*discoverychannel
24 Jan, 2026
(thematically relevant)tags: drug use, allusions to CSA (none explicit), self-directed kink shaming / naming (the tmi/explicit tag applies here to varying degrees)
no one is more surprised than me that i have a high tolerance for weed now. i still truly don't enjoy the acrid burnt popcorn smell of vaporized flower, but that hasn't stopped me from getting high almost every single day for the past month and a half. as i write this, i'm taking a break, because while weed has been extremely helpful for being more playful creatively, when it comes time to actually write, it's sooooo hard to focus. i'm mentioning that up front to explain why i haven't written another entry in a while but also because it's relevant to the overall theme which is,
embracing the process of becoming a huge pervert (and the issue of shame along the way).
some months ago, i read a book called ALL FOURS by Miranda July. i'd heard of it from a few different sources, but only when it was directly recommended to me as something i would love did i finally dive into it. i chose the audiobook copy, narrated by the author, and finished it over the course of a few days. in brief: a multi-disciplinary artist and mother in a supportive but bland marriage gets an offer to collaborate with a famous musician, which requires a road trip to the meeting spot. before the trip even begins, the appointment gets cancelled, but instead of telling her husband and child, she drives an hour out of town and checks into a roadside motel. what follows is the story of a middle-aged woman discovering what her sexuality actually is in blunt but beautiful ways. i resonated with that aspect of her character to a degree that kinda shook me, and in tandem with things like Slime Feet or my own book WIPs, i've been finally looking inward.
which, it turns out, involves a lot of letting myself genuinely look, outwardly, at other people. my oldest and most foundational habit.
the world the next room over
"I wonder what they think I'm doing?" that's sort of where it started.
this is bizarre, but i remember having that thought at a very young age when i was left alone. it was born from a constant curiosity of the opposite: staying in my room while adults had child-free discussions. i'd wonder what i was missing, especially when life in the other room always seemed so rowdy. but ever the rational and trusting child, i always assumed that if i was being left alone, it was with adequate things to preoccupy me, because i never felt allowed to be bored. maybe to parents boredom is like the sword of damocles always dangling over their child's head, something to perpetually save them from. or maybe parents with untreated anxiety and ADHD simply project on their progeny.
but anyway, right: doing what people THINK i'm doing. 'pretend-pretending'. do my parents think i'm trying to balance on my bed on one foot? i'd do it, to see what it felt like. did they get quiet because they think i might hear them? i'd listen at my own door, just in case. if i was home alone, did they think i was drinking chocolate milk from the jug? or peeing in their bathroom? why not!
i forget when the intent behind that thought—"what do they think i'm doing"—changed from transgressing against general normality to transgressing against specific expectations. oh i was a sweet [kid]? i put salt in their shoes. i was cleanly? i put my hands in the dirt so i could get it under my nails on purpose. i always asked permission to do everything? well now i was in their room and looking through their stuff because screw that. ('screw' was the worst word i was allowed to say for a while there.)
before i'd reached double digit years old, i'd kinda run out of ideas for this psychological exercise, except then two things happened, one a while before the other:
my dad started keeping a rack of magazines in the master bathroom—Playboy, Hustler, Penthouse, that sort of thing—
and when he and my mom split up, he started living with one of his druggie buddies. that man taught me chess and to fear the dark. what did they think i was doing alone with him?
unfortunately, i had an unbelievably disrupted childhood, so i lost track of what was normal for everyone else my age; what was normal to say or do (or want to do). i wonder how wrapped up this 'pretend-pretending' was with a general nebulous uncertainty as how i was meant to proceed into the future as myself. WOW that's a pretentious way to say "kids playing pretend do so as a reflection of how they think about the future", but i more mean about the gender shit. also i was and remain terrible at envisioning my own personal future, so that wasn't part of it for me.
all of that to say that the mental exercise went on for a very long time, experimentally doing things by myself (or to myself) to fill some kind of invisible grid of possibilites with check boxes, until it wrapped back around to an obsession with watching other people do anything. anything that seemed normal to them, that seemed fun and easy. my friends said i liked people-watching. it could be called voyeurism.
animal afraid of her own instincts
god. it's so FRUSTRATING to do this preamble but i feel actually literally compelled to do it even though it's basically me explaining "how does paraphilia get formed" to an audience of [non-zero number of people who definitely already know] but i have to put this down in words because i haven't been able to articulate it better than the way it's been floating around in my head lately, which is linked to the aforementioned concept of 'pretend-pretending': acting out fantasies rooted in personal curiosity but outsourcing it, imagining a proxy who fantasizes of actions you might be doing. then the more common concept of teenage rebellion: impulsively doing the bad things people already believe you're doing because shame and expectation come into sharper focus in that life stage.
or how about the concept of fetishes as thought contagion, cognitohazard? fearmongering logic obviously, but there's a kernel of truth in it: repeated attempts to better understand a phenomenon that repels can and will tip in the opposite direction eventually, given the right inciting incident. it's the good ol 'it started off as a joke but eventually making fun of it became having fun with it'.
the last of these proxy fantasy rationales is one that has a preexisting term, but is exponentially harder to explain, because no psychological or psychiatric journal has truly agreed on the definition: counterfeit deviance.
broadly speaking, counterfeit deviance is behavior that appears deviant or perverted, but the action itself has no such motivation. more specifically, it's the idea that intellectual disabilities might impair judgement and understanding of social norms and in certain circumstances, lead to instances of social transgression, specifically in a sexual context.
it's easy to guess that this concept is wielded in an infantalizing manner towards neurodivergent / mentally disabled adults ('it's not all their fault, they don't have a fully functioning brain'), but it also extends to the pre-moral stage of social development. when i say 'pre-moral', i mean the stage of life after which the rules of society feel more tangible. the kind of curiosity a child has before they've developed an understanding of right and wrong. children can display behaviors that seem terrible in a vacuum but that don't have any ill intent behind them. within that period of time, formative experiences are still being made, and some of them have can have an impact that extends far beyond childhood. at some point, those experiences can transmute, almost spontaneously, into paraphilias. prior to that, they can loom nebulous and unnameable in the mind for years.
one of the clearer examples of this that i can point to is an early chapter of Dragon Ball. do you know what i'm referring to? it's this silly-goofy-uncomfortable-maybe-perverted-maybe-innocent scene from chapter two, which is entitled "No Balls!":
in the scene, goku and bulma have gone to sleep—with bulma on a bed and goku on the floor—but time has passed and goku has woken up. bulma is quite literally the second person goku has ever met aside from his adoptive grandfather, and he met her when she hit him with her car. when goku wakes up it's because he's uncomfortable. he's used to sleeping in the same bed as his 'grandpa', using him as a pillow. he looks at bulma asleep in bed; she's kicked off the blanket and is wearing nothing but a t-shirt and underwear. goku looks at her crotch and notes that bulma's 'pillow' isn't as big as his grandpa's—his understanding of anatomy is slim at best; earlier in this chapter he makes fun of bulma for having a 'butt' on her chest. he lies down on the bed, resting his head on her crotch. but something doesn't feel right? it's flat? he turns over and inspects his pillow, giving it a pat, which only increases his confusion. goku removes bulma's underwear to try and solve this mystery... and screams in surprise, because as he tells her when she wakes up confused, worried that there's an intruder: you've lost your balls! bulma assumes this is about her dragon balls, and the misunderstanding isn't addressed.
goku can't be said to be the deviant party in that scenario because goku has no ill intent or understanding of the wrongness, which is what provides the comedy of the scene. but in a modern view this scene is uncomfortable for some in the audience because even with the facts being what they are, isn't the scene inherently perverse? well yes because toriyama was a pervert who contrived a reason to depict a teenage girl pissing her underwear and then getting pantsed in her sleep by a child within the first two chapters of his new manga. but is what's happening in the scene, in a vacuum, deviant? i don't think so.
(unrelated: there's also the phenomenon of wanting to do something bad, even though you have no inherent desire to do it or have any reason you will derive pleasure from it, simply because you want to Do Something Bad for the sake of knowing how it feels to do something bad. sometimes you want to do something bad to live out the fantasy of people being right about you, the fantasy of being recognized as something knowable and reducable.)
so why did i get into all that? i don't know. i think in my recent abandoning of a lot of shame i've carried over the years, i've struggled to divine answers to the parts of myself that have surprised me—to track them to their artesian source—and have instead found it comforting to articulate these different logics of behavior. each one carries different weight, produces different conclusions, about different aspects of myself. it can be soothing to intellectualize the least intellectual parts of my wants and needs. being able to choose from different possibilities makes me feel less constrained to any one specific thing.
sometimes though, just being human is enough reason to be a fucking weirdo about something. so while i'm sure there's tons of potential catalysts that led to me having a scent fetish—a high school ex using too much laundry detergent to cover up the smell of her cigarettes, for instance—it's more likely that because i have a nose and a sense of smell to be stimulated, there was obviously a chance that the right scent could make my brain malfunction. so. scratch that off my bingo card.
NSI (non-consensual sensory input)
you can close your eyes if you want.
if there's something you see, and you don't want to see it anymore, you can just close your eyes. if your imagination is vivid enough, maybe you're still seeing it. if you could only see darkness, maybe you see it most when your eyes are closed.
you can plug your ears too of course. the muffled world still leaks through, but the right headphones will silence the outside world completely.
and if you really need to, you can plug your nose to stop from smelling anything, but like with ears and earplugs, it doesn't work a hundred percent. you have to breathe, and even with a mask on, you're going to catch a whiff of something. smell is so much subtler than sight and sound too; you can avoid places you know will have certain sounds, but anyone could be wearing a certain perfume, eating certain foods, smoking etc. unless you walk around with your nose pinched shut you don't really have a choice in the matter.
that high-school ex i mentioned? i've forgotten a lot of things about her. favorite band, movie, the first thing i ever said to make her laugh. i remember other things still even if they're faint: coding short lived memes for each other in computer class, the adorable explosive wheeze of her laugh like the ecstatic relief of a girl only nearly drowned, the true chestnut color of her hair in a cascading curtain over my face before she kissed me. but above all, i will never not have a reaction when i catch the scent of her laundry detergent, or whatever cocktail of discontinued dollar store stand-ins she used to hide the warm acrid smell of bummed cigs.
cigarette smoke doesn't have the same effect on me (most of the time i think it's disgusting) and just the smell of clean laundry on its own doesn't do it either. it's the combination of the two and even that doesn't fully replicate it. there's a missing piece (a secret third thing if you will). oh right: pheromones.
i don't read much BL these days—i'm so far into deep yuri space that the light from yaoi's star can no longer reach me—but sometimes a furry thing will break through anyway! nagabe's SMELL is a short furry BL story about two guys in school, one of whom catches the other sniffing his discarded shirt after P.E. class. in trying to figure out why his classmate was sniffing his shirt, he eventually moves past most of the reasonable potential explanations because he can't stop thinking about it. he plays a game with his classmate where he tests him to see if he can tell whose possessions are whose based on smell alone and because it's a furry story that's played up a bit here. the MC decides to poke fun at his new nosey pal by having him close his eyes while the MC secretly takes off his own underwear for his classmate to smell.
what the MC doesn't know however is that his classmate—quiet and unassuming—is at peace with what he likes. embarrassed at the thought of everyone knowing about it maybe but generally pretty comfortable with that part of himself. the attempted prank goes awry when his classmate begins taking long, deep breaths of the MC's underwear, content to do so until someone stops him. the MC suddenly feels weird about having pulled this prank: this wasn't what he expected this guy to do. the MC also doesn't expect to get hard from watching him do it.
the manga is a really short read so i won't get into the rest of the plot in detail but needless to say the MC's curiosity isn't so easily satisfied. in a memorable scene where the MC finally realizes the perfect explanation—his classmate is a fucking pervert—he also immediately has to grapple with the fact that he's the one who wants to push things much much farther. rigid thought boxes listing off reasons that it's wrong to push the envelope are interrupted and overlapped by thought bubbles that simply say: "I WANT IT."
scent can be a hand blindly taking a book off a shelf in your mind. take a deep breath through your nose, then let it out slowly. what was the prevailing smell? whatever it was has visited you briefly: wound through your sinuses, flown through your windpipe, gone spelunking in your lungs and diaphragm, then found its way back out again. it should take about as long to do as it took to read the sentence prior to this one. did the smell make you imagine anything in particular? take another breath and try to pick out a different smell than before. repeat this exercise as many times as you like, my words aren't going anywhere. i do think i'm funny, yeah.
in retrospect i should've known it was gonna be like... a THING for me when i started buying perfumes specifically so that i could spray them on my wrists and smell them throughout the day. isn't that what everyone buys perfume for? no, people at large probably don't 'let' themselves have a sniff of their own perfume as a way to keep themselves stimulated enough to focus, because that's what great perfumes do for me. when i breathe in a scent i really fuck with, it's like my world shrinks to the size of my breath, and anything that could distract me is totally silenced. it's the same feeling of mental obliteration i get when i stand under a waterfall or dive underwater. those are the only senses i have that reaction with; there's no sight or taste or sound that immediately soothes me as completely. it's exciting to think that maybe i just haven't found them yet?
i'm focusing on smell because some smells are all-encompassing. human olfactory receptors are so poor compared to the majority of mammals, so it's not hard to overwhelm that sense with a powerful enough odor. there are smells we instinctually find abhorrent (unless we don't) and some that we can't help but be drawn toward (unless we can). i've circled the point long enough, here's what's been plaguing me:
lately there is a scent that has been fucking with me. i can't avoid it, i can't shut it out, and whenever i smell it, it's as though levers are being pulled inside me—it bypasses giving me thoughts and forces my body to react, making me wrestle with it after the fact. this is because i know its source.
a seventeen-year-old girl.
she's a coworker at my job—i'll call her marie. she's on the grungy side; from my nose alone, i believe she showers once every three days or so. marie isn't a huge fan of deodorant or shaving her pits, but the smell is more intense and less offensive than some b.o. or unwashed funk. it's strong; i can stand out of arm's reach and still catch it. in the way that people say botanical notes are 'green', something about her smell is like... warmth? not warm spices like cinnamon or nutmeg, but literal warmth. it smells like life, or like i can smell the live-ness of her when she's near.
marie is very sweet—as a person, though there is a subtle sweetness to her scent—and a delight to talk to. despite the disaprity of our ages, our humor is bizarrely aligned and we have strikingly similar interests. some of the things i never outgrew are some of the things before her time that she's just now getting into (such is the cycle of adolescence and maturity i guess). we work well together, and both of us feel less stressed around each other than most of our other coworkers. last week she said i was her favorite person to work with and she pouts when she's not scheduled with me.
despite how well we get along, and despite that fact that she's pretty and definitely the kind of girl i would've crushed on in high school, she doesn't evoke any feelings in me beyond our work friendship. well, okay, maybe she also makes me feel a little maternal, but that isn't inappropriate really. i understand that there's a world where it could be.
the smell, that warm living scent, was still eluding me. i knew it belonged to her, but i couldn't understand what it was that was making me feel...
here's my problem. this isn't a smell that obliterates all other thought, the way a nice perfume does. it makes my step stutter when i catch for the first time. it makes my gut coil, and my mouth water, and—
"—i'm just worried it's like, a noticeable smell! you know? is it super noticeable?"
the conversation happens one day while i'm in the kitchen at work. marie is around the corner talking with another coworker (i'll call her marcy). i'm assembling the ingredients for whatever is next on the prep list; i don't remember what it even was. i only remember that feeling i'd felt since i was a child standing behind my own closed door, antennas adjusted toward a fuzzy signal until it came in clear as a bell, as they kept talking.
marcy scoffs. "kinda girl, yeah! maybe if you gave yourself enough time to shower instead of gooning—"
marie gasps, scandalized. "what EVER!!! i do not!!!"
marcy's tone is a verbal eye-roll. "fine, then maybe you should kick your boy out to GIVE yourself enough time to—"
marie sounds a little bashful when she interjects with "shut uuuuup, we don't even do anything, and anyway i can't kick HIM out, i come to work straight from his place—"
the conversation turns a corner and so do they, entering the kitchen. i turn on the now full blender in front of me and don't look for their reactions. my face is impassive and they assume i probably didn't hear, what with the earbuds in and everything.
so that's what the smell is. the smell that's driving me up the wall a little bit, that i wish belonged to an age approriate source i could breathe in directly, is sex, or something close to it. morally speaking i'm probably fucked for even trying to process this, because earlier i said there was no inappropriate thought associated with her, but even the act of noticing it feels inappropriate.
it's also felt vaguely familiar for a while, and recently i realized why.
in the manga Age 15 by asagi ryuu, fifteen-year-old anna is living with ema, a fourth year college student working a part time job. anna's parents are busy with work all the time, so they sent her to stay with ema, because one of ema's parents is the cousin of one of anna's parents. which means that the two women are hardly related at all actually, a fact which anna only realizes when they're changing clothes in front of each other.
ema is a bizarrely behaved young woman. she hasn't quite grown out of teenage behavior, but also understands she's sliding into adulthood whether she wants to or not. ema stays out late, gets drunk, flirts with all the wrong people, and doesn't get around to all of her chores. she's also very... very fixated on anna and her budding adolescence, both literally and figuratively. see, early on in the story, ema starts doing something seemingly inexplicable:
she kneels down in front of anna, lifts her skirt, presses her nose right up to anna's underwear, and breathes.
it began as teasing behavior about anna's choice in underwear, but then seamlessly became something else over an uncertain period of time. ema tells anna that being under her skirt "seems to settle [her] down", and anna reluctantly permits it while clearly confused about the perceived violation of it.
ema pushes this too far one night, deep in a depression from her interactions with a woman named yoshino. anna is familiar with the name, and assumes it's the reason for emma's sad mood. "it's not about yoshino," ema says, "but yoshino's behind it." anna expresses confusion before ema places her mouth against anna's crotch, and anna demands ema stop almost instantly. ema sinks down against the wall and says that she's completely worthless as anna walks away to go make dinner.
we learn that yoshino is ema's boss, and a woman who completely dominates ema sexually. yoshino teases ema to a lascivious degree in a public park, and when ema asks to go with yoshino to a love hotel, yoshino laughs mockingly at her and refusing further physical contact. ema has been teased to her limit by yoshino, and the reader is led to believe that ema's unfulfilled desires are being mitigated by how she physically transgresses with anna. to put it bluntly? ema wants pussy so bad that she's micro-dosing it by huffing her roommate's crotch.
there's no way to defend this interaction to outsiders, and anna has to contemplate it herself for a couple of days, during which time she has confusing fantasies about both ema and anna's classmate, miku. at school, anna has been preoccupied with miku, both her appearance and her after-school habit of making out with grown men. when anna confronts miku about this, asking what she likes about one of them, miku says that sometimes he makes her feel maternal because of how childlike he can be, despite being older. anna thinks that she understands this, picturing ema in her head.
when anna goes home, she thinks back to her conversation with miku, and wonders if she should also be kinder toward ema. here, there's nothing to say she thinks of ema in the same way that miku thinks of the adult men she makes out with, but the course of action she takes with ema exists in a similar but different space to the 'counterfeit deviance' example from Dragon Ball:
it's romantic and platonic, a bold transgression and an earnest invitation. it's both clearly wrong and a moral malapropism: anna is someone who knows this kind of closeness like reading a word in a book, having inferred some of its meaning, but who has never had to say the word aloud until now. it's an incredibly charged moment, as reflected in the staggered negative space between the panels, culminating in the person with theoretically less power in the scenario literally pinning the aggressor in place with the specific focus of her desire.
the manga in general is, obviously, pretty leering ecchi work, and the scanlation job is sorta subpar, but there's still something to chew on there. i've thought way more about the act being committed, and how well the story wields scenes of physical intimacy as the primary mechanisms of change and revelation in the plot, than i ever thought about the titular age gap. until recently anyway, when i became far more self-conscious of the age i actually am.
i've been plagued with the urge to self-dissect a lot in the past year or two, but what started as harsh criticism eventually became a more reflective, almost anthropological exercise. peeling back the layers on things i'm wary of cracking open, and then going further to see if there's some common ancestor between my fixations, some childhood thing. it feels like breaking in a pair of jeans, except for loosening the borders of my mind for a more comfortable fit.
but like. none of that really fits neatly into a lex post. i mean i guess the bare bones of it does; i found myself putting the following text through rot13 to post on a private account i only use to talk to fellow freaks in a small fandom:
"i need to shove my face between someone's thighs and held down there until i suffocate or pass out okay i'm dying from a severe lack of breathing deeply in another girl's crotch"
that's kinda all it boils down to, which is why it's almost embarrassing that it's the kind of fixation that is going to haunt me until i act on it. the last time this kind of thing happened to me was literally when it led me to two different shitty apartments to give head to two very different people. when i told that story, it was nice to memoralize the experience, to try and get it down in text as vividly as it lives in my head.
here though i'm content to simply have articulated this bizarre constellation of feelings in a way that feels like staving off a ghost that won't stop following me everywhere.
listen if i could go down on the ghost i would but i just pass right through