Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
Not that many years ago, I was attracted to "masculine" men. Long hair was gross; if a dude wore a skirt this made my vagina shrivel into sand. Then I joined a culture where masculine signalling was done differently - skirt wearing and long hair were *countersignalling* - 1/
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
done as subtle social evidence that these men were so confident in their power that they could wear a skirt and still be high social status and attractive - similar in theory to how rich people sometimes wear very distressed/ill fitting clothing. After this, my experience of 2/
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
masculinity changed in a way I didn't know it could. Now I'm basically *only* attracted to men who feel comfortable presenting feminine - this indicates that they're stronger and more powerful than the men who would would lose status by presenting feminine, and strength is manly.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
But my point here is something else - I'm recounting an experience of sexuality, of culture, attraction, gender, and presentation going through a deep shift for me after I found different cultural norms. It turns out very old and ancient sexual patterns can take a myriad of 4/
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
unusual new forms; there's lots of different ways to represent strength/submission/loyalty/power. I think the people who are absolutely convinced that no good man would ever marry a "whore" are failing to understand the variety of ways culture can treat the same principles. 5/
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Monogamy/trad stuff is a 'stable setup' - there's a set of norms and expectations that makes things predictable and workable. But there's lots of other 'stable setups' - and it can be really hard to understand how it works if you haven't seen it up close, just like how I didn't 6
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
get how some of my female friends could possibly stand their partners sometimes wearing makeup, before I entered that culture and realized the signals actually meant quite different things than I thought. Promiscuity culture can be extremely stable, and there's norms inside it.7/
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
The trad perspective of promiscuity culture is absolutely *not* how promiscuity culture actually works. Promiscuity culture signals mean very different things than they mean in traditional communities, but trad people see those signals, misinterpret, and get horrified. 8/
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
For me, a man in a skirt meant weakness, but when it started meaning strength, I was attracted. The signals change, but the values underneath remain stable. The values underneath promiscuity culture are surprisingly similar to the values underneath trad culture, imo.
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Apologetically Anonymous
@Songbir95377759
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
This just makes me think of the kind of people who do weird, outrageous stuff all the time and get praised for 'being themselves' while it could just as well be a lashing out of insecurity about who or what they are and desperate cry for attention. What I'd call 'weakness'.