#kiss repulsion

[kyanitedragon]

Looking back, me being unknowingly aromantic, kiss-repulsed, and with a strong mentality to keep my boundaries respected, was hilarious.

Because all the time I would tell myself:

"If my boyfriend tried to kiss me, I'd break up with him."

Can't even imagine the reaction I would have gotten if I ever said that aloud to an allo.

[tyrannuspitch]

and to be clear my point is not that kissing is sexual and therefore it needs to be subject to intense sex negativity or that kissing is a kink and therefore people who are into it really are freaks and are doing something immoral by not treating it as a shameful secret. it's just the hypocrisy. i want to remind people that, a, even the most "vanilla", "normative" cishet sexuality includes a lot of bizarre things unrelated to procreation too, and b, that these things are considered *mandatory* and *exceptions* are made for them - where other sexual acts of similar intensity would be considered inappropriate for children, for public, etc, kissing is considered universally appropriate. compulsory sexuality and sex negativity go hand in hand. you're a freak if you have a fetish that isn't on the good fetish list, but you're also a freak if you DON'T have the fetishes on the good fetish list - and suggesting that these are, in fact, fetishes and not some magical transcendent act of sheer Love and Humanity itself shocks, confuses and angers people. we can (now) recognise a forced kiss as sexual assault, but people still try to argue that kissing doesn't "really count" as a sexual act. because sex is dirty and adult and shameful, but kissing comes from fairytales. what do you MEAN it's an interaction of orifices and exchange of bodily fluids intended to cause arousal? that's so reductive, and heartless, and honestly disgusting, i can't imagine what kind of person would say that. it's MAGICAL.

[alloarostuff]

Shout out to kiss repulsed alloaros, we're valid as hell

[tyrannuspitch]

kissing is officially OUT no more smooching no more snogging mouth kink freaks have had LONG ENOUGH in the sun. no-one wants to see your saliva any more! keep that shit in the bedroom, weirdo! it's time for some OTHER band of perverts to determine the universal mandatory action symbolic of all romantic-sexual relationships. get your votes in now for a chance to see YOUR bizarre fetish in every book show and movie ever made no matter the plot tone or target demographics!!! will a thousand songs and poems recall the sweet, innocent, magical first time they sniffed a teenage crush's armpit? will couples start sealing their wedding vows by ingesting each other's hair? only you can decide!!!

[tyrannuspitch]

truly cannot put into words how quietly weird it is to be kiss-repulsed and alloromantic. people talk about sex-repulsion but no-one ever talks about kiss repulsion. even though kiss repulsion is going to be a deal-breaker for an *even higher* number of people, and you have to mention it pretty much *immediately* if you don’t want your date to feel misled. 99 times out of 100 i will be immediately incompatible with any potential partner for this reason alone. 

and because kissing is such an ingrained part of society, because it is *the* defining symbolic act of romance, i find myself forgetting that i literally cannot do it! all the time! society has not given me a framework for romantic feelings beyond “what if we kissed uwu” so i default to that in the abstract, but the moment i consider any of the reality of it, my skin crawls. even when i’m actively invested in a romance in a film/show i normally have to look away and take out my headphones when they kiss. at best, i tolerate it. and yet my mind just keeps wandering back because it has nowhere else to go.

and the thing is... in our society romance is fundamentally and inescapably “about kissing”, but my kiss repulsion is not even about romance. i’m not aro-spec. it’s not trauma. i’m literally just autistic. (and i’m equally repulsed by non-romantic kissing! when i was little i used to scream whenever my parents kissed me on the cheek. i still dread seeing some of my grandparents because i’m “not allowed” to refuse that greeting.) 

this is just one tiny part of my sensory issues, and in a vacuum it should barely mean anything, but instead it’s alienating on a life-changing level. genuinely surreal.

[neshatriumphs]

HBO gives me far too many unnecessary kiss scenes and I hate it. 😭

[bottomoftheriverbed]

Somehow it's taken me this long to realise that the reason that I find forehead/cheek/hand kissing to be so much more intimate than lip kissing is because I'm (lip) kiss repulsed. If I had a brain...