For reasons I might be less likely to want to tweet controversial things right now and so might stick to sensible safe topics for a while.

...

No, fuck that, lets do a thread about sexuality hacking.

By "sexuality hacking" I mean anything you do to yourself to try and change your sexual interests. I'm almost exclusively interested in *broadening* sexual interests - I don't think narrowing them is desirable, and I suspect if it's possible then it's intrinsically traumatic.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: Nobody under any circumstances has any obligation to change their sexuality. I do not believe you can coerce people into doing this, and you shouldn't try because it's horribly unethical. This is for self-directed consensual use.

Anyway people ask me for advice on bi hacking occasionally. I pretty much started out bi, so my internal model of what straight people are like may be a little off, but fortunately I also don't believe straight people "really" exist so this shouldn't affect matters much.

My personal experience of sexuality hacking is that I started out bi-but-practically-asexual but people seemed to enjoy sex a lot and I felt like I was missing out and was presented with a delightful opportunity to experiment and decided to take it. It worked great.

I won't go into too much detail because enough IRL people follow this account now that it might cause them some embarrassment, but my sexual response isn't 100% "normal" yet but I'm still having a great time.

A lot of people who do bi hacking try to do it with porn. I'd be incredibly surprised if this worked, and based on the lacklustre results people report indeed it doesn't. Possibly porn and drugs might work, but honestly I doubt it.

The reason I don't expect porn to work is that I don't think it's touching the actual bottleneck most people have on broadening their sexuality, which is psychological safety.

"Arousal" by Michael Bader adopts the explain everything theory that sexual fantasies (in a very broad sense that includes what you enjoy in person) are entirely defined by psychological safety: Creating circumstances under which it's OK to be aroused.

It's standard Freudian trauma-centric bullshit where the same events can be used to explain any outcome, which makes it really annoying that it actually seems to work very well as a lever to pull for modifying fantasy and preference.

For example, a submissive fantasy might work for you because you don't feel safe being in control. A dominant fantasy might work for you because you don't feel safe not being in control.

You can thus expand your range of sexual interests by broadening the contexts in which you feel psychologically safe, and then exploring those contexts until you find things you like.

My basic super complicated model of sexuality based on this is:

1. Sex is fun.
2. All of the things stopping sex being fun are either:
a) Practical problems that you can resolve ("It hurts when I do this!" "Well don't do that then!")
b) Resolvable emotional blocks.

The "Sex is Fun" bit is important BTW. This is one of the things I think is missing from Bader's book - naked physical contact just feels good once you let go of anything that's stopping it doing so, and this can get you quite a long way even without "conventional" sex.

Porn is unlikely to work for sexuality hacking because you haven't learned to find the things the porn is showing you fun. Porn *might* work for unpicking emotional reactions - e.g. if you have a disgust reaction to naked men, watching gay porn might give you a handle on that.

Porn definitely doesn't work for the "practical problems" part because you definitely shouldn't be emulating the things you see in porn, but you know that.

What's most likely to work is probably to find someone who you trust to fool around with. I can strongly recommend poly for this because it makes it lower stakes if it doesn't work out. If you can't do poly, you'll need to do a lot of work on trust with your partner.

Either way you need to enter into such an exploration with an explicit shared understanding that it's an experiment. It might not work! If it has to work, then that's too much pressure, and it will definitely not feel psychologically safe. Failure just means you've learned stuff.

It might be worth starting with something like sensate touch (see "Sex Therapy" by Weiner and Avery-Clark) - essentially let go of the idea of having sex altogether and just explore each other's bodies for a while, get very comfortable with that.

If you can't get comfortable with touching each other's bodies then definitely don't try for any more!

But in general it's probably going to be very helpful to let go of the idea of sex as a specific act. The goal is to spend time together naked and have as much fun as possible.

It might be good to practice massage? I mean, hell, it's good to practice massage even if you don't expand your sexuality. All of our backs are fucked up because sitting all day, and having a buddy who you practice with is great.

Throughout all of this, pay attention to what sort of feelings come up. Maybe do some Internal Family Systems, Focusing, NEDERA, or other such emotion work to poke at them until you understand the discomfort.

Some of it might fade once you understand it, some of it might prompt you to try different things, some of it might fade if you just keep noticing it and telling yourself that that's OK to feel that way every time it comes up.

Possibly some of it won't fade and you'll have hit a fundamental block! I'd be kinda surprised if there's anything truly insoluble here, but what do I know I'm just a genie.

Whatever you do, talk a lot with your partner about what's coming up for you. Trust is the foundation of feeling safe, and working on safety is vitally important here. If you can't have fun while naked with someone you trust, that's a problem you can work on together.

Also chances are that going through this process with someone will result in amazing sex. "Magnificent Sex" by Ménard and Kleinplatz talks about a lot of people who have amazing sex who learned to do that because they had to overcome medical difficulties or the like.

And the reason this results in amazing sex is, I think, because sex is actually a very easy skill. Having great sex with someone is actually much simpler than e.g. dancing, but most people have so much emotional baggage and fear bound up in it that they never learn it well.

Building the degree of trust and communication around sex that allows you to actually learn and grow your sexualities together is the god tier version of this, because it lets you get good at exactly what is needed to help your partner have a good time, and they do the same.

Having some sort of practical difficulty to overcome seems to be the easiest route into this, because it forces you to acknowledge what was true all along - that sex is something you can actually figure out and practice and get better at.

In terms of things that I think might work if you do not currently have a sexual partner (or one you're not comfortable exploring this with).

My guess is that the first thing most people who like I did find themselves in my boat of having generally low sexuality, possibly currently identifying as ace spectrum, who want to expand on that is to look into a bunch of good therapy modalities.

Maybe read up on Focusing (I like "The Power of Focusing" by Cornell), Internal Family Systems ("Self-Therapy" by Schwartz is the go to book. It's... OK), cPTSD ("cPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving". Useful even if you don't exactly have cPTSD)

Arousal and Magnificent Sex, mentioned upthread, are probably good things to read up on too.

Reading these on their own won't necessarily help, but applying some the skills to the various emotions around sex should help you figure out what's going on.

At some point you probably do have to get another person involved, but addressing some of the various fears before hand is completely legitimate.

The therapy reading route is probably a good idea even if you do have a partner BTW, just do the two in parallel.

Also, a call to inaction: Should you do this? Maybe! If you want! But be gentle with yourself, please?

This thread is because:

a) This has been hugely positive to me in my specific circumstances and guidance would have helped me.
b) I've talked to multiple people who also want to do things along these lines.

It's something to do if and when you want to, if and when you're ready.

BTW this isn't just about bi hacking or going from asexual to allosexual, it works with other ways of changing your sexual interests / dynamic too. Learning to dom/sub definitely works this way, learning kinks should work this way, as should removing dependencies on a kink.

Basically there's a lot of ways to have sex, almost all of them have the potential to be fun, and most of what stops them being fun is some sort of emotional resistance to enjoying the world that way.

Such resistances are fine, you don't have to (and probably don't have the time to!) enjoy everything, but it's better not to treat them as immutable and fundamentally mysterious if you have any internal conflict over them.

("removing dependencies on a kink" = "it seems I need XYZ to become sufficiently aroused, and I would like not to". This is one of the areas I think Bader's model is strongest: It's often the case that XYZ is creating some necessary safety that's worth looking into)

Oh a thing I should probably have mentioned earlier in the thread. Orgasms are complicated and often require a lot of comfort / absorption! When exploring new areas of your sexuality it's probably important to not make success contingent on having an orgasm, only on enjoyment.

If you had a great time but not an orgasm, that's still a success. If you need to you can always go finish off another way, but you might find you don't need to. You might get there eventually, or you might not, but putting a lot of pressure on yourself to doesn't help.