What It's Like to Be a Fetish
Shemales, tgirls, trannies, ladyboys, or whatever the porn industry wants to call us, is one of the most popular categories of porn consumed by straight men.
Trans women are essentially fetishized for being chicks with dicks. If a trans girl wants to be a porn star, she better hold off on getting surgery.
What is it exactly about chicks with dicks that has such a broad appeal? I think part of the explanation involves what psychologists call a "hyper-stimulus" or "supernormal stimulus".
A supernormal stimulus as an exaggerated version of a normal stimulus that is more stimulating than the normal version. For example, researchers can take artificial bird eggs and make them look like exaggerated versions of regular eggs and birds find them even more attractive. Another purported example is many works of art that have exaggerated body proportions:
Similarly, men are already turned on by the image of a nake female body. But then add in an "extra" element that is taboo and the stimulus becomes exaggerated, a supernormal stimulus.
Despite the popularity of trans porn, there is still a lot of stigma surrounding it. Guys who work with trans pornstars have a harder time finding work. Trans porn stars receive little recognition by the industry despite representing a huge chunk of all online porn traffic.
There is also stigma for men who watch trans porn. It's not something most men are willing to admit to their friends. It's a secret little fetish for most them - something they do in the privacy of their incognito browser. And many men probably go through their own guilt issues surrounding their love of trans women and what that means for their sexuality.
And if they aren't even willing to admit to watching trans porn, think how fewer are willing to date us, let alone take us home to Mom for Christmas.
So many men want to fuck us but not date us. They fetishize us but won't love us. They objectify us but don't validate us.
We are often just an item to be crossed off someone's sexual bucket list. "I fucked a tranny! Check!"
That bucket list fulfillment often happens on craigslist and in motel rooms around the country. Just go onto the male-4-trans category if you want to see what fetishization looks like in real-time.
Many times these men are bi-curious and want to experience the first dick in the "least gay" way possible. And hey, if that penis is attached to a soft feminine body with breasts, how gay could it be? And yet once they cum they don't want to stay and cuddle or stay up late whispering sweet nothings. They got their taste of D - time to go home.
And along the same lines, many men want to fulfill their fantasy of being fucked in the ass. The irony is that most trans women are not super into that at all.
Look, there's nothing wrong with finding trans women attractive or being attracted to their bodies. The problem is reducing our entire personhood to our genitals. Furthermore, the problem is in the implicit "Othering" that entails: seeing us as "tgirls" rather than girls, "ladyboys" instead of ladies.
There is a term for men who fetishize trans women and want to date us to fulfill their sexual kink: we call them "chasers". They chase after trans women in a predatory fashion, often with the nicest intentions. They compliment us to no end but at the end of the day they're not interested in our minds or personalities but what's in our pants. Rather than being attracted to the totality of our being, chasers have a narrow fixation on the shape of our genitals.
So often in the dating world trans women have to navigate between the tension of accepting that a man might be into you vs. wondering if they are a chaser. And many trans women end up dating chasers because often that's who is willing to date us. There are obviously exceptions to this but in my experience trans women dealing with chasers and fetishization is a very common occurrence.
And even if they're not chasers they're probably going to struggle with the issue of keeping their trans girlfriend a secret from their family and friends.
The point of this post is not to be all "Woe is me - no one wants to date a poor trans woman." Personally, my dating life is great. But I nevertheless wanted to illustrate what it's like to be a fetishized sex object. It can be exhausting and isolating at the same time. There is a reason so many trans people end up dating other trans people: sometimes it's just easier because we "get it".
a steemit original
images: wikipedia commons, pixabay
Chasing, banging and ditching is exactly how we treat born-girls anyway.
I'd definitely date your mind but physically I'm just an old and boring hetero! Apologies for the pronoun error on my comment in the philo section as I didn't catch your sexual identity.
I kinda think it sucks to be human no matter how one slices it especially in an age where the paragon of being human is to be a billionaire oiligarch manipulating the fcuk out of the masses! But true, Patanjali did predict that would happen; that is to say humanity would be reduced to objects of financial exploitation.
Congratulations @rachelsmantra! You have completed some achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click on any badge to view your own Board of Honor on SteemitBoard.
For more information about SteemitBoard, click here
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPInteresting "sneak peek" into your world!
I've often tried to explain the ladyboy thing or whatever you wanna call it (I apologize if the term isn't apt). No psychology research, just thinking by myself. And here's some of these thoughts: men understand cocks better. They can so to speak wrap their head around a cock and its orgasm. Not the same with vaginal orgasms. Nothing's happening. (Which is, btw, I think, the reason behind the recent popularization of overdone female ejaculation).
And btw, I think both these trends (ladyboys and female ejac) first became popular in hentai porn, and only then really adopted by mainstream. Hentai has the tendency for the exaggeration you mentioned, including huge boobs. And the thing that attracts straight men to the hentai versions, is ladyboys are in fact women, who just have this extra appendage that, like I said, men can understand and empathize with. So men form this kind of fetish, but can't find it in real life, so they become chasers.
As happens to most of us I think, I've watched porn with male friends when I was a teen, for the fun of it, and I got insights from that. One is that, the male penis has to be in the porn for the male audience to feel they're somehow participating, but the rest of the body they're not interested in. Lesbian is fine, but without a cock it's boring. So what's the best solution? "Chicks with dicks". You remove the antagonizing male that you're not interested in, you keep the female, but you also got the cock in there because if there's no cock getting pleasured then what's the point of sex?
Sent you a DM on discord btw about how we can increase your post rewards.