More on saunas

[mrissa]

I don't like to share too much personal sexual information with people. There's a line in Dar Williams's "Iowa" that I just love: "But way back where I come from, we don't like to make a bother; We don't like to make our passions other people's concern. And we walk in the world of safe people, and at night we walk into our houses and burn." It's like that north of the border, too. It's not that we don't have burning passions. It's that we don't really think you should have to hear about them if you don't want to. Which is why an extreeeeemely small number of you have any idea what, specifically, gets me going, and why it's going to stay that way.

But. With that ominous beginning, I would just like to say: damn, people! Saunas! It's not just that sauna time is family time (although it is), it's -- saunas! If ever you are unfortunate enough to be consulted by someone who would like to seduce a Mrissa, please remember these words: NO SAUNAS! (Also, "Go away!" and "Shut up!" and "I don't know!" and "I don't want to talk about that with you!" may be useful words to remember. I know they would be for me if someone was consulting me about seducing the friendslist on average.)

rysmiel suggested that saunas are orthogonal to sex. This is a good data point to have from someone else's viewpoint. I asked those questions so I'd know how other people react, since I already know how I react. It's useful data. There's more than one sauna scene in Thermionic Night (and its sequels), but if you run across one where someone seems to be thinking unreasonably much about very, very unsexy topics in very, very unsexy ways, it is your collective fault. For my viewpoint, saunas are not orthogonal to sex; they are antithetical to sex. Saunas are either not warm enough to be any good or nearly too hot for me to stir myself to move out of. Much less to move around doing something active within the sauna. Saunas require at least 15 minutes of lying still somewhere cool afterwards, lying absolutely still lest the world disappear on you again, if you are a mrissa. (You know what? When I pass out, the world only sometimes goes black. Mostly it goes maroon or sometimes kind of a swirly purple. Also there is the gnat ballet. Anybody else get the gnat ballet? You never read about the world going maroon in books. Like the maroon of that one T-shirt you had, scottjames, you know the one.)

So. Saunas. All righty then. Useful information to have, but I'm really surprised at how overwhelmingly it depended on characters. I guess this is a bit of my own characterization instead of a law of nature.

Dude. Saunas.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Now that I come to think of it I suspect I would find saunas very much antithetical; it's just that your poll putting the concepts of saunas and sex in close proximity gave me a "huh ? why would someone think that ?" reaction rather than an immediate "No, don't be silly".

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The reason I thought people might think it is that a lot of Americans (and, I suspect, Canadians, too) don't have a very comfortable relationship with the idea of nonsexual nudity.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Oh, that.

Going from twenty or so years of very body-shy Irish cultural context [ which was hateful for a lot of other reasons as well ] to a decade or so of preferentially socialising in contexts where people are relaxed about touch and nudity seems to have left me totally unable to model where any given person's lines will be save by asking lots of questions.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Very useful things, questions. Much more useful than assumptions, often.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Among grown-ups, yes. [ This is one of my identifying markers for "grown-ups" ] I know more people than I would like who assume such lines are obvious, though, and one of these years I want to get a bunch of them in the same place and get them to realise what a wide range of different body-comfort states are "obvious". It's an annoying thing to have someone duck the question, particularly in the context of offering a backrub and wishing to be sure it's not perceived as less than chaste. I can work that with almost any defined set of lines, but not when I don't know where the damn things are.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

One of the things I like about living at home again after my four years in the Bay Area is that I have much better guesses about local standards for a very generalized version of local. Then it's easier to adjust for different groups' norms in different directions. I feel like I have a starting point, and from there points of departure can be negotiated.