wispfox

In the context of my pending hair cut, being reassured that someone (who I have admittedly been dating a long time) is certain that I will continue to be beautiful with short hair, evidently makes for a mental stutter (hiccup? not sure).

IM may have meant my mental stutter was non-obvious, I have no idea. I did manage an appropriate thank you in a reasonable amount of time.

I think I was bemused for a number of reasons. First, the notification of pending short hair was meant to be informational. Mind you, we had just been talking about my leaving grad school, and I'd pointed him to my recent posts on the topic. (This was in large part both a 'fyi' and a 'this likely means I'm not visiting you this year'.) So he had good reason to believe I might need reassurance in general.

But, and I think this is the more interesting aspect, I have trouble thinking of myself as beautiful if the context is purely appearance-based. It's not that I don't think I'm attractive (although, yes, depression is not helpful there), but that to me the concept of physical beauty is both highly unusual (I think a _very_ small - perhaps nonexistent? - number of people are beautiful when based solely on appearance) and needs to be to the level of breathtaking/awe to make sense.

So what's beauty?

I can't think of a way I use it purely about people's appearances. A still photograph of someone just can't be beautiful to me. Water, sky, the play of light on things: things like this can be still shots and be beautiful to me. Not people. (and perhaps not animals or plants, either. Not without light/water/sky things going on)

Once you add motion, it's no longer just physical appearance. It's going to include how someone expresses themselves, how they move, how they carry themselves. Even if you ignore possible sound/vocal cues, there is a _lot_ of info in motion.

One example for which I am pretty consistent relates to graceful movement. If someone nearby is doing something graceful, and I notice and don't have a good reason not to, I will become entirely distracted and just watch. It's absolutely about awe and beauty and things for which words are not coming. And it is entirely possible that my jaw will actually drop.

I have a similar reaction to enthusiasm being shared with someone, where, if it's with me, it's usually stronger than if I just happen to get to watch other people enjoying that experience. Enthusiasm and glee about things are absolutely beautiful.

Other ways people move can be beautiful, although it's not often something I'll notice if I'm in the middle of a conversation with someone (paying attention to conversation trumps noticing physical things). I think it may still tend to involve either grace or enthusiasm, now that I think about it! Or sometimes the way the light catches someone.

Perhaps my bafflement at being called beautiful is simply that I don't have many contexts in which I find people beautiful. So it's a temporary (and often fleeting) thing ('estar'), not a constant thing ('ser'). Which, why do we not have two "to be" words like Spanish does?

What do you all find beautiful?

I do not get enough cuddling in my life. Currently, it's basically only metahacker. jasra and I are working on it, on our end. The fact that I will tend to forget to be cuddly with people if I've not been doing enough cuddling does not help.

One of the best things about the wedding I just attended was feeling comfortable saying to a couple of women I had just met that I would like to be cuddling them. And then, we did so. One was more comfortable with cuddling than the other, I suspect due purely to experience with it. But. Cuddles. Cuddles with no purpose beyond simple touch.

Also, fabulous dog whose purpose in life is to be cuddly (literally, that's what she's being trained for). :)

I really, really miss contexts in which the cultural norm of 'touch must be sexual or at least have a sexual overtone' has been subverted. I mean, I don't tend to be cuddly with people if I'm not attracted to them somehow or another ("attracted" as in "drawn to" or "fascinated by" or "want to know better" - no specific goal beyond that), but it feels like a world of difference between "hey, you're nifty" and "My only purpose for touching you is because I want to get into your pants at the earliest possible opportunity". The attendees at this weekend's wedding, thankfully basically free of that cultural norm. So, I actually let hugs last as long as they would naturally do so. And didn't feel uncomfortable at random back massages as part of hugs (and indeed gave such as part of hugs myself). I am not trying to suggest that there was no interest, just that it wasn't the point of the touch.

I'm also _utterly_ delighted by the fact that, unlike usual, one of the women there was first to suggest the idea of trading contact information. It can get very, very tiring to always be the one asking for more interaction with interesting women, y'know? (I'm typically not as drawn to lengthen interactions with men, and the fact that I'm acutely aware of not dating any women appears to only have increased this trend more toward finding women more interesting) I think the last woman who was first to suggest more interactions (or perhaps mutual of said) after our first interaction was jasra. (and before that was the_xtina)

I can never tell if that's because they are shy to suggest more interaction, there is not sufficiently strong mutual fascination, or what. And I often feel like I come on too strong when I find someone fascinating, which rarely helps when interacting with a woman.

There is a post bubbling away beneath the surface of my thoughts which may or may not manage to come out in this post, as a result of the combination of metahacker's post on cuddling and affection with friends-who-are-not-necessarily-lovers, and figmentj's post on dating when not seen as an audition.

It took me a very long time to understand that, for most people, and in the context of typical societal norms, cuddling was assumed to be sexual. Touch at all - beyond a handshake - was assumed to be an expression of sexual interest.

An additional difficulty with wrapping my head around this concept is that my line between finding someone interesting and wanting to seek them out and spend more time with them, and being sexually attracted to them is very thin. And, people who I find interesting enough to actively seek out are people I would like to cuddle, and there is probably at least some amount of sexual attraction there. It's not quite true that everyone that I'm close to and seek out and am cuddly with is also someone that I have some sexual attraction to, but it's very close.

But having that attraction does not mean that I - or they - have time, energy, sufficient levels of attraction, or even necessarily are aware of it. So, for me, cuddling is _not_ automatically a sexual thing - and has never been - and the idea of there always being a sexual aspect to touch and cuddling is a hard one for me to grasp. However, it does seem true that, at some level at least, whatever nebulous concepts sexual attraction contains is frequently involved in whose touch I seek out.

Also in whose touch I am not comfortable with. If there is any level of sexual content in cuddling for another person and I am not interested in going there, I will not be comfortable cuddling them. This does not even need to mean that they are aware of said context, so I am not entirely sure how I can tell, sometimes. If I can't tell, I will tend to err on the side of caution, so if I can't read a person, I will generally not touch them. Too much cultural baggage tied up in touch, especially cross-gender. This was a very, very hard-learned lesson.

The frsutrating part about this, though, is that I do still find myself hugging people, sometimes, because the social costs of not doing so are more than I can handle right now. This frustrates me when I do it, and is usually a good sign I'm not actually up to group social interactions.

So many things meant by 'attraction', even 'sexual attraction'. So much tangled up in that concept, and the related concepts of the process of sexual entanglement and dating.

Why does [edited to add: anyone believe that] it need[s] to be true that touch and cuddling are completely unrelated to attraction in order for them to be non-sexual? Attraction may often, and possibly usually, contain sexual desire, but that isn't the only thing in there. That isn't the only possible context for touch between adults! Including adults who _are_ sexually involved with each other.