on seeing, being seen, and performative sexualities

from 2025-04-13
by hexeaktivitat

some personal thoughts on visibility and paranoia

something that usually gets at me a lot is the constant sense of Being Seen. some of this comes from complex childhood traumas (thanks mom, helps a lot), some of this comes from being adjacent to online communities with a known habit of stalking and doxxing people, some of this comes from having had a very minor taste of being a Source for Information on the Internet once upon a time. these things are very far behind me, but a lot of the latent paranoia and sense that I need to be constantly looking behind my back remains.

this manifests itself in physical spaces in very specific ways:

on online spaces, though, it comes out as a constant fear of someone being Upset at Something I Did or Said Online. it's rejection sensitive dysphoria, but with the backing of some deep-set paranoid thoughts magnifying every possible thing I do or don't do online into the wrong thing to do or not do that will give me severe real-life repercussions.

none of these things have ever happened to me, of course, but it doesn't stop the fear of One Day, They Will.

the spectre of 'sexuality' has entered the room

Screenshot from Gabriel Dropout. Raphiel Shiraha Ainsworth is holding up a bible, causing Satanichia Kurumizawa McDowell to suffer PICTURED: author (right) holding up a ward to unsuspecting readers who might be mildly surprised to see sex show up in this post topic (left)

very much adjacent to this is my relationship with my body and sexuality and how that manifests itself. I've been very much on the complex side of sexuality, having a largely asexual disposition but having a really keen interest in sex and sexual expression as an activity. I didn't really have a super religious or conservative upbringing, but I can definitely feel that I've been affected by sexual repression on some level. this is something I've been working on in 2025, trying to unmesh the fear that underpins a lot of my sexuality and sexual expression.

historically, the thought of having my somewhat public self associated with the more private sexual self has been a key driving factor of a lot of these paranoid fears that stem from the fear of being seen: someone is going to having an unwanted Anime Tity placed in front of their eyes, and they will be upset, and judge me, and loathe me, and write opprobrium about me, etc etc etc. there is a point in time in which this fear is somewhat genuine, where the pressures of polite culture dictate that talking about Sex is something you do in nuanced critique and academic language, not pressing a button that lets all of your followers and cohort see that you enjoy Patchouli Knowledge's noncanonical bust size a healthy amount.

Character portraite sprite of Patchouli Knowledge from The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil fig. A: Patchouli Knowledge, with flat chest, from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (2002), as drawn by ZUN

the thing is, even when that was a reasonable thing to have to mind, it really isn't. even just the thought of it goes against the actual core belief I have that who fuckin' cares what someone's sexual proclivities are?. I sure as hell don't care if I see someone like something with a sexual connotation, nor do I think that they're putting it in front of me because they're inescapably horny at that very specific moment. I sure as hell spend a lot of time looking at heavily erotic and sexual images without a single iota of hormonal uptick, just acknowledgement that it's aesthetically pleasant to look at and other people should know that, the same way I might share an article that I haven't really read because it might be relevant to the interest of someone who sees it later.

other forms of reluctance at being seen

another thing that specifically holds me back with regards to this specific paranoia of being seen is that I have a pretty wide spectrum of interests and I use social media in very specific ways that deliberately go against the nature of being a person with a monointerest in one specific topic and only focusing on that. if someone follows me because I put out some music at some point, I worry they don't also want any number of other interests of mine: literature, anime, music outside the genre I record, video games, science fiction, history, media criticism, software development, whatever. it's been very difficult for me to try to be a person with a singular interest, or be in singular interest spaces. in fact, I'd argue that a lot of my current crisis state comes from invisible and unintentional pressure from my job to be a monointerest and exclude all the fields listed above.

I talked about sexuality first, and I think it's standing in for the entire feeling of having to try and package myself down into an easily digestible sound bite for the consumption of other humans, the corporeal manifestation of a blurb. if I can't even vaguely feel comfortable sharing a different interest than someone might know me by without fear of being judged, then the deeply personal aspect of individual sexuality is going to take the brunt of damage since it's at least plausible that someone who likes video games might also like Borges.

there's a lot of other fears at being pre-judged by others based on whatever I say that usually leads me to be incredibly taciturn about myself and reluctant at best to talk about what I genuinely like because of a fear of being stereotyped or pigeonholed into a singular stereotypical box that holds no possibility of expressing the complex whole that my existence is. I'm working on several angles of attack on this particular problem at the moment, but it's good, I think, to acknowledged the interconnected nature of everything

is there a point to all this

not really, this entire post is an excuse to give myself permission to reskeet anime boobs on bluesky.

that's a lie, it's to reflect on why I think I need to give myself permission and an excuse to reskeet anime boobs on bluesky.