an apothiaroace nerd who has a lot of thoughts on intimacy and power. certified wholesome chungus millennial who loves good things and hates bad things. join me on my journey to make a version of kink that is enjoyable for me and me only since I'm allergic to 97% of what most of the community enjoys. you can follow if you like sex but be warned that this blog is deliberately impossible to fap to
This space caters to my comfort and my comfort only. I do not debate people. If you think I'm doing something wrong, please shut up about it, or alternatively, please send me your critiques in detail along with your location so I can begin planning the composition and placement of my next artistic depiction of the Glory.
This is a blog about the forms of kink-adjacent eroticism I enjoy. I do not identify as a member of the BDSM community. Why? Well, you see, I don't want to and you can't make me. Sorry, but you people can't tell me how to define myself anymore.
I originally intended for this to be a blog about things that make me feel good, absent any theoryposting or venting, and for the most part I've stuck to that intention. But when the way you experience the erotic is as differently wired as mine, some theoryposting is inevitable. I can't promise I'll keep it to a minimum, and I can't promise you won't be offended by me rubbing my filthy love-and-kindness-obsessed tenderqueer puriteen hands all over the concept of kink. C'est la vie, I guess.
Under the cut: content you can expect here, interaction boundaries, recommended reading.
What You'll See Here
I've broken my list of meanders into two categories: narrative interests, which are mostly genre fiction tropes about power and intimacy that I explore primarily through fiction, and non-narrative interests, which I explore in my interactions with the people I love.
Most of them, though, fall into one or more of the following broad categories:
Kindness from something that could squash me like a bug, or the inherent eroticism of being shown mercy
Allowing oneself to be changed by an encounter with something vast and beautiful
I want you inside me BUT NOT LIKE THAT
Mutually consented-to power structures as an accommodation for social/relational anxiety
Psychological play oriented towards collective healing outside of the medical establishment
Structured spaces in which my or another's personhood can be unavoidably acknowledged, centered, and experienced
Narrative interests:
Longtime friends of mine will note my interest in what TV Tropes calls Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
Mind/body sharing. Please listen to Give Me Away it is one of the things that inspired me to make this blog.
Telepathy more generally.
If you guessed from that list that I'm a koshlyta enjoyer you guessed correctly I love them so so much.
Subverting authoritarian dynamics towards a more caring form of partnership. I have an entire DS9 fanfic series about the Founders and the Vorta going through this process.
Eldritch beings. But I'm more of a Nyarlathotep type than a Cthulhu type — it's not about tentacles (though if it is for you that's valid and I love you) but about the way that proximity to such a being can warp and expand the mind. I Have Once More Seen The Glory shit, you know.
Religious elements, but I rolequeer and paganize the fuck out of it. Less "Catholic priest jorks it to your confession behind the screen" and more whatever is going on between those guys in The Hands of the Emperor.
Non-narrative interests
Mutual assisted gentle reparenting, WITHOUT anything that could be construed as ageplay. I know it's shocking that my partner and I incorporate elements of gentle parenting into our relationship while not pretending to be anything other than two unrelated adults, but I swear it's possible.
Energy work and magic. As I kind of alluded to with the religious elements thing up there, my spirituality is inherent to how I experience intimacy, and I love the intimacy of doing witchcraft with or to someone.
Related to the above point, trip guiding. Entheogens (mostly weed as it's what I have the most access to) are an important part of my and my partner's spiritual practice and you really need to trust that someone will be responsible and keep you completely safe if you're going to let them guide you through an entheogenic experience. If you want to consider this a kind of nonsexual intox play I won't stop you but I don't particularly share that opinion as the point is to not manipulate someone, even within a shared fiction. (I had an abusive roommate in 2024 who very much did use this manipulatively so I will probably not be trusting anyone with this except my partner for the foreseeable future.)
Being cared for. Especially when I've burnt myself out trying to do too much, as is often the case. I occasionally need someone to sit me down and make me let them take care of me. How many dark edgy 2dom4u motherfuckers will I make angry if I call this CNC caretaking?
Service as a skill, or maybe as a motivator to improve certain skills. I just know I get better at things faster when I'm doing them out of love and loyalty to someone I know cares for me.
Following from above, Montessori style feedback. Once you experience the joys of detailed, specific encouraging feedback focused on continuous improvement, you'll never go back to conventional praise and punishment again.
Interaction Boundaries
Do Not Interact: ageplay, raceplay, incest, or "breaking"/orientation/detrans play blogs
Can interact, but don't follow unless I follow first: sex-centric kink blogs
Can interact and follow, but I probably won't follow or interact back: nonsexual kink blogs that focus overly on pain, discipline, or obedience
Please do interact: nonsexual kink blogs that like soft kind things. I am begging you there ain't enough of us in the world
I do not consent to strangers initiating any kind of play with me and will probably not initiate it with anyone else. I'm not looking for partners, just trying to make my existing relationships better.
Policy on minor interactions: This might get me some shit, but I honestly do not care if some sixteen year old reads my blog. I was curious at sixteen too. The difference is that there weren't people talking about what I'm talking about back then, and the ideas I encountered instead led me to get groomed into a relationship I wasn't ready for (and which would have been abusive regardless.) That being said, don't try to talk to me. I'm not comfortable taking on the responsibility of helping you navigate your relationship to all of this. If I can safely give you one piece of advice it's to not put any of the ideas you read about here into practice until you're at least 18 or ideally at least 25. I know everyone tells you you aren't ready for anything, and I know it feels insulting, but take it from someone who has been hurt in ways I'm still recovering from by engaging in conventional kink before I was ready — you aren't ready. Meandering isn't inherently safer than conventional kink just because it's safer for me.
been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter
Please keep making art. Please make it for yourself. Please don’t let everything become even more of the same flat general appeal nonsense that doesn’t seem to have anything to say
My partner and I were discussing our equally negative experiences on the dominant and submissive sides of the kink scene and it's crazy how it's basically "I got chased out for saying I like being nice to people" "Lol I got chased out for saying I like when people are nice to me"
BDSM enjoyers will say it's not about cruelty, then take "I don't like cruelty" as a personal attack.
Well, we're just going to leave you to it. Our own thing is better and makes us happier than trying to fit into that mold ever did.
the popularity of posts like this demonstrate fr how so many relationships aren't built on the respect for the interior of the other person, their mind and thoughts. the other person exists for making you feel good about yourself. all these posts basically say "your reaction to me is proof that I am sexually attractive, being sexually attractive makes me feel good about myself, and thus this is a good relationship/dynamic I want to keep going." sometimes it goes a little further if the person they want this positive reinforcement from is also sexually attractive. to them that's an even bigger boost. you self-objectify and objectify the other person. being in a relationship for a lot of people is just trying to recreate fantasies that prop up their ego, not actually trying to be in relation to another human being.
Okay, so, I keep iterating on this and I feel like I explain it better every time I do, so please be patient as I explain my psychological fucking problems for the seventieth time.
When BDSM is being done ethically, it is a way for a person to feel in control without actually exerting control, or a way for a person to feel helpless without actually being in danger. This is an uncontroversial and fair statement I think everyone agrees with, though it's probably surprising to some of my audience that I agree with it.
There are also many peripheral benefits to BDSM activities for people who enjoy them — when one is first exploring it, one hears a lot about trust, vulnerability, and communication. People who truly enjoy BDSM say it connects them to themselves in a more powerful way than anything else in the world does. I once read an interview with an extreme masochist who said the first time they ever felt human was the first time they saw their own blood. I am a self-actualization junkie, and in favor of whatever helps people self-actualize, whether or not I would personally enjoy it.
However, there is a type of person who cannot get conventional BDSM results from conventional BDSM activities. I make no attempt to define the boundaries of this class, because every thing that makes me a part of it is something you can find all over the scene. It's not asexuality in general or repulsion specifically — plenty of asexuals, including repulsed asexuals, enjoy BDSM. It's not survivor status — I've met very few genuine BDSM enjoyers who did not also have some kind of sexual trauma, and many who found that participating in the scene helped them take control of their narrative. It's not disability or neurodivergence or experience with misogyny/intersexism/transphobia or even the combination of all the things I listed. But it is all of those things for me, and the result of them is that psychosexual terror is one of the most dreadful things I can experience and the culture and milieu of BDSM is essentially designed from the ground up to provoke it in me.
I cannot interact with BDSM without feeling two things: that I am being forced into a submissive role, and that whoever the dominant party is wants to hurt me in a way that will have serious consequences for how I see myself and the world I live in. In essence, for some reason, BDSM as a culture and set of activities makes me anticipate trauma. I've given up trying to figure out why.
But my style of intimacy resembles it more than it resembles a "vanilla" relationship (a term I hate for its implicit sex-centricity. You never hear anyone talking about "vanilla friendship", though maybe we should.) I enjoy playing with the concepts of belonging and guidance and mercy and vulnerability and how people see each other, and I feel most like myself when I'm doing it in ways that make sense to me.
As an example of a way that makes sense to me: I've been having a lot of thought spirals over how others see me lately, so last night I made an open offer to my partner to be his first ever human photographic subject. I asked him to do it because maybe if I'm able to see myself through his eyes, I'll stop worrying about how I look to other people. To me, this registers as an intensely erotic ceding of control over my own image and self-perception, and certainly not something I'd trust just anyone with. To others, this wouldn't even register as being at all connected to anything they'd consider kink unless I was nude, tied up, in lingerie, or in some ridiculous roleplay costume.
Meandering can be thought of, but is not exclusively defined as, adaptive kink. Kink for people who are allergic to 99% of its ingredients. The sunflower butter of kink. Maybe it's unpopular because no community which has branded itself as a welcoming place for all proclivities has ever taken kindly to anyone saying they feel unwelcome in it. But it's not like it's their fault (except when it has been) — we just like to play different games.
getting characters into world-endingly intense codependent queerplatonic relationships is literally what life is all about. it is literally what we were put here on this earth to do
I actually don’t post on tumblr at all, sorry! My account is mostly just for me trying to find thoughts like yours and random things like stimboards, lol
I’m sorry about your experience with your roommate. I’ll have to look more through this blog sometime. I’m glad you’re in a better place now. It’s really nice reading from people who formulate their thoughts on these topics well… I’m not sure if I would be ready or comfortable to contribute there atm, but I wish you the best with it, truly
I see your point of view and wouldn't want to force you to do anything you aren't comfortable with.
However, please don't hesitate to reach out to this blog with any questions, comments, personal experiences, or thoughts you'd like to share. Nothing is built in isolation, especially not something like this, and the body of work I'm building will stagnate if it's only me deciding what deserves to be talked about. Your thoughts and experiences matter just as much as mine.
I just want to thank you for existing. I only realised today you’re also TrustedCompanionship. There aren’t enough people who think like you out there. I’m autistic, plural, polyamorous, and also trying to navigate BDSM alternatives. You make me stronger. Thank you…
Yeah lol that was my first attempt at creating the kind of space I'm trying to create here. A lot has happened since I made that blog (including a really awful situation with a now ex roommate who tried to manipulate me using many of the ideas I expressed there, which led to me having to extensively rethink how I express said ideas) but I think I finally know what I'm doing well enough to try to start building community.
Incidentally, there is a tumblr community that hasn't gotten off the ground yet, if you'd like to hop on that. It would make my year if people started posting there.
This post is not meant as a serious or scholarly analysis of Octet, and it's not supposed to be relevant to anyone but me — it's me journaling the thoughts Octet brings up in me as a kink-adjacent person who has very different ways of relating to kink than most people due to my asexuality and survivor status. Unless Octet fans enjoy this post, in which case it was meant to be serious analysis and I absolutely meant for it to be applicable to people who aren't me. Please don't hurt me
The OG rolequeers had a refrain they loved to repeat — "you can have hot sex with other submissives without involving a dom" — that I've long taken as part of the sex-centric bathwater I've had to carefully drain from rolequeer to save the gloriously anti-authoritarian baby at the heart of it, but watching Octet through a meandery lens helps me conceptualize what that means for me as a person who hates sex and whose ways of playing with power involve very little dominance or submission.
The subtext of Octet is that every Friend of Saul (except Velma who has no idea what to expect) has chosen to engage in a humiliating, embarrassing, but ultimately edifying activity in which they commit to complete and total vulnerability for the duration of the experience, with the goal of not just kicking the habit of compulsive internet use but of reshaping their epistemology around technology and reality itself. The activities of the support group would certainly not be considered BDSM, but they can be understood as a type of erotic (as defined by Audre Lorde) play in which the mutual ceding of social power takes center stage.
All of the songs are diegetic. Within the universe the story gives us, we are shown that these people explicitly come to this group to sing incredibly vulnerable choral songs about their destructive habits and mental illness complexes, with no musical accompaniment, in the name of mutual healing. They learn a metaphorical framework for their experiences that is religiously kept to within the confines of the meeting, which enables them to talk about their experiences in a way that respects, rather than trivializes, the harm that their compulsions have done to them. They take weird drugs together and have some kind of shared astral journey. In short, every person in the group is choosing to throw off social respectability and all the protection that comes with it, to put themselves at the mercy of their fellow attendees, to choose to trust that their vulnerability will be cradled gently by those they're exposing it to.
And no one is in charge.
(Well, there's Paula. But she's more of a referee than a player in this game, and she seems to mostly be there to make sure the itinerary is followed.)
I don't have a big sweeping conclusion I just. Get a lot out of this musical in a very specific way. Uh. Sorry.
oh you wanna watch octet by dave malloy with captions ??????? literally just click this link its on youtube .........
(if you are seeing this and do not know what octet by dave malloy is it is an a capella chamber choir commentary on our relationship with technology and the internet and its GOOD !!!! very inchresting please watch )
synopsis : a meeting of the internet addicts support group 'Friend of Saul ' held in a church basement . All the characters represent a caricature of an issue for example gambling , pornography , gaming , etc . Every character / song also represents a card from the major arcana tarot deck !
(PSSSST !!!! I ALSO MADE SOME KEYCHAINS YOU CAN BUY HERE !!! )
Ohhh the fantasy of all your bones being put into one of those ultrasonic cleaning baths they use for jewelry. All the pain coming clouding out like dirt. Then carefully reassembled and joints oiled and then it would all just work perfectly and painlessly...
Like, I know that's not what's wrong with me but I think we should try just to be sure
A young girl has just started at a new school. At recess on the first day, a boy shows her around the playground, which is split into four sections, each with a band of greenspace between them.
"Each section of the playground has a different game in it," he says. "That one's got a basketball court, there's tetherball over there, that one's got a track for relay races, and we play foursquare on this one."
The girl is flummoxed. At her old school, there was a couple of courts on the playground, but most of it was occupied by a play structure, and there was also plenty of green space to explore. "But what if I want to, you know, just run around and play?" she asks in confusion.
"I guess that's allowed," he says, "but no one ever does it."
She decides she's going to do it. Over the next few days, she plays in the greenspace, inventing her own games and creating beautiful works of art with sticks and leaves. A couple of new friends join her, and they discover together that they like the easygoing atmosphere and cool shade of the greenspace a lot more than they like playing competitive organized sports in the hot sun.
But one day, the boy who showed her around rolls up with a bunch of his friends and tells her that she and her friends don't belong there, that officially speaking the greenspaces aren't even part of the playground, and that anyway, they're all crazy and weird for wanting to do something outside the Four Approved Activities™ of basketball, relay races, foursquare, and tetherball.
The girl goes to her teacher, who tells her that none of those rules exist. Then she goes to the principal, who tells her the same thing. After much persuasion, she's able to take this question to the school board themselves, who don't just tell her the regulations don't exist, but also look at her like she's growing a second head and patronizingly tell her to run along and stop bothering the grown-ups.
At every step, she asks "So can you do something about these bullies who keep chasing me out of the greenspace?" and at every step, she is told by the authority figures in the situation "You belong here too! Just be strong and confident and don't back down!"
But it does nothing to change the situation — she has a space she enjoys existing in, where she can do what she likes doing, and nothing is being done about the people who are trying to push her out of it on a daily basis.
This is a post about what kinksters do to people with too many hard limits.
project hail mary is meanderer culture @meanderposting - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
