Talking about the ethics of online flirtation is always kind of hard and annoying because there are plenty of kind considerate people who will use what you say to scare themselves even more meanwhile a lot of the people who already push boundaries will be like nahhhhhhh I'm fine
- they’d never, ever, possibly be interested, so it would be harassing them to say anything
- if they did feel similarly, they would have said something themselves, so if i say anything it’ll be seen as bothersome at best
- i’m AMAB/a trans woman/Weird/using a label they probably don’t think i deserve, so they will see my advances as predatory
- it’s Wrong of me to even have feelings like this (due to the aforementioned [imagined] negative aspects) so it is only ethical to force myself to stop feeling attraction to this person, so any other course of action is then unethical and i should punish myself for them.
and just so, so many other stupid things like that. i have always had a problem with internalizing that i am definitely fucking up in a specific way every time i learn about a new way that others have hurt someone—teachers always had to pull me aside after lecturing the class on something to reassure me that i was the only one not doing whatever thing they just talked about, but online, it was something i had to become more aware of my tendency to do and grow out of as best i could.
and in many, many ways i have! part of that was recognizing that i was Maybe More Traumatized Than I Thought I Was, part of it was just forcing myself to Just Fuckin Tell People things (highly recommend), part of it was accepting that our strong negative emotions were not logical and shouldn’t be informing my reasoning so hard… no one thing made it better, and things are far from perfect, but, they ARE better.
sorry this got real rambly, but this specific thing has been a real difficult but satisfying growth arc for me. i hope this can help somebody else to realize their own cognitive distortions are just that, distortions—and ones that can be broken out of :3!
