Knowingless

We’ve covered women’s sexuality in general so far in this series - what does it mean for a woman to be an outlier? How does general female sexual psychology work? You’re near-experts now. But for this post, let’s do a case study: I’m going to explain in excruciating depth how my own sexual psychology works, with careful breakdowns of the strategies men have used to arouse me, and times men have done apparently similar strategies but failed, and what subtle things cause the difference.

People say women hit the wall in their mid-30’s, when their spell over men’s penises finally fades and they are left flailing. Is this true? I got a bunch of photos, some AI and some real (including a few of myself and friends across different ages), and made a game - ageguessr. You can play it yourself - you get shown a photo, and guess how old the woman in the photo is. For photos of real people, you’re scored against their actual age.

Warning: this post has nudity, as well as frank discussion+data of how attractive people find various bodies. I had a bunch of people1 rate a bunch of nudes2 of males and females. These pairs of bodies were voted equivalently hot by the opposite gender: (women got rated higher than this, but there were no male 8s.

First announcement: I built a sex matcher called Sexxo (a section inside of the larger Glosso website). It works like this: You answer a bunch of questions about your sexuality, in a wide spectrum of things that might be relevant, from positions to orgasm ability to bdsm to specific fetishes to emotions, etc. You pick the algorithm you want to sort by. Is emotional matching the most important thing for sex for you? Do you not particularly care about enacting any fetishes irl?

When I was 19, I spent a year assembling electrical relays on a factory floor for $10/hr. I was pretty excited to get the job. I’d been applying to much worse - I remember looking at at a craigslist ad for a sewage worker, which included a warning that it might be pretty gross. I applied for that too. Knowingless is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I really needed money.

In Pornlandia, relationships have a really particular failure mode: people get mad at each other for failing to live up to a sexual ideal. In Pornlandia, there is no stigma against exposing kids to porn. Kids grow up watching it, and in fact people make kid-friendly porn with fun animations and simple shapes. It’s normal for teens to have photos of genitalia on their walls and rank their favorite pornstars and talk about getting laid as the only thing that matters.

I have walked through a lot of dangerous areas in my life and only got almost-killed on the street once. Walking is my favorite mode of transport, and I also don’t seem to have much of a survival instinct compared to other women, and I’ve lived long-term in ~8 cities and shorter-term in several more across the world. Here’s my guide on ‘how do I accurately assess risk on the street as a woman’. Knowingless is a reader-supported publication.

I personally was not particularly affected by getting lightly molested at 8 by my handsy grandpa. I think what he did was bad, and should have been punished (he wasn’t), and I totally believe other people with similar experiences might have found theirs traumatizing. But for me, I didn’t know what sex or sexual arousal was, and adults already made me feel uncomfortable all the time by violating my physical autonomy.

I’m not the best at marketing, but I still have had occasional successes - the gnome photoset which landed #11 top of reddit of all time for a few years, various miming stuff, earning 100k/month on OF during a brief summer of intense obsession.

If you’ve ever taken a psych quiz, or an OCEAN personality test, or to some extent an IQ test, you’ll notice they have scales. This is a cluster of obviously similar statements you gotta agree or disagree with, like I’m the life of the party or I prefer sitting at home with a good book or I have a wide circle of friends.