ARC Resources

ah shit i forgot about this, sorry! arc is indeed an acronym! it’s averse, repulsed, and conflicted, for the main negative feelings about sex stuff. 

Your sexuality is whatever you feel most comfortable calling yourself. It’s not about finding a box or label, it’s about learning how to describe yourself, learning about yourself, and giving you ways to talk about yourself and find other people like you. Any and all of those things, and more, is what sexual exploration can be--and it can be doing nothing or cutting it out completely. It’s exactly what you want it to be! You can use as many labels or as few as you want. A lot of people simply use “ace” to describe not wanting involvement with sex, but that tends to get confusing because “ace” also means not having any sexual attraction. Some people just say they’re sex repulsed or averse. The stuff on this blog expands on  aversion and repulsion and conflicted feelings.  

It sounds like you’re repulsed no matter what the sexual situation is. Apothisexual sounds like that fits it, and so would anticarnal. They’re synonyms, if you will, in the same way that bi and pan can be seen as synonyms. There’s lots of orientation descriptions that overlap, because human experience can’t be whittled down to just a few distinct words. 

(sorry I forgot about this for a bit)

Arcflux is where your feelings change; they’re in flux. Eriscarnal has an element of conflict about sex in it; a negative feeling about sex along with your other feelings. 

The two can overlap: some of your arcflux feelings might bounce between having a negative element and not having it. Perhaps you’ve always got a negative element in there, but you also have other feelings and those fluctuate.  

If it sounds messy, that’s because human feelings *are* messy and can do a lot of things that we haven’t really got words for yet. I think that’s part of why it’s hard to talk about messy feelings, because finding words to describe it--even without inventing new ones--is hard. 

Whenever a person has a traumatic experience like an assault, the brain tends to obsess over it. That’s what PTSD is. I’m not saying you’ve got that, I’m just saying that normally when something extreme happens, that obsession can be a thing that happens just as much as the avoidance version of it can. People can also react in a mixed way. When trauma gets mixed up with sex, things get....even more messy. There’s no such thing as “it’s because of your trauma so therefore it’s not real”, that’s just people being foul and trying to force you to “get over it” and pretend it didn’t happen. You are real. What you feel is real. Your reactions are yours, are real, and they matter. More flippantly, cops, judges, lawyers, and politicians think a lot about crime and nobody goes “you’re not really a good person because you think about crime and criminals so much, nyeah nyeah”. Religions think a lot about sin and immorality, do we claim that all religion and holy people are the devil incarnate?What you think about doesn’t matter, it’s what you feel that matters. That’s what identity is. Like, thinking about things can lead you to figuring out what you feel, but reasonable people get the drift. Nobody reasonable is going to say “you think about this one thing too much so you can’t possibly be this other thing”. 

I’d think that mostly fits arc? This doesn’t sound like the usual “it’s taboo to talk about sex!” sort of thing that people call being a prude. Repulsion to anything related to you is definitely arc. Think about it like how people can go watch scary movies and go to haunted houses and roller coasters; those things are scary but people like doing them because fundamentally we know we’re safe. So, when you know the sex stuff isn’t about you, you’re fine engaging with the topic because you know you’re “safe” from it. Same thing. 

I don’t know what’s been said to you, but I don’t think the issue is that they think you’re invalid. (If they did say that, they’re wrong) The things you list here are necessary to dom/sub play, so even if you can’t handle abiding by those, it’s understandable why other people would be wary of having you around. Trust is paramount when you’re doing anything in the kink community. You do see how not wanting to have safewords makes doing anything with you much more dangerous, even impossible, since the other person can’t say no to you? Same goes for condoms, that’s the only form of safe sex that protects against STIs at all, and pregnancy for most people. If those are things you can’t do, then you need someone who agrees to that before hand. Everyone else gets to have their own boundaries as much as you do. These are what most people ask for; they ask for a reason, and it sucks that these common red flags happen to be things you can’t do for other reasons. Other people don’t know that, though, and even if they did, that’s generally not going to change their minds about still wanting those things in their kink play. Understanding why you can’t isn’t the same as agreeing to forgo it themselves. It’s not about your validity, it’s about their own boundaries just as it’s about your boundaries. I think the problem you’re trying to say here is that it’s frustrating to want to do bdsm-type things, when you can’t deal with all the stuff needed to safely do that with other people. There’s really no way around other people being able to draw their own boundaries. Either you have to give this up, as lots of arc people with any kind of sex stuff, or find a way around your repulsions. Strong repulsions mess with a lot of things, it’s not a mark of weakness, invalidity/lack of being a “real” kinkster, or of being evil to have to alter your life because of things like this. It sucks, but the brain is an organ just like every other organ, and if it decides it’s going to misbehave, we don’t get a choice in feeling that hell.You could try to let the kink part of you stay untouched. I don’t think we have any posts about trying to make those feelings recede, but maybe someone can chime in. I think there’s communities called “no-fap”, those might be helpful for that. If you try kink anyway, you need to be sure the other person won’t be harmed at all in any way if your attempt to get around your issues fails. If you can’t guarantee that, if your partner(s) can’t just up and leave, then I think it would be better to work on fixing these things with a therapist first, until you can get to that guarantee. Other people being guinea pigs isn’t safe ever, and especially when the price of failure would include pregnancy, bodily harm, and rape. You could get to know someone in other ways first, and then ask if they’d do kink like this. You could find ways around the repulsions, especially the safeword ones, by doing things like agreeing explicitly before hand what can happen and never deviating from that. You could try faking out your safeword repulsion by thinking of all kink as “normal sex”, and letting people safeword out that way in the same way that people say no to you during “normal sex”. You could try faking it out by using a safeword gesture, instead of a verbal word, as long as your partner can always make that gesture. You could simply call it something other than “safeword”; you could think of it as a pause, to be decided whether it’ll resume in a bit or if there needs to be reviewed. You could try having your partner explain to you why they want a condom, lube, safeword, etc; then you get to decide if you want to do kink with them or not--that puts the illusion of the decision in your hands. A lot of these suggestions are really just putting an illusion over the issue; it can work if you can fake yourself out enough and don’t think about it too hard--basically, if you can give yourself enough suspension of disbelief that the illusion is REALLY REALLY the truth, the way you do when you get lost in a good movie and don’t notice that physics does not allow any of what you saw.