Sky Rockets

I finally listened to some ASMR with headphones.  The idea is that it's a bunch of sounds that trigger a specific, unusual, positive feeling.  Without headphones, they don't work at all for me.  With headphones, I get it.  They still don't exactly work for me- the best I get is uncomfortable goosebumps and a dull sensation of what it's meant to be at the base of my skull.

The reason they don't work for me?  I know what it is, and there's a spot on the back of my head that triggers it when touched.  My reaction to that is involuntary and I'm not capable of triggering it myself.  So what the videos do is the same thing that happens when someone is standing too close behind me- makes me uncomfortable.  The videos that are literally someone rubbing stuff on a binaural microphone?  Not pleasant.  They can't actually trigger the sensation, they just act like they're going to.

This, of course, led me to hypnosis videos.  And then a particular subset of hypnosis videos.  The latter don't really work as hypnosis is probably meant to.  They did lead me to Google some interesting facts.

A couple years ago, I read Emily Nagoski's book, and one of the things it re-iterated over and over was that the female orgasm is normal, however it comes about as long as it isn't painful.  It stressed that female sexuality has always been seen as lesser compared to men's, mainly because it was studied by men and different indicated lesser.  I don't necessarily agree with this spin on it, but one of the things that the book addressed was the idea that the majority of women don't need medication for orgasm assistance, and stressed that it was OK if orgasm is a process.  What it never did was quantify that process.  There wasn't any, "this is typical," because the book really wants everything to be normal, so it doesn't attach numbers.

One of the things I noticed about the hypnosis videos was how long they were.  Why are they all twice as long as they need to be?  Turns out the reason for this is that length is considered about average.

I was married to someone who believed that I took too long.  I'm not sure what the women he was paying were doing (though I assume faking it), but it occurs to me suddenly that I may be one of the only people that experience could have worked for at all.

I suspect if I were truly interested in doing a lot of sexual exploration, all I'd need to do is put it about that I'd like to try several things, frequently, and I have certain skills and abilities that would make the experience worthwhile.  Except that I'm not ready to get to that point with just anybody just because.  It has, however, been a very long and boring year.