Drawing, expressing, playing
Got all beaten out of me at school. Weird kid, noisy, curious
Stims. Beaten up for that. Quieted. Masked.
Therapy has helped
Furry expression has helped enormously.
Regaining the ability for imaginative play. Losing the fear for silly expression
It's helped me a lot. It's been a good environment for myself. I want to help make it a good one for others
I want to help others feel like they can be themselves as it's helped me
I am repeating this a lot.
But I am so grateful to all of you who have helped me. Who have indulged me. Who have pushed me to express and explore.
Helped me be more myself.
Thank you.
You ever get that feeling you just ran into someone who described the thing you're trying to make a thing without knowing that the thing you're working on is a thing?
Anyway, I call the mentality of hyper-realistic and overly-grounded participation in fiction and play 'Tactile Realism'. I think I've mentioned it before here and there but not in great detail. I'm still putting together a larger Autism post in response to another person's semi-recent post, but that's not ready and defining Tactile Realism here would probably help me over there. This is a grander social-science and psychology topic that connects to other essays and writings about hegemony and the suppression of the private experience by theocratic entities and industrialists. I would anticipate having at least one or two tangents that might seem out of place as the text and train of thought this is nested within involves discussions about pornography, social conservitivism, weaponization of obscenity law, and Queer Erasure.
Tactile Realism: A sensory-memory and experience-focused perspective in regards to how one processes fiction whilst utilizing shortcuts and heuristics to save resources. Tactile Realism depends upon the Neurotypical experiences of sensory and emotional information to a great extent, often serving as reliable foil to suspension of disbelief. The rigid boundaries of Tactile Realism have their applications when focused on actions taken in the real world (such as ethics, laws, one's opinions, one's self-described role, etc), but often struggle under the weight of abstraction and transformation.
I alluded to liking Vore in a previous post, and that one is of course self-critical in its delivery, but that doesn't change the actual experience of my personal mind-palace contained sexual fiction. You can however note that the tangible elements of Vore are not what I am fixated on, there is an abstract intellectual conceit or attraction. For every surface-layer take about Vore (EG: "how can you like that, you die!"), there is an obvious childishness to the lens that the normative person views the niche sexual fantasy within. In a simple way, Tactile Realism is how we get Tabletop RPG / D&D characters like Dan the Fighter who looks identical to Dan the Football Player*, acts like Dan the Football Player, appears like Dan the Football Player, and otherwise is a direct port of the sensibilities and life experiences of Dan the Football Player. Most people who've played tabletop games can think of their version of Dan the Football Player, and there is a laziness to how they engage in fiction, often dismissing whimsy or absurdity in favor of extremely mundane and grounded fantasies which have far more industrial/societal import assigned to them.
Tactile Realism is inherently Traumatic for kids to adapt to, as it involves debunking the private fictions and play behaviors deemed inappropriate for hegemonic society. Especially in Autistic kids, we tend to ground ourselves extra-hard in the assumptions assigned to us by the Tactile Realism communicated by others. Our sensory and emotional experiences are not as clean or appropriate, so we often have to nakedly parrot others to mask our difference of disposition, which of course drains resources. This paradoxical over-task to under-task is a big part of why Tactile Realism is a problem for intellectualism in general: it is prone to major flaws in logic because it often is prescriptive, not entirely of the viewer's own origin. Often times the prescription of hegemonic religious and cultural heuristics will trap Tactile Realism in an interestingly hard to describe abstract space that lives almost entirely within the Theory of Mind. By assuming others have your values, there is a psychic tension unseen and unacknowledged by these mental shortcuts and gymnastics.
Neurotypical people often have to learn the same skills of self-regulation and self-reflection that are taught to Autistic / ADHD / Neurodivergent folks. Unlike the special kids in special categories, there is far less emphasis on teaching the skills as they are assumed to have been acquired naturally without effort by neurotypical kids. This allows Tactile Realism to operate as a gap-filler of gap-fillers, a great lens of assessment that operates not dissimilar to the earlier mentioned Obscenity Law. We call this little legal test the "Reasonable Observer" test, though it is famously used for porn with the legendary quote of "I know it when I see it". Through rigid and structuralist prescription, Tactile Realism structures fiction as having to obey our rules and morals, often forming a bubble of unreality around the intentions of the author of a fiction. Such as the earlier Vore example, people often shout: "how can anyone like this!? they must be sick in the head" gap-filler arguments which are clearly just a shortcut to avoid mental resource expenditure. The exercise of simulation and investigation where information is lacking is not exactly a learned trait in the industrialized assignment-identity of the mentally preoccupied neurotypical person.
Tactile Realism is informed by life experience and cultural assumptions. So it isn't (or rather, should not be) shocking when protests rock the streets of France and the country's President declares Violent Videogames to be at fault. The dude's an old fuck who wouldn't know an original thought or contemporary piece of interactive media if it emerged from behind a column and slapped him in the face. Cognitive Dissonance also covers for Tactile Realism's gaps, creating this loosey-goosey series of mental gymnastics hurdles which can easily be bypassed through simply rationalizing irrational perspectives. Taking fiction so seriously is often the mistake of many children and immature thinkers[Note 1], and as debates about pornography and adult-only spaces rage in the U.S., I think it's worth the reminder that the people discussing this often think shooting someone in a videogame means you endorse shooting actual people and would do so regularly. Food for thought.
[Note 1]: Yes, citing the vox article about puriteens, AGAIN. I was reading into a rambling attempt at debunking the article's points by someone who largely stuck to character-attacks as their argument. It wasn't especially coherent, but it is worth the notation that Social Conservativism seeks to erase magical thinking that is not strictly within its prescribed lens, ironically stamping out "wrongthink" in a manner they often accuse liberals/progressives of doing. It's also worth noting that Death of the Author is not a definitive prescription on how to interpret text, you can analyze it from many angles and the bias of the author is just one of many approaches. Shortcuts are unbecoming and our brain evolved to do them all of the time!
[Edit] Addendum for myself: Reminder to talk about Husband's impairment with acting out characters who deviate from his baseline personality.
Also remember to talk about clinical impairment of abstract thinking in moderate-range Autism in regards to symbolic language and puns/lingual jokes/abstract humor that depends on subtle intellectual context clues. Mention how mom doesn't understand puns or most cultural references and how that relates to her extremely limited world view and judgemental decision making / general ignorance.
