What I’m reading vol. 4½ — Devon Price

This post quotes writing about sex and kinks.

In the last roundup post I linked to a piece by Devon Price. I was not aware of him before coming across a link to that piece myself but he seems to be quite a prolific writers. I’ve been going through some of his pieces and not only are they very interesting but they also speak to my own experiences in many ways as well, though quite different in others. I am being deliberately unspecific here about which parts are which, but I wanted to just link to a few more of his pieces and would just generally recommend reading his writing I think.

Common Phases of Accepting You’re Autistic

The questioning phase is perhaps the most challenging one to move forward from — because to openly declare that you have a mental disability is to immediately call your own capacity to understand and interpret things into question. If other people can’t see how much you’re suffering, they will accuse you of being crazy and faking it. If they can see your struggles, they’ll accuse you of being too crazy to understand those struggles yourself.

The Asexual Fetishist

There’s nothing especially alluring to me about any type of body, or any type of face. The idea grabbing a dick or cupping a pert ass feels a bit formal, as if I were examining a purebred at a dog show. I can recognize the differences between one type of person and another, and even recognize the qualities that someone else might like, but to me all these gradients just dissolve into a bland field of fleshy sameness.

I’m equally bored by the mechanics of sex: the motions and stimulations bring me absolutely no pleasure. An attractive and attentive stranger could rub the correct spots on my body for hours, with the exactly right pressure and speed, and I’d only feel hollow if the experience weren’t also combined with some mind-controlling mantras or a swinging pocket watch.

Hypnosis is sex to me. Even in its most stagey and sterile forms, I find it inescapably erotic — and that leaves sex itself as just some boring party trick. You can touch me, or you can perform a series of backflips in front of me on the floor; either way I’ll tell you that you’ve done a very impressive job and all but it will not make me cum.

A Non-Disposable Place

That’s one thing that people don’t talk about, when they complain about landlords: how much disregard for your surroundings that renting breeds in you. It’s not only that the owner of your building never cleans the pipes. It’s also that you have no reason to feel invested in the pipes’ long-term functioning, and every reason to feel bitter about the thousands of dollars you’re already wasting on a broken building each year.