Anna's fantasy / What makes us weird / The establishment and being normal

When she came back, Anna/Dana had a transparent blouse that from which her nipples were clearly visible and the short miniskirt with panties of different color. “So what do you like… in sex?” she said the last part after I sat silent for a few seconds (although her looks provided enough context for her question, even for me. “The… Part… Where… I… Cum…”, I said and I became silent again, realizing that what I said sounded like a stupid joke, although I was actually trying to be serious. “OK. For example… What’s your favorite category of porn sites?” she asked, and when I began blushing she began encouraging me “Yes, tell me what are you thinking about right now?”

But I didn’t tell her, and so she took the lead and started describing a sexual fantasy of hers which I am not sure I remember clearly as it was it was pretty complex, but which began something like this: Dana wakes up at the seashore after taking a part of a ship wreck. She is naked, except for a bra (she had this whole backstory that justified this). Soon she is captured by a tribe of ingenious people who plan to use her as a sex slave, but she somehow realizes this and comes up with a counter plan - to seduce the members of the tribe and turn them into sex slaves instead. And via a long series of sex, backstabbing and mind games (although a little chaotic, her plot was probably more structured than the narrative you are reading right now) she becomes the princess of the tribe.

She got immersed within that fantasy for seconds and started teasing me and then making me touch her, constantly getting in and out of character. The whole situation seemed funnier (and therefore much less weird) than I might have expected. Maybe it was because it all reached the level of weirdness after which you couldn’t expect anything. Or perhaps it was because it is not really our quirks that makes us weird, but our inability to accept them and to show them to the world, the fear that we might be misunderstood. Fear that was, obviously, totally well-grounded, but also illogical, as we are always misunderstood. It is this fear which actually is the sole reason why the very concept of the perverse exists. This fear of exposing yourself, that makes you hide, betray, even remove this part of you which you actually hold dearest. This fear that makes us make up explanations like “I went crazy for a while, this is not who I am, this is just a little deviation in my behavior, this is Dana.”

This is what I thought first, but then while I was sitting with her, trying out a fantasy of mine (my dream where my maths teacher has sex with me to reward me for my awesome work on the end-of-year test) the distinction between the perverse and the vanilla seemed to me superfluous, as did the distinction between alcohol and marijuana which originally tempted me to try the latter. It seemed that it existed only so to provide ground for some people to feel bad, or rather for the opposite party to feel good. And if not “good”, then at least “protected”. My memory shifted to several of my classmates who at ninth grade were already preparing for university exams and were starting to prepare their portfolio for when they apply at Facebook or Google (or, create a startup, for the more adventurous) - they were the biggest assholes ever, but nobody was able to say a thing about them as they were carrying the doctrines of the establishment like an armor. They were “vanilla”.

Like, when I was little and I asked my father (and nowadays parents are the ultimate voice of the establishment) why it’s wrong to smoke pot, he told me that as a respectable member of society, I cannot be seen doing it. And so I have two options - I would either have to drop it at some point, which would be painful for me, or keep it a secret and live some kind of double life, but he clearly was most afraid of the third option which he didn’t mention - that I might decide not to be a respectable member of society, that I might deviate further and I would integrate this habit into my life and exhibit it in a way that would normalize it in the eyes of some people and, by doing so, normalize myself as well, making the deviation an integral part of myself (and therefore not a deviation at all), and feeling good about it, and the only downside would be that I would make some people uncomfortable. He never mentioned that option because I would have asked him what’s wrong with it and he would have to lie and say that it’s not good to make people uncomfortable, but both of us would know that the worst thing about it was that it would make himself uncomfortable, something about which there was no way around.

And the case with Anna was a similar (if you replace marijuana with being kinky) — I am sure that she was way more insecure than she should be, because her parents were more assertive. But again, why was it so? Perhaps the distinction between the vanilla and the perverse was just an invention of the established. Perhaps it was there just to enable some people to obscure the choices that they are making and to make it seem like they are making no choice at all, that they did what they did just because that’s the way it is done in principle. Why were they were doing it really? To buy some comfort, like how catholic priests were offering rich people eternal salvation for a few gold coins - it is lame but it is better than nothing, especially if you already have the coins. That last thought struck me as some kind of revelation - the distinction between vanilla and perverse, between normal and weird wasn’t only an invention of the establishment - it gave birth to the establishment — the ultimate way to exert power over someone, was to make yourself the “normal” one in the face of others and them, the “weird” one, the deviating one.

I abandoned my thoughts, or rather I left them be, without actually engaging with them. I put my hand on Anna/Dana’s butt and pulled her body towards mine. We continued with our roleplay, but were doing so in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner, as if we were parodying the way we talked just before. I undressed, (I was fully-clothed while she was naked for at least half an hour) and I started rubbing her pussy, getting more and more horny. I looked at her face, fearing that I was making her uncomfortable, but she actually looked calmer than when I was clothed. And then she started caressing my body end encouraging me to have sex with her “OK, let’s get on with it”, “OK, now put it in!”, and the thought that I was about to do that, that we are about to start having sex was so arousing that it actually made me finish, by spraying my sperm all around her pussy and belly, all the way up to her titties. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them in this brief second of clarity that you experience right after you cum, (among other occasions) all my thoughts from before came back to me, but transformed in a way where all the tension from them was removed - the issues that I saw seemed like non-issues. The paradoxes, which before that seemed daunting right now just seemed like a mere curiosities.

“What are you thinking about?”She asked me once she stopped laughing. The question made me uncomfortable at first, but when I came to my senses I decided to just tell her everything “It seems like the concept of vanilla, like vanilla sexual taste, only exists so some people to obscure the choices that they are making and make it seem that they made no choice at all. In other words’ that their decisions are not really decisions and they are not being deliberate. But they actually are! Because if you really are acting spontaneously, if you aren’t being deliberate about your choices, they are actually non-choices. So it wouldn’t actually matter how they (your choices) look to other people.”

“Hm, then, shouldn’t it be easy to make them?” Anna asked.

I told her that Cathy had told me the exact same thing earlier today, thinking that I would make her happy, but she didn’t care and dismissed the conversation.

After that, I remembered that we were having sex (or were about to anyways) and I started apologizing to her that she didn’t finish. She quickly told me that she’d actually reached a climax several times during our foreplay, which made me feel really weird - I simultaneously had my confidence boosted because I succeeded to make a woman orgasm without even touching her while I was also made insecure by the fact that I apparently wasn’t at all aware about my partner’s state during the act. “I don’t think you did.” I said half-jokingly and then I offered to lick her pussy so she understands the difference, which she accepted.

The knapsack problem How to write a book / P and NP / leaving home

Meeting my roommate Alex / Picking friends / Who am I / How switching places would solve both of our issues

Hallway Church and Turing / Being stupid

X Nerd stereotypes / How I got my nickname / Establishing connection with my younger self

Good company Social code / Anna / Catherine

Fence Outside / Not being punished / Discreet and continuous models

Outside This or nothing / The moon / Fractals / Me and Alex / Explanations / Is the world mathematical

What are we in for Anna's kinky alter ego / Marijuana

What are we in for contd The conformist choice / Taboos / Dichotomies /Marijuana

Back to the facility Anna and Cathy / Trying to be like other people / Sleeping with Anna

The sleepover Anna's childish behavior / Critics / Boring robots / Adoring Anna

The sleepover contd Irony / Heroes and deserters / Retreat to where? / Real and ideal / Choices

Us and them The uncut book pages / Envy

Sex Anna's fantasy / What makes us weird / The establishment and being normal

Cigarettes Alex's good night sleep / About me and Alex again / Sex and love / The proof that P does not equal NP