about status, attractiveness, etc - *I* paid attention to personality. I was a *good* person because only the inside mattered.
Turns out I was lying to myself. It's easy to, when everybody you meet is on the same general tier you are

early into my relationship with an ex we sat down and he went thru his darkest, weirdest porn folder and showed me stuff. id be like 'what's the hottest part about this thing' and he'd point out the parts that really did it for him. 1/ id ask clarifying questions, he'd explain. i started tryin to guess the hottest parts of more of his porn to see if i understood what he was into really well.
it was really wholesome and bonding, he was adorably shy about it. but i really loved seeing what he was into. 2/

it freaks me out a bit how extremely misguided economic opinions permeate so much of media for young people. I watch youtube and people will casually drop anti-landlord, anti-capitalist, etc. sentiment in completely unrelated videos. I really fear for voting shifts in the future normally i'd think uneducated economic activist opinions is a niche thing and if i'm seeing it then it's probably some selection bias, but it pops up in places i wouldn't expect to see it. And NO sane economic understanding is casually popping up in the same places.

as i've gotten to know more high-profile people, most are predictably quite great, but some of them have emotional issues, are mean, or live life in ways that are harmful to others.
im not sure how to handle this professionally? how do u figure out boundaries for association? there's a lot of cases that are sorta grey area, like I catch a glimpse of something going kinda nasty in their personal life, but it doesn't involve me at all, but now i'm seeing them at a profesh event or maybe should work with them on something and idk how to operate here

I was homeschooled for the entirety of my k-12 years, as well as were nearly all the other people i knew. Here's some of the pros and cons (of the specific version I got), how it seemed to work out for my other homeschooled friends, and if I'd homeschool my own kids: Cons: Your parents have a waaay bigger impact on your life. Good parents or bad parents, your variance is huge. I and some of my friends had abusive parents, and that was not great. Your parents get to control basically all cultural information you're exposed to.

As a sex worker online for over a decade, who's been closely watching how the sexy parts of the internet have changed, I have a theory for why this is happening.

https://twitter.com/paleonormie/status/1792325927852028327

Spaces for actual full sex/erotica have absolutely slowly been getting squeezed out. Tumblr banned porn, reddit removed porn from r/all even if you opt into seeing NSFW, fetish subreddits have been getting banned, more rules and restrictions are getting out on sexual behavior.

Ppl shit on poly for being explosive but I've been poly for 12 years and it was rough at first but it's really good now. It's an active, thriving delight in my life.
So here's some hard lessons i learned from mistakes, and some unexpected joys 1. don't date people who are partially open to monogamy. this results in partners dating other people who aren't full-throated yes to ENM, and this ends up with subtle grating pressures that have soooo many ways to go wrong. You want your metamours to be glad you're involved

i used to be pretty 'traumatized' in the classic sense - nightmares, difficulty sleeping, etc. Over the course of a 1-2 years I managed to fix nearly all of it. I used a lot of techniques - but one thing that was noticeably absent in my healing was psychological narrative. 1/ "My parents did x, now I'm like y", or "I'm really sensitive about this cause I subconsciously view you a parental figure" or "that time my uncle embarrassed me made me feel unsafe around men"
All that type of thinking? Basically completely useless for my healing.

some ppl I know are real fluid in business, agentic financial success, etc., but it took me *so long* to learn this. It was a foreign language.
here's my timeline of constant failures and dumb mistakes: im a teen in suburban farmland idaho in a lower-middle-class family, house for my family of 5 cost $130k, 1/5 people in the city have any sort of college degree. I'm homeschooled, as well as all my friends. Adults tell me that I can make my own business and im like ok lets do it

i know this isn't quite fair, but part of my brain just doesn't believe that non-fundamentalist christians are christian. My brain goes 'oh isn't that cute, you're larping religion, only deviating from secular culture in a few convenient instances of generic social conservatism' 'yeah, you read the bible and concluded that the way to think, act, and believe was almost exactly like the rest of your modern western secular culture (evolution being real, women's rights, wearing tank tops, etc) with a lil honey drizzle of 'praise jesus' ontop'

this is totally unreasonable but i sorta feel like it would be a soothing balm on my sexuality to tell someone my weirdest fetish and have them respond "oh yeah i've talked to 8 other ppl with that fetish, it's super cool, [bunch of diagnostic questions about the fetish]" i want someone to be completely unphased, i want them to have already been well exposed to the fetish and the subcategories, i want them to know it well enough to be able to ask interesting questions to get at the shape of it, and use other ppl like me they know for reference

I'm not sure if i have full autism; I seem to have some symptoms but not others. I have a hyperfixation on data collection. you have no idea how much data i have. most of it i hoard and never manage to get it out into the world.
I only occasionally get sensory overload tho i really hate the sensation of getting out of a shower, which is a big part of the reason i replace many of my showers with spot-washing.
but i seem to be able to do normal smiling and nodding stuff pretty convincingly?

i think most people are operating quite similar to me in life, but are in intense denial about it. I think a lot of the people accusing me of being weirdly robotic and evaluatory are also doing it too, but are so afraid of rejection that they hide it from themselves. I think I've got good self awareness, enough to know that my insides - and probably yours too - are a mismash of unflattering motivations. I suspect people acting horrified are just failing to be sufficiently self aware. I was also horrified by similar things pre-introspection

i'm not sure ppl properly appreciate the intense subjective experience of a woman making the decision to go into sex work.
It's not like she doesn't know society hates it. She's not stepping in blind or ignorant. Every woman knows exactly what it means, and chooses it anyway. 1/ As a kid in an abusive, extremely repressive household, I learned the skill of making cognitive decisions from a "rational" standpoint, and then coldly following through with that decision no matter what emotions kicked up as I powered through it.

One of the worst things about school is that it's extremely hard to see its terrible ripple effects. There's no contrast - there's Only Culture As Created By School, this is the default, the air you breathe, the movies you watch, the friends you make, the shorthand you use One basic example is that it's really weird that we socialize kids primarily, almost entirely, with other kids *of their own age*. Did you ever think that's weird? Abnormal for human history? Maybe it's got terrible downstream outcomes? Maybe it's really unhealthy?

the more i learn about statistics the more horrified i get at how much personal interpretive choice is at play at every step of the process. i came in expecting a hard science and feel like i'm getting slapped with way more art than i expected 'how do i know how many factors to run factor analysis for'
'idk people usually just do various amounts and squint at it and then do as many as just makes sense to you. if the factors start getting random-feeling then just don't use those'
excuse me what

Oh there is SO much involved in this you have no idea
Cause *every other girl* thinks the same thing. It's not just you posting, it's a flood of hot ladies posting on the same platform.
Take reddit, for instance. 1/

https://twitter.com/Flo133742069/status/1704178466508152860

If you are a hot girl and know nothing and go to reddit and just post a photo, the odds of this actually translating to subscribers (and not getting you banned from the sub, which is shockingly easy) is so low. You have to understand a few key things to do well 2/

one of my partners once was like 'you're not that pretty' during a tender moment
i rolled over in the fetal position and groaned for like an hour, and then he went and made me an im sorry card out of construction paper and markers and stickers

https://twitter.com/postboob/status/1698710827216359646

To be fair he said it in response to me mourning that ppl are not incentivized to be honest about each other's physical appearances, he was trying to be helpful by giving me his honest opinion since I wanted ppl to be more honest

@bashu_thanks @br___ian the only way you can 'not be that person' with grace is if you are acting 'from that person'; if some part of your soul has come to terms with it, you aren't recoiling from it; some part of you is and will always be that thing. @bashu_thanks @br___ian i don't trust people who are nice, kind, and selfless, if they don't have a part of their soul touching the pool of evil. If someone is acting nice, kind and selfless because they're terrified of that pool then I don't know them and they don't know themselves

Guys my "don't ask a woman out if you're gonna socially punish her for rejection" is the necessary flip side of me saying "men asking women out isn't bad, more men should hit on more women, you're not creepy, go for it"
...its not bad *if u don't punish her if she says no!* If I'm like "just ask ppl to borrow a lighter, it's really not a big deal, it's good to be clear about what you want, no shame in that" and then ur like ok, you go ask your friend for a lighter, they say no, and then you give them the cold shoulder and stop asking to hang out...i