The Earlier Papers, for Readers Who Are New Here

Before I go further into the more difficult parts of this paper, I want to pause and give context for readers who have not read the two earlier works that this one is quietly standing on top of, because while I do not want to fully re-summarize them (they are their own papers, with their own excessive lengths and their own personal rabbit holes, as is my way), I also do not want a new reader to feel like they have wandered into the third act of a story where everyone else already knows the character motivations. This paper is not a sequel in the strictest sense, but it is definitely a continuation of a thought process that started somewhere else. If I do not name those earlier stages clearly, then some of what follows may sound like I am making huge emotional leaps when, in reality, I am building from concepts I have already spent a lot of time sitting with.

The first relevant paper is Never Have I Ever: Kinks, which began, somewhat ironically and somewhat painfully, with my history around the party game “Never Have I Ever.” For most people, that game is treated as a harmless social ritual, a little circle of confession and teasing and “oh my gosh, you did what?” energy, where people reveal experiences and laugh about them and supposedly bond through the shared performance of having lived messy, interesting, socially legible lives. For me, especially as an aromantic asexual person who did not have the same relationship to sexuality, romance, drinking, social experimentation, or “wild” adolescence that others seemed to have, the game felt less like bonding and more like being slowly pushed into a spotlight I had never asked to stand under. Every prompt felt like a test of normalcy, and every abstention felt like proof that I was outside the circle everyone else was drawing together. A game with the main game mechanic encouraging “othering,” if you will.

That paper used “Never Have I Ever” as a doorway into a much larger discussion of autonomy, consent, sexual curiosity, and the strange experience of being sex-averse but not sex-incurious. I am aro-ace, and more specifically I would describe myself as sex-averse rather than purely sex-repulsed, which means that I have no desire to participate in sexual activity myself and often find the thought of being personally involved uncomfortable or actively off-putting, but that does not mean sexuality as a subject is uninteresting to me. In fact, it is often the opposite. I can be deeply curious about human sexuality in the way someone might be curious about an ecosystem they do not personally live in, observing the behaviors, structures, languages, rituals, and emotional meanings that other people attach to desire. I described myself there as something like a voyeur of human kink, not literally (because obviously violating people’s privacy would defeat the entire consent-centered point), but intellectually, aesthetically, narratively. I wanted to understand why people want what they want, how they construct intimacy, how fantasy works, how kink becomes meaning instead of merely sensation. That curiosity has always existed in tension with my own boundaries, and the tension is part of what makes it worth writing about.

The reason Never Have I Ever: Kinks mattered so much to this later healing journey is that it was the paper where I most clearly explored the idea of controlled exposure through a medium that gave me enough agency to stay present. The central object of that paper was Trials in Tainted Space, or TiTS, which is a text-based erotic sci-fi adventure game that, on paper, sounds like it should have been completely outside my comfort zone. It is explicit, strange, kink-heavy, sometimes absurd, often furry-adjacent or fully anthropomorphic, and generally the sort of thing that would have sent younger me running in the opposite direction if it had appeared without warning in a social context. But the crucial difference was that TiTS did not arrive as a social demand. It was not someone shoving something in my face, or pressuring me to laugh at a joke, or assuming I would be comfortable just because everyone else was comfortable. It was a game I could open or close. It was text I could read or skip. It was a system where I could save, reload, denylist mentally if not always mechanically, avoid characters, avoid scenes, pursue only the routes that felt safe enough, and retreat the second something touched the metaphorical hot stove.

That permissive opt-in is everything to me. TiTS worked for me not because it was tame, because again, absolutely not, but because it respected the one thing I need before I can approach anything frightening: autonomy. The game was structured around choice. It let me decide what kind of character Doe Steele would be, what she would do, what she would refuse, who she would help, who she would love, who she would avoid, and when something became too much, I could simply stop. The ability to stop was not a minor convenience; it was the condition that made exploration possible in the first place. In real life, so many of my difficult experiences around sexuality and relationships had come from feeling like the script was already written by someone else, and I was either expected to play along or become the problem. TiTS, strangely enough, gave me a universe where even the wildest content still had options. That sounds silly, maybe, but for someone like me, options are safety.

Through that game, and through the paper I wrote afterward, I found myself reflecting on relationship anarchy, especially the idea that relationships do not have to follow a default ladder of friendship to dating to exclusivity to marriage to whatever other milestones society has decided count as “serious.” Relationship anarchy gave me language for something I had already felt for a long time: that no relationship should be ranked or scripted automatically by category, and that the people inside a relationship should be the ones who decide what it is, what it means, and what commitments belong to it. In TiTS, through Doe Steele’s relationships with Amber, Shekka, Reaha, Bess, Pippa, Celise, and others, I could imagine a world where relationships were built as unique bonds rather than forced into one hierarchy. Some were sexual, some were parental, some were friendly, some were queerplatonic or adjacent to that kind of emotional category, some were simply supportive, and no single bond needed to erase or dominate the others. It was, in a fictional and obviously exaggerated form, a way of rehearsing the idea that intimacy can be negotiated rather than scripted.

The second relevant paper, Anti-Group Tendencies: Standing Apart from the Crowd, took some of those same themes and pulled them outward into a wider psychological pattern. Where Never Have I Ever: Kinks focused on sexual autonomy and controlled exploration, Anti-Group Tendencies focused on my lifelong resistance to group pressure, whether that pressure came from party games, social rituals, dating norms, fandoms, politics, apps everyone else was suddenly using, or any situation where a group seemed to be saying, explicitly or implicitly, “Come on, just do what everyone else is doing.” That paper was where I named my anti-group stance as both a shield and a scar, a kind of psychological reactance that activates when I feel my freedom is being threatened. The more I feel pushed, the more something in me pushes back, and while that can absolutely make me difficult in social contexts, it has also protected a core part of me that refuses to be absorbed into someone else’s expectations.

I compared that anti-group stance to radicalization not because I think they are morally equivalent, but because they seem to answer some of the same human needs in opposite directions. People need belonging, meaning, identity, structure, catharsis, and guidance. Some people find those things by fusing with a group, letting the group give them purpose and identity and a sense of being held inside something larger than themselves. I, historically, have tried to meet those needs by refusing fusion. If the radicalized self says, “I know who I am because I belong to this,” the anti-group self says, “I know who I am because I did not let that absorb me.” That can be empowering, but it can also be lonely, rigid, and exhausting, because being your own structure means you are also responsible for noticing when your structure becomes a cage.

So, for readers entering this paper without the earlier two, the vocabulary I am carrying forward is this: autonomy is not a preference for me so much as a psychological requirement; consent is not merely a yes/no at the beginning of an interaction but an ongoing, revocable, context-sensitive process; group pressure has often felt to me like a threat to selfhood, even when other people experience it as harmless fun; and controlled fictional exploration can sometimes create healing precisely because it lets me approach frightening subjects without surrendering agency. These ideas are not background decoration. They are the support beams under the rest of this paper.

What changes here is that I am no longer only talking about the safe version, the reflective version, the “look at this fascinating game mechanic and how it relates to relationship theory” version. I am also talking about the part that made the safe version necessary. The earlier papers showed that I could learn from sexuality and nontraditional relationships when the conditions were right, when I had distance and control and the ability to retreat. This paper asks why those conditions mattered so much in the first place, and why, even after all that learning, there are still certain concepts that make my body react viscerally and unavoidably.

In that sense, this paper is not rejecting the earlier ones. It is not saying, “Actually, none of that healing counted,” or “Actually, relationship anarchy was only ever a way to intellectualize something painful.” It is saying that both can be true. I can have genuinely learned from Never Have I Ever: Kinks. I can have genuinely clarified something important in Anti-Group Tendencies. I can believe, in a thoughtful and ethics-centered way, that people should be free to build relationships outside normative scripts when everyone involved is consenting, informed, and respected. And I can still have a visceral trauma response to certain multi-person sexual implications because intellectual acceptance and mental health are not the same thing.

The earlier papers are the proof that I am not approaching this subject from ignorance or simple moral disgust. I have thought about it. A lot. Possibly too much, because of course I have. I have written about it through games, through identity theory, through consent ethics, through anti-group psychology, through fictional families on starships, through metaphors about autonomy and belonging and the dichotomy of human need to both connect with others and remain ourselves. But this paper is where I turn back toward the part of me that still flinches, and instead of treating that flinch as a failure of the previous work, I want to treat it as part of the same story.

Healing did happen.

The alarm still exists.

Both are true, and the rest of this paper lives in that uncomfortable overlap.