Just A Setting On The Dryer
- Posted on
- By L
Kinky is actually a setting on MY dryer.
I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying “Normal is just a setting on the dryer” or "just a setting on the washing machine", meaning you shouldn’t concern yourself with fitting in too much, since there is no real standard or normal or average way that one “should” be. This same ethos applies to sex and kinkiness tenfold- external pressure should never dictate what kind of sex you think you should be having.
You’ve certainly heard people talking about how unrealistic porn is by now, and no surprise there- it is absolutely true. Porn is a manufactured representation of sex and sexuality specifically catered to the eroticism and fetishization of the viewer- if it doesn’t serve to titillate the watcher, it isn’t included. Which makes for a deeply impersonal and vastly unrealistic relationship with sex, especially relating back to one’s own body. This is not to say porn is bad- erotic content is extremely important both in human history and in current culture. But it is important to remember that it is just that- erotic content. In the same way that action movies show people doing quadruple backflips over exploding cars, you shouldn’t expect yourself to do a quadruple backflip over an exploding car every time you cross the street. It’s okay to joke and laugh, to take breaks, to have to slowly work your way up to something, to stop abruptly, anything of the sort. You shouldn’t start roleplaying as the sex version of yourself who only likes porn sex (unless, of course, you’re into that).
In a similar vein, a lot of us are made to feel like our bodies, especially our genitals, are weird or gross or not enough. For those with penises it’s often about size, and for those with vaginas it’s about nearly everything you can think of- colour, shape, size, smell, taste, etc. It’s dangerously easy for someone to be convinced that their genitals are weird or ugly because they deviate from the Eurocentric nigh-pedophilic standard that most genitals are held to. I had a friend who for most of their adolescence was convinced they had to get plastic surgery on their labia to make it look “normal”, and was dissuaded from doing so by the first time they had sex with someone, they apologized about having weird genitals profusely, only for their partner to say “Looks normal to me?” It’s truly the mind-killer to think you have something fundamentally wrong with you- I promise that you don’t.
If you clicked on this thinking it would be advice about laundry, well… sorry to disappoint. The only advice I have on that front is that you don’t have to wash your clothes on a warm or hot setting unless you’re disinfecting them from something specific- for regular dirt and grime on clothes, a cold wash is perfectly fine.